The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [13]
The Davenports’ cabinet looked like a wide walnut armoire, with three doors in the front. The center door held an oval window, curtained by dark velvet. Behind it were two wooden chairs, placed so that when the brothers sat down, they faced each other. Members of the audience could enter and tie the Davenports’ hands and feet. They could bind Ira and William together if they wanted. They could check the knots, seal the ropes with wax. Once the satisfied audience sat back down, once the doors closed, the cabinet slowly came to exotic life. The bolts on the doors mysteriously slid into place, phantom hands appeared and retreated through the velvet curtain, musical instruments placed inside played familiar tunes. (This was twenty years before Edison introduced recorded music.) When the watchers reopened the cabinet, the brothers still sat tied to their chairs, unbroken wax sealing the knots.
The Harvard investigators required more than a few cords and some dabs of wax. They brought a wagonload of rope. Local newspapers estimated the scientists had five hundred feet of good hemp cord with which to tie the brothers’ hands and feet. The professors also bored holes in the cabinet and ran the ropes out through the openings, back in, out again. They knotted the cords, again and again, into a net around the outside walls. Amused reporters noted that the observers could barely make out the cabinet through Harvard’s skein of rope.
Still, as journalists wrote, the mandolins yet twanged and the spirit hands still fluttered. They also wrote that the university refused to publish a full account of the day with the Davenports. The professors issued a report condemning the performance as a trick, but added that the findings didn’t need to be dignified with details.
The newspapers thought that they did, actually. And the townsfolk whispered that one academic left the cabinet wound with his own rope like a fly trapped by a vindictive spider. Harvard denied that rumor to the Boston papers, but in Buffalo, folks thought the professor lied.
The Davenports may have been charlatans, but they were charming and capable ones. People liked them—to the point, perhaps, that they even trusted the performers’ explanations of spirit mischief. Aloof and autocratic university scientists with their rational cynicism seemed far less appealing.
MANY YEARS LATER, William James marveled at the ineffectiveness of such scientific strikes against the supernatural. “How often has ‘Science’ killed off all spook philosophy, laid ghosts and raps and ‘telepathy’ away underground as so much popular delusion?” he would wonder ironically. As James noted, the ghosts kept coming back, the visions yet glimmered, the voices yet sounded. No matter how many times scientists evoked mental illness, dreams, fantasy, and stupidity as explanations for bumps in the night, people kept reporting them as though they were real.
Go back in history, James pointed out, and “you will find there was never a time when these things were not reported just as abundantly as they are today.” Ghosts drifted like smoke through the pyramids of Egypt. Smoldering demons climbed out of fires in ancient Africa. Spirits walked with native hunters in the American forests, guiding the arrows with their invisible hands.
“The phenomena are there,” he wrote, “lying broadcast over the surface of history.” The question for him had never been whether people saw—or thought they saw—ghosts. The question had always been what to do with such odd reports, how to classify such irregular events, where to place them in our orderly descriptions of how the world worked. Or maybe it was better described as a problem, one that didn’t fit in such organized systems.
“The ideal of every