The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [124]
Or so it might seem. But the interpreter of these threatening ghosts is the governess herself. The reader becomes aware that the spirits may exist only in her mind, and that the alternate story is of two children unfortunate enough to be put in the care of a psychotic young woman. Did she frighten her young charges to the point that one of them suffered heart failure—and died in her arms?
“Henry James has written a forceful story of country-home life,” Myers wrote to Lodge that fall of 1898, in an ambiguous description of his own. Myers had no problem accepting the idea of ghosts. Such images permeated the SPR’s records of crisis apparitions. The problem, the difference, was that the specters in James’s story—if such they were—seemed imbued with a goal. “True ghost stories,” Myers said, tended to be brief visions or sensations that flickered and vanished. They were startling, perhaps, but never really purposeful.
“Instead of describing a ‘ghost’ as a dead person permitted to communicate with the living, let us define it as a manifestation of persistent energy,” Myers said. There was nothing in science to show that energy had a conscious purpose. The evil Count Dracula, the vengeful ghosts imagined by Henry James—these fictional manifestations bore little if any resemblance to what the SPR investigators had so far glimpsed.
IN 1898, WILLIAM CROOKES was elected president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, another milestone in his return to mainstream science. Yet, he chose to give his presidential address, that October, on a note of blazing defiance.
In a speech in Bristol, to a materialist audience, Crookes deliberately returned to the subject of his favorite medium. Almost thirty years after he had published his first controversial account, D. D. Home’s powers seemed to the scientist as compelling as ever. In retrospect, Crookes believed that Home had offered the first real demonstration of telekinesis and therefore confounded the scientific community. The late medium had proved, Crookes said, “that outside our scientific knowledge there exists a Force exercised by intelligence differing from the ordinary intelligence common to mortals.”
Crookes was reclaiming ground from which he had long since retreated, after his unfortunate experience with London street mediums. Still active and productive as a physicist, he had that very year completed analysis of the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen; over the next few years, he would successfully undertake the separation of uranium isotopes and measurement of the radioactive decay process. His accomplishments had returned him to the inner priesthood, as Oliver Lodge had once described it. So, “perhaps among my audience some may feel curious as to whether I shall speak out or be silent,” Crookes said.
“I elect to speak.... To ignore the subject would be an act of cowardice—an act of cowardice I feel no temptation to commit.” Crookes wanted his fellow SPR members—and the greater scientific community as well—to clearly to understand that he still believed in supernatural powers and in his own experiments demonstrating them. “I have nothing to retract. I adhere to my already published statements,” he said, and he found the more recent psychical research done by others equally convincing.
He believed in telekinesis; he believed in telepathy; he believed in the possibility that the dead might return. “Indeed, I might add much thereto.”
Meanwhile, Hodgson’s report continued to fulfill Cattell’s fear that it would have the power to convert the undecided. Even worse, one of the more prominent converts came from Cattell’s own institution.
JAMES HERVEY HYSLOP was a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, a slight man with a neat brown beard, chilly gray eyes, and the faint pallor of ill health, which had dogged him since childhood. The look of fragility was deceptive; he possessed the