The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [133]
During one sitting, Hyslop became so exasperated that he put a pellet on the table, then declared that he was embarrassed and ripped the paper to shreds, then announced that he’d changed his mind and asked for a spirit opinion on the message anyway. Naturally, as he told Hodgson sarcastically, the sitting was a failure.
“It is rather amusing about the pellet that was torn up,” Hodgson wrote him. But after all, genuine psychics didn’t need to rely on such showy demonstrations. “It is almost a sure thing, when the writing of names and questions on pellets come into a sitting, that there is fraud.”
Hyslop found himself in complete sympathy with Hodgson. He agreed that the commercial medium trade was a scummy business. And he agreed that Leonora Piper was a different entity altogether.
Determined, as always, to be honest in his opinions, Hyslop wrote an essay for Harper’s, firmly making his case for communication with the dead. Coming as it did from a Columbia University philosopher, the piece attracted considerable attention. “Horribly written,” William James commented, “but makes a stronger case for spirit return than anything I’ve seen.”
After researching and analyzing his Mrs. Piper sittings, Hyslop had considered and discounted the possibility of fraud or trickery. He’d been unable to find even a hint of evidence that Mrs. Piper had gone visiting Xenia, Ohio, sent detectives there, or made any inquiries whatsoever. In a community so small and close, he would have heard about that immediately.
That left Hyslop with two possible explanations for such uncanny knowledge making its way into Mrs. Piper’s trance state: “omniscient telepathy and discarnate spirits.” After reviewing the evidence, he could see no reasonable answer but spirit communication. To start with, many of the facts Mrs. Piper provided about his family were unknown to him at the time. She could not have read his mind for things he’d didn’t know. As he’d ruled out a secret intelligence system, the best remaining option, he then concluded, was that his father’s spirit had been in attendance.
Hyslop admitted that such a conclusion sounded improbable. Yet science was constantly exploring other improbable places, he pointed out, one might even say “wasting enormous resources upon expeditions in search of the North Pole, or in deep sea dredging for a species of useless fish to gratify the propensities of evolutionists.... Why is it so noble and respectable to find whence man came, and so suspicious and dishonorable to ask and ascertain whither he goes?”
New York journalists began packing into Hyslop’s talks, hoping for further signs of lunacy. “It was funny to study the newspaper reporters,” Hyslop wrote to Hodgson after one talk. “They came there as usual to watch and hear cranks” and left disappointed by his pedantic description of his work.
His detachment didn’t last long, though. There were, after all, more than two dozen fiercely competitive city newspapers. Dull copy didn’t sell. Hyslop’s cautious way of describing his research wasn’t nearly as interesting as the journalists wanted it to be. More than one journalist jazzed up a story by writing that Professor Hyslop proposed to “scientifically demonstrate the immortality of the soul,” perhaps in the next few weeks.
It dismayed Hyslop to learn that his scholarly peers were willing to take such ridiculous newspaper accounts seriously. Many didn’t care that Hyslop had been misquoted on his intentions. They cared that he had given unwarranted support to psychical research. At Columbia, James McKeen Cattell, still simmering over his debate with William James on the same subject, led these hard-liners. Outraged to find his own university associated with spiritualist nonsense, disappointed that any faculty