The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [121]
It was just the first glimmer of a thought, really, but James wondered whether the energy generated in our lives—with all their passion and grief, laughter and argument—did more than fall to dust. Perhaps life’s energy burned an impression, or memory, a cosmic record of sorts that lingered after the person himself had vanished.
Perhaps the very objects that we handle could sometimes be energy repositories, absorb some of life’s stray heat, radiate it back out. If so, that might explain the improbable art of psychometry, the occasional flash of insight that a good psychic seemed to get from holding a piece of jewelry or an article of clothing. It might even explain haunted houses, those curious impressions of spirits that tended to repeat over decades, even centuries.
And perhaps—as the editors of the Review posited—that added up to a different explanation of immortality. Perhaps there was no real life after death; just the occasional echo of what was, sounding briefly in the night and fading away.
Pursuing that set of ideas, James proposed that most of us never hear the echoes at all. We live sheltered, born with mental buffers—or dikes, as he called them—to protect against such intrusions, to keep life from being too impossibly strange. But sometimes—as with a crisis apparition—that last blast of desperate energy overcomes those barriers so that just for a moment we hear our dying mother’s voice, see the face of a lost friend.
James had recently evaluated just such a case, the story of Bertha Huse and Nellie Titus, which seemed to capture those possibilities. It was all there, the young woman’s unseen fall into a lake, the body trapped out of view, the dream image of the tragic accident. There had been no conversation in the dream, no purposeful ghost, merely an intense image of the girl’s last moments. Mrs. Titus reported a history of such dreams, flashes of insight caught in the quiet night. Perhaps in her undefended sleep, she was unusually open to those energy surges created by a final moment, allowing her to receive what seemed to be a message from the dead.
The same explanation might also serve for the medium James knew best, Leonora Piper. Perhaps she was even less well defended from such signals, more prone to picking them up on a frequent basis. Both women might belong to a small group of people born without adequate mental barriers to that cosmic record, so that “fitful influences leak in, showing the otherwise unverifiable common connection.”
BAFFLING PSYCHIC PHENOMENA were something Charles Richet understood well, too well. In the world of traditional science, he knew what he was doing and that his work was good. He was exploring the immune system, probing the mechanism of fever. He was testing treatments for the great killer tuberculosis. In his spare time, he continued to design flying machines—motorized gliders—and test them himself, looping like a crazed moth around his family’s summer home in southern France.
In the world of psychical research, however, Richet felt curiously on the defensive. From Boston, Richard Hodgson had made him look a fool over Eusapia Palladino. And now from England, Frank Podmore, one of the collaborators on the SPR’s respected Phantasms of the Living, had taken an aggressive stand against telekinesis—supposedly one of Eusapia’s talents—basing that position on a recent study of reputed poltergeists.
Podmore had picked apart eleven reported poltergeist cases in England, concluding that the flying objects and crashing furniture could be attributed simply to girls seeking attention. Often, Podmore sneered, the talents of psychical researchers were not required. Police officers sufficed.
He provided an example from a British country village, where an agitated couple declared that after their niece moved into their home, doors suddenly rattled in the night, windows crackled, furniture trembled out of place. Frightened, the aunt and uncle called the police. A constable hiding outside a window was able