The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [12]
“We were touched by the invisible,” the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in the summer of 1855, after a sitting with D. D. Home. She found the spectral hands completely believable and the medium completely wonderful. Her husband and acclaimed fellow poet, Robert Browning, dragged to the affair by his wife, resentfully admitted only to a peculiar evening. One hand had literally crawled, spiderlike, up Home’s arm, Browning said. Another had tapped Browning on the shoulder, “a kind of soft and fleshy pat.”
It was the table that really bothered Robert Browning. The table had risen off the floor at Home’s bidding. The medium then invited Browning to inspect it. Browning felt around and under the legs. He watched Home’s fine-boned hands, kept clear above the table, as the oaken legs shuddered into the air.
“I looked under the table and can aver that it was lifted from the ground, say a foot high more than once, with no wires or rods to be seen. I don’t in the least pretend to explain how the table was uplifted all together.”
Home gave his own explanation. If tables floated, if misted forms drifted across the room, if bells jangled on their own, each served only as evidence—the kind that science could never produce—of powers from beyond. He was a conduit, he explained, a messenger from the beyond.
“I believe in my heart that this power is being spread more and more every day to draw us nearer to God. You ask if it makes us purer? My only answer is that we are but mortals and as such liable to err; but it does teach that the pure in heart shall see God. It teaches us that He is love and that there is no death.”
He promised, as Swedenborg had before him, that he could help people see God, prove to them that the afterlife could be seen and touched. “Fear not,” wrote a ghostly hand to a young woman who had frozen into a white silence during one of his seances. And as she shrank back, a heavy bookcase—“one that would at least require four men to move”—began to trudge ponderously toward her, thumping across the floor.
In Home’s soft voice, in his words of faith and hope, even a walking bookcase could seem, somehow, shining with the dust of angels. “Fear not, Susan, trust in God. Your father is near. He is the Great Father.”
IN THE SPRING OF 1857, a tired and cranky team of scientists made its way from Harvard University to upstate New York, determined to try yet again to rub some of the superstition out of modern culture.
They’d been sent to investigate claims that two sons of a Buffalo police officer were able to summon spirits into a theatrical performance. There was no talk of God and holy messengers from Ira and William Davenport. Instead there were rolling hoops, ringing bells, twanging mandolins brought to insane life while the mediums sat tied to their chairs. But following Home’s lead, the Davenport brothers gave full credit to the spirits for enlivening their events.
Such spirit shows now drew audiences in villages and cities across the land. There were so many, and so many were so obviously phony, that the editor of the Boston Courier offered $500 to any medium who could really produce spirit phenomena. His one condition was the results had to be verified by Harvard University. The university administrators preferred to take the higher road of scoffing at such productions. But they also believed that if some reputable professors took on the job, spiritualism could be easily exposed and, they hoped, eliminated. Over the protests of the designated investigators, Harvard’s president sent his professors to Buffalo.
The Davenport Brothers—as they billed