The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [130]
“I wrote at once to my brother,” the neighbor said. “He sent a friend to investigate. The family in question said they knew nothing about the missing will but invited him to search the desk and the will was recovered.” The woman was not a spiritualist. She said she could not explain what had happened, but it did make her wonder what lay behind the mythology of the Fox sisters—and the destructive pattern of their lives.
Theodore Flournoy had certainly wondered about the stresses of being a working medium, about what in their lives might be real and what might be fantasy and wishful thinking. The University of Geneva psychologist directed his fascination with such questions into such a lengthy study that it eventually grew into a full-sized book, published in 1900.
Flournoy had joined Richet in his investigations of Eusapia Palladino, but the Swiss psychologist was far more interested in another practitioner of supernatural arts, one that he found significantly more credible. For his own case study, Flournoy chose the French medium Catherine Muller, who worked under the pseudonym Helene Smith. The resulting book, From India to the Planet Mars, explored Mme Smith’s multiple trance personalities and examined her strengths and her weaknesses.
Helene Smith was not a professional medium. She conducted sittings for friends and acquaintances. Like Rosina Thompson and Leonora Piper, she did not charge for her time. Outside of the seances, the medium was a respectable thirty-year-old woman, “beautiful, vigorous, with an open and intelligent countenance,” who was liked and respected by her neighbors and who worked for a business firm where, Flournoy said, her ability and integrity had led to her being promoted to a managerial position.
Flournoy had first visited Mme Smith anonymously and had been shocked when she began discussing his family, including some events so obscure that he’d had to write to relatives, checking the accuracy of her accounts. He’d been further shocked when the details were confirmed. He tried to find out where she had acquired the information, where she could have acquired it. He found no evidence that she spied on visitors, hired detectives, or used any other obvious methods of cheating. He was left with the notion that she had an unusual talent for telepathy, perhaps comparable to that of Leonora Piper.
What complicated a consideration of Mme Smith’s abilities was the dubious nature of the trance personalities through which she communicated her extraordinary knowledge. These “spirit guides,” like Mrs. Piper’s Phinuit, seemed extremely unlikely to be the afterlife manifestations of actual people and more likely to have sprung from the depths of the medium’s own mind. A peculiar assembly of characters jostled for supremacy once Helene Smith slid into a trance. They included a kindly Victor Hugo; a hostile military leader, who would become so angry he would pull the medium’s chair out from under her; the doomed French queen Marie Antoinette; a domestically inclined Martian; and the long-ago wife of a Hindu prince.
Flournoy thought Mme Smith’s trance personalities were both part of and independent from her possible telepathic gifts. That is, her mind might create them as it struggled to cope with processing the thoughts and needs of other people. But the personalities were undoubtedly created from her “subconscious, memories, scruples, emotional tendencies.” He suspected that the characters arose from forgotten experiences in her childhood, resurfacing as the fatherly Victor Hugo or the childish, whispery Marie Antoinette.
Thus, her most exotic seances might result from a kind of mental embroidery, building a small gift into something more exciting. The