The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [141]
“What do you mean by saying that he looks to me to return it?” Funk demanded irritably. He possessed no coin belonging to any spirit.
The woman repeated the demand.
Funk fumed for a while and then, gradually, recalled that when his company was making the first edition of The Standard Dictionary, nine years earlier, he had borrowed an old coin, which had been called the Widow’s Mite, to copy for an illustration.
But he’d given it back.
“This I promptly returned,” he repeated.
“This one has not been returned,” came the reply. Funk was advised to look for it in a large iron safe, in a drawer, under a pile of papers.
When he returned to his offices in Manhattan, Funk queried his longtime business manager, who recalled the coin with some trouble, and also that it had been returned years before. The company cashier told him the same.
The cashier agreed, however, to search the iron safe in the business office, with his assistants for witnesses. In a small drawer, in a dirty envelope, pushed under a muddle of papers, they found the coin.
Funk mailed it back to the original owner and received a letter from the man’s son, saying that his father had died years back, but he too had thought the coin returned. “As executor of my father’s estate, I felt so certain that this coin had been returned that it never occurred to me to make inquiry of you whether it was in your possession.”
Funk was an organized man, a list maker by nature. He drew up four possible explanations: fraud, coincidence, telepathy, or spirit communication. To find the correct answer, he decided on two actions: to tell the story publicly, seeking comment, and to consult with experts.
Funk wrote to forty-two scientists, editors, philosophers, and other scholars, describing his “Widow’s Mite” incident and asking them which of his four possibilities made sense. He queried James Hyslop, William James, Alfred Russel Wallace, Sir William Crookes, and professors of physics and philosophy at Yale, Princeton, the University of Toronto, the University of Wisconsin, Vanderbilt University, Columbia University, the University of Michigan, Cornell University, and a smattering of other institutions across Canada and Europe.
The resulting answers didn’t resolve the question, but they did neatly reflect the schism in thought between psychical and traditional researchers. “Spirits,” replied Wallace and Crookes. “Possibly spirits,” answered Hyslop and James. The rest of the scientists queried, to a man, voted for either fraud or mental illness.
“A batch of reporters came after me about the Dr. Funk case,” complained Hodgson to Hyslop, adding that he wished psychic euthusiasts would keep their alleged test cases out of the newspapers. Thanks to Dr. Funk’s well-known name and the peculiar nature of his experience, the Widow’s Mite was front-page news in New York, jostling for space with accounts of the trans-Pacific telephone line connecting Canada and Australia, President Roosevelt’s successful move to take over the Panama Canal, and an extraordinary decision in Australia to allow women to vote (making it and New Zealand the only two countries thus far to permit such electoral inclusiveness).
Hyslop’s gold-mining venture in Vermont had not been a financial success. But his tuberculosis was once more in abeyance. He was stronger and more determined than ever to prove that he had been right about spirit communication and that his enemies at Columbia had been wrong. He rented a small apartment on New York’s Upper West Side, supporting himself with some family money, some writing jobs, lecturing, and the occasional investigation for Hodgson.
Hodgson, meanwhile, tried to finish Myers’s book while continuing his work with Mrs. Piper. He did his best to ignore Evie Myers’s frequent letters accusing him of going about it in the wrong way. He was delighted to have Hyslop again as a friend and ally. A colleague described them once as a curious pair: “Hodgson with his lithe athletic frame, a