The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [132]
Following up on a seance in February 1900, he wrote, “My Dear Mother: Please to answer the following questions and return this with reply: 1) Have you had a rheumatic trouble either since I saw you, or sometime before? If so, how are you now? 2) Did we have a horse by the name of Jim within your recollection? 3) What became of the horse named Bob?”
And on another tack: “Did father ever speak to you about my theories being strange? If so, do you remember what they were in particular and how he spoke of them?” Hyslop carefully didn’t mention that the question referred to a comment about Swedenborg.
He closed with the formality typical of his family. “Yours as ever, J. H. Hyslop.”
His mother answered every query: She suffered from neuralgia but not rheumatism. They had owned horses of those names; Bob had been put down after Hyslop’s father’s death. And Hyslop’s father had thought that his son’s ideas were very peculiar indeed, especially on the evening that he explained Swedenborg to his bewildered fundamentalist Christian parents.
“I think he remarked afterwards when we were talking about the conversation that you had some strange ideas,” his mother wrote, signing herself, “Yours affectionately, M. E. Hyslop.”
The son neatly recorded her answers. He checked them against his own knowledge. “When you remember me to father,” he wrote to Hodgson in Boston, “please say to him that he was right and I was wrong about that incident in regard to Swedenborg.”
Hyslop found it difficult to express in writing that sense of personal recognition. The turn of phrase, the expressions chosen, had been so like the way his father talked. One evening, Hyslop’s “father” had said, “Do you remember what my feeling was about this life? Well I was not so far wrong after all. I felt sure that there would be some knowledge of this life, but you were doubtful, remember you had your own ideas, which were only yours, James.” To an outsider, it might sound a vaguely encouraging statement. But Hyslop couldn’t count the number of times that his father had told him that, “You have your own ideas.... He meant that I was the only one of his children who was skeptical, and this was true.”
Over four sittings, Hyslop said the “ghost” of his father had described 205 incidents, of which 152 were true, 37 unverifiable, and 16 false. And while the tally was reasonably impressive, he doubted that it conveyed his own bone-deep assurance that “I talked with my discarnate father with as much ease as if I were talking with him, living, through the telephone.”
Mrs. Piper’s seances could be a heady experience, leaving one overconfident of opening the doors to immortality. Hodgson warned Hyslop to think of this as a temporary euphoria. Before he became too enthusiastic about accessing the occult, the philosophy professor needed to spend some time on the professional medium circuit.
Hodgson sent Hyslop to check out the cozy little Occult Bookstore, on New York’s West Forty-second Street, and observe the working mediums there. A few evenings later, Hyslop was seething with outrage. “And the effrontery of the whole business is one of the most amazing things I ever met,” he wrote to Hodgson, although he found himself as annoyed by the “fools who fell for the scam—and paid to hear such nonsense!” as he was with the con artists themselves.
The scam was a variation on the old sealed-envelope ploy. Sitters were asked to write their questions on small blank pieces of paper and wad them into tight, tiny pellet shapes. These crumpled balls were heaped on a table, in plain sight, usually placed in a brass bowl or tray. Mediums appeared to barely approach the pellets, perhaps brushing them with a fingertip, no more.
As Hodgson had warned him, and as Hyslop rapidly confirmed, if one simply kept one’s eyes on the mediums