The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [129]
Richet’s multiyear inquiries into those varied responses—done partly by exposing dogs to repeated injections of jellyfish toxins—would open the way to the medical profession’s understanding of anaphylactic shock. The work would also win him the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1913 and a reputation as a world-class scientist long before that. Many of his colleagues wished that a scientist of Richet’s caliber would abandon the peculiarities of psychical research. But his reputation made him—and his protégé—difficult to ignore.
MEDIUMS WERE PECULIAR creatures; there was no denying it about even the best of them. How could they not be? They spent hours of their time surrounded by people desperate to talk with the dead. They fell into trances reputedly inhabited by ghosts. They agreed to be hogtied by investigating scientists. Skeptics mocked them; journalists parodied them; former friends feared them. One had to wonder why anyone would choose to become a medium.
The sad and strange story of the Fox sisters was a case in point. Neither had become wealthy by pursuing such a career. Both had died paupers’ deaths in the early 1890s—Kate at the age of fifty-two, Maggie at the age of fifty-five. Kate’s body, reeking of old dirt and cheap gin, had been found on a sidewalk. Maggie had died in a tenement house in lower Manhattan, virtually alone.
Many in the spiritualist community had never forgiven the Fox sisters for their betrayal. Isaac Funk, of Funk & Wagnall’s publishing house, expressed the widely held opinion that Margaret, especially, had betrayed the faith to feed her bad habits: “So low had this unfortunate woman sunk that for five dollars she would have denied her mother, sworn to anything,” he wrote. But there were still those who believed that the Fox sisters had once been gifted, had been betrayed themselves by all those who used them for financial gain and promotional purposes. More than ten years after the Fox sisters died, schoolchildren playing in the abandoned cellar of the old Fox “spook house” found the complete skeleton of a man hidden behind a crumbling wall; apparently that of the murdered peddler they had first claimed to hear rapping. “Repeated [earlier] excavations failed to locate the body and thus give proof positive of their story,” reported the Boston Journal, calling the discovery a reminder that not all about the Fox sisters had been false.
And a neighbor who stayed with Maggie Kane during the last week of her illness, in 1893, later told a curious story. The dying medium had been almost unable to move, crippled by rheumatism and weakened by fever. She mumbled constantly, asking questions of some unseen spirit in her rasping voice. As she spoke, knockings often sounded in the room, in the wall, the floors, the ceiling. There was no place to hide a rapping device. The tenement room had no window, no closet, just a dresser, a table and chair, and a narrow cot with a ragged mattress. Upon her cot, the medium “was as incapable of cracking her toe joints as I was,” the woman reported.
“One day, as Mrs. Kane felt somewhat improved, she unexpectedly asked for paper and a pencil. She had a small table standing by the side of the bed. Placing the paper I handed her on the table she began to write feverishly and kept this up till she had filled some twenty pages with rapid scrawling. I did not know