The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [125]
Born in 1850, Hyslop came from an Ohio farm family. He grew up in the tiny community of Xenia, a swatch of fiercely tended fields surrounded by forest. His childhood had been one of farm labor—from caring for horses to breaking away corn stalks after a winter frost—and ultraconservative Christianity.
His parents belonged to a fundamentalist Presbyterian church and followed its teachings to the letter. The children were required to study the Bible daily—although during the week they could also read certain newspapers and books. On Sunday, the whole family spent six hours attending sermons and memorizing Psalms. “We were not allowed to play at games, swing or whistle, ride or walk for pleasure, pluck fruit from trees, black our shoes or read any secular literature,” Hyslop recalled. He’d followed those teachings faithfully as a child, but as a university student majoring in philosophy, Hyslop became convinced that his father’s faith was at odds with reality. The son still accepted the notion of a deity. He could admit the “force of the argument for the existence of God or some intelligence at the foundation of things.” It was the teaching of Christianity that now seemed to him preposterous—the impossibly simple explanation of creation, the egocentric notion of a chosen people, even the arguments for the divinity of Christ, seemed to Hyslop “fatally weak.”
Determined not to be a hypocrite, he’d told his parents of his new perspective, proving to his farmer father that, as suspected, a university education led to godlessness. In the following years, Hyslop’s father alternated between ignoring his son and bombarding him with warnings of damnation. Even after Hyslop received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Johns Hopkins, even after he was hired in 1889 as a professor of ethics and logic at Columbia, he knew full well that in his father’s eyes he was a failure.
Hyslop fretted that he would never be able to repair the relationship, a loss made even more painful in 1896 when his father died of throat cancer. His father’s death left Hyslop contemplating the rigidity of his opinions. Not about Christianity—nothing changed his mind about that—but about immortality. He began to wonder about survival after death, whether his father lived on in some form, whether he could reach him yet.
In early 1898, after reading Richard Hodgson’s endorsement of Mrs. Piper, Hyslop realized that he’d found the medium through whom he could pose his questions. He wrote to Hodgson asking for a series of sittings designed to challenge Mrs. Piper’s vaunted talents—and perhaps to resolve his personal dilemma. He proposed to make the challenge as difficult as he could. If it was too easy, it would convince no one, including himself.
As they arranged it, Hyslop not only attended the sittings anonymously, he wore a black mask over his face. He came masked even though he routinely waited outside a window until Mrs. Piper was in a full trance and Hodgson could gesture him into the room. Hodgson added another layer of protection to protect Hyslop’s anonymity, a code name. Hodgson would refer to Hyslop only as “four times friend,” since he had requested four sittings.
It was at the second sitting that Mrs. Piper told him that a spirit was newly arrived in the room, and that the visitor’s name was Robert Hyslop. As Hyslop told Hodgson afterward, he didn’t think four sittings were going to be enough.
THE SPR’s HOPES for convincing scientists that telepathy should become part of standard research had sustained yet another blow—and led William James into yet another public quarrel with one of his fellow psychologists.
The argument began after Sidgwick presented some new telepathy work—including a tidy set of experiments with playing cards, done by Oliver Lodge—at the summer’s experimental psychology meeting in Munich. His presentation almost immediately provoked an article in Science, suggesting that the SPR telepathy subjects cheated their way to success, possibly by simply whispering the correct cards to each other.