The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [138]
Leonora Piper already regretted her flash of rebellion. The New York papers had made her look like a fool, she thought—a weepy, hand-wringing sort, which she wasn’t. Further, the headlines had declared that she’d recanted her entire career, that she had practically announced herself as a fraud. She hated reading accounts so entirely untrue.
After thinking it over for several days, Mrs. Piper gave another interview—this time to the Boston Advertiser—criticizing the Herald for labeling her interview a “confession.” She was returning to her work with the ASPR and Dick Hodgson. The only thing she wanted to confess to was puzzlement and frustration: “My opinion is today as it was 18 years ago. Spirits may have controlled me and they may not. I confess that I do not know.”
VACATIONING IN THE Adirondacks, thinking his position at Columbia was well secured, James Hyslop had the misfortune to encounter a fellow guest who reminded him all too well of his nemesis, James McKeen Cattell. The astronomer Simon Newcomb, the difficult first president of the ASPR, was relaxing at the same resort.
Newcomb made the mistake of rather mockingly inquiring about the latest in spiritual study. Hyslop, seething with suppressed outrage, allowed himself to vent for nearly three hours. As he wrote to Hodgson, “I poured experimental telepathy into him and then the Piper incidents until he was ready to cry enough and at last told him that he could choose between accepting telepathy or something worse.” The argument ended when Newcomb—to Hyslop’s frustration—merely walked away.
The ill will stirred in that encounter seemed an omen of events to follow. Hyslop’s wife, Mary, returned from the vacation with meningitis. She was dead in three days, “a terrible shock,” Hyslop said, as he grappled with being the single father of three children.
Now, at the worst time, Hyslop began to again feel backlash from the antipsychical research camp at Columbia. Cattell still wanted his dismissal. Out of patience, the university president attempted a compromise. He shifted Hyslop out of his accustomed classes and into an intensive schedule of teaching advanced metaphysics. The shift, with the extra preparation time involved, greatly increased Hyslop’s workload. By fall’s end, he was staggering with weariness. He’d developed a racking cough, which “I soon discovered ... was tuberculosis and that it had been precipitated by nervous prostration.”
Hyslop requested and was granted a leave from Columbia. He sent his children to stay with relatives and checked himself into a sanatorium for consumptive patients in Saranac Lake, New York. To his surprise and relief, he found the cure effective—not just in restoring his health, but also in improving his outlook. He took long walks, did deep breathing exercises, and gave up both coffee and alcohol. He even tried a recipe—sent to him by the sympathetic Hodgson—for making pine-bark tea from tree scrapings.
By the fall of 1902, he thought himself well enough to take up his duties at Columbia. Once again, though, he was given a grueling schedule, and once again Hyslop tumbled into illness. He dropped eighteen pounds in six weeks—pounds that he could ill afford—and coughed his way through classes. When the semester ended, Hyslop resigned from Columbia. He believed that he needed a physically active, outdoorsy life to keep the tuberculosis in check. He decided to join some friends who were starting a gold-mining company in the Green Mountains of Vermont. He sent his regrets to only one person, writing to Richard Hodgson and expressing his sorrow at abandoning psychical research and a friend.
WHY ARE SOME people’s minds so open to faith and belief, and others locked tight against those ideas? Why does a god appear necessary to so many cultures? To William James these were fundamental questions, and