The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [123]
As Sidgwick reminded Myers, the SPR had yet to accomplish its most basic goal, convincing the scientific community to consider telepathy with a little respect. So far their most obvious successes had been outside the halls of academia, in the more welcoming walks of popular culture.
The effects of psychical research were so visible, across so many venues, that James wondered if they had gained a reputation as the foremost experts on spiritual matters. “This seems to be rather a grave moment for all of us,” James wrote to Lodge. “We are changing places with a set of beings, the ‘regular’ spiritualists, whom we have hitherto treated with a species of contempt that must have been not only galling, but asinine and conceited, in their eyes.” Stories of crisis apparitions regularly appeared in the daily newspapers; special editions dedicated to such stories rapidly sold out. Equally impressive were the creations of fiction writers—ghosts, demons, creatures of the nights—stalking the pages of magazines and books.
Some wrote to terrify, as did Ireland’s Bram Stoker in his 1897 story of the evil undead, Dracula. Others spun satire. Oscar Wilde, who like Stoker was Dublin-born, had some years earlier published “The Canterville Ghost,” a short story in which an American family discovers that its rented British mansion is haunted. The realization occurs after several days of trying to remove bloodstains from the library floor, only to have the horrid spots continually reappear.
After three days of scrubbing, as Wilde cheerfully wrote, “Mr. Otis began to suspect that he had been too dogmatic in his denial of the existence of ghosts. Mrs. Otis expressed her intention of joining the Psychical Society and Washington [their son] prepared a long letter to Messrs. Myers and Podmore on the subject of the Permanence of Sanguineous Stains when connected with Crime.”
Novelist Henry James Jr. also liked to spin ghostly tales, not surprisingly, considering who his father had been and who his brother was. Henry had published his first thriller in 1868, some twenty years earlier. In that creepy little tale, “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” the ghost of a man’s first wife kills the second wife, who happens to also be her scheming sister. More memorable, at least for Henry’s brother William and the other SPR members, was “Sir Edmund Orme,” which had been published as a magazine serial in 1892. The ghost of the title recalled the late Edmund Gurney, who had relatives living in London’s Orme Court. The Edmund of James’s rather vengeful tale had committed suicide when the woman he loved proved unfaithful. The story was set in Brighton, where Gurney had died.
Henry James confessed that he got the idea for his most famous ghost story while visiting Henry Sidgwick’s cousin, Edward White Benson, who held the exalted position of archbishop of Canterbury but who was also a self-proclaimed ghost story addict. The archbishop held “ghost evenings” in his library, for friends to meet and tell tales, fueled by a good fire and plenty of alcoholic spirits. Benson’s ghost evenings spawned many a literary venture. (His nephew, the famously satiric novelist E. E Benson, was hailed for authoring some of the scariest stories of his time.) The story that Henry James began drafting after an evening of spectral tales at the Bensons was published in 1898 and was titled “The Turn of the Screw.”
James started the story at a “ghost evening,” narrated by a guest at a house party, one of a group enjoying an evening of spooky stories told around a fire. Most creatures of the night evoked in such stories are presented as if real. In James’s artful hands, the ghosts were, instead, hauntingly ambiguous, evocative of all the unknowns that troubled his brother William.
In “The Turn of the Screw,” a young governess secures a lucrative job caring for two children whose father often travels on business. Slowly, she perceives that the house where they live is haunted. The ghosts are silent, shadowy, but she comes to believe that they have come to carry away the children. She