The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [127]
Fred Myers decided to pay her a visit. And then another, and then another; he would eventually have 150 sittings and persuade the medium to abandon her physical productions and concentrate only on automatic writing. Once he accomplished that, to his surprise and pleasure, Mrs. Thompson produced the kind of results previously only seen with Leonora Piper. Myers wrote them up, in detail, for the SPR journal:
The professor had come from Holland with a bundle containing a piece of clothing from a dead friend, a young man who after one unsuccessful suicide attempt—slashing his own throat but recovering—had shot himself to death the previous year.
After Mrs. Thompson had slipped into a trance, he handed her the parcel. He had given neither his own name nor the name of the parcel’s owner. As her fingers closed around it, Nelly’s little-girl voice suddenly spoke:
“I am frightened. I feel as if I want to run away.”
She set the parcel down and pointed at it.
“This is a much younger gentleman. Very studified, fond of study.... He’s not a rich gentleman. If he had lived longer he would have had more.” He was worried about money, depressed, and headachy.
All this was true, according to the professor from Holland. But it wasn’t enough: “You have not told me the principal thing about this man.”
“The principal thing is his sudden death.... It frightens me. Everybody was frightened.”
She described the dead man, that he loved the outdoors, liked to hunt, and wore a round hat with a cord on it. All true again.
And then:
“I can’t see any blood about this gentleman, but a horrible sore place: somebody wiped it all up. It looks black.”
She was talking about the bullet hole. She described the cloth that had been put over his head when he was found dead. But it was the throat slashing that the spirit guide stayed fixed on.
“When any people want to kill themselves, he goes behind them. He stops them from cutting their throats. He says, ‘Don’t do that: you will wake up and find yourselves in another world haunted with the facts, and that’s a greater punishment.”’
When Mrs. Thompson woke up, she complained bitterly of the taste of chloroform in her mouth. Myers’s friend told him later that the chemical had been used in the treatment of the young man’s slashed neck.
“My first sittings with Mrs. Thompson were in no way remarkable,” Myers wrote to James in the fall of 1899. “There was little intimacy in the communications and Mrs. Thompson, as usual, came to herself with no recollection of the experience of the trance-state.
“But one day little Nelly announced the approach of a spirit ‘almost as bright as God’—brighter & higher, at any rate, than any spirit whom she had thus far seen. That spirit with great difficulty descended into possession of the sensitive’s organism—& spoke words which left no doubt of her identity.”
Myers would not repeat the words—they were too private and too precious. He would not write the name of the spirit, although he knew that James would guess her identity. “May I not feel that this adoration has received its sanction, & that I am veritably in relation with a spirit who can hear & answer my prayer?”
He could almost hear Annie Marshall calling him. He found mostly joy in that, and a little fear as well. That shining spirit wanted him closer, it seemed, very much closer. Mrs. Thompson had written it down carefully, a promise that Myers would be reunited with his long-dead Annie—and soon—just on the other side of the dawning twentieth century.
10
A PROPHECY OF DEATH
THE NEW CENTURY came in like sounding brass—a roar in the blood, a clatter in the ears, a triumphant drumbeat of progress. With the calendar turn to the 1900s, overseas phone calls arrived, along with double-sided phonograph records and Kodak’s everyman camera, the one-dollar Brownie. German physicists introduced the idea of quantum theory; Freud published his revolutionary book The Interpretation of Dreams; the Zeppelin airship sailed