The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [144]
Even the G.P personality seemed to be slipping away. In a recent sitting, G.P. had warned Hodgson that their time together in the lamplit quiet of Mrs. Piper’s parlor would not continue long. Some days, James told Lodge, he longed for the croaky voice and conniving ways of Dr. Phinuit. Both he and Lodge worried that Hodgson hovered over the Boston medium, over-managed her so that she functioned in a kind of permanent stress state. Her primary controls these days—new personalities who went by the names of Rector and Imperator—seemed to function entirely to protect her from strenuous demands, making her “inaccessible,” as Lodge put it.
James had steered a raft of alternative investigations in Hodgson’s direction—a magnetic healer, a teenage girl who practiced “automatic piano playing,” an Irish-American dwarf who left streaks of light on any paper he touched—but, to his frustration, none of them had served to lure the investigator away from Mrs. Piper and her mysterious ways.
HAVING RETURNED FROM Egypt determined to pick up her life again, Nora Sidgwick stacked her plate high. She started on a book about her late husband, a combination of memoir, collected letters, and biography. She went back to her duties at Newnham College. She accepted an invitation from her brother-in-law, Lord Rayleigh, to do some tricky mathematical calculations needed for his research.
Rayleigh had retired from his teaching position at Cambridge but was continuing to run experiments in a laboratory he’d built at the family seat, Terling Place in Essex. He was focusing on electric and magnetic problems, the traveling of electric currents and the ways certain materials stubbornly refused to carry those currents. His reputation for nonstop investigation was so established that King Edward VII greeted him at a reception with: “Well, Lord Rayleigh, discovering something I presume?” For his illuminating work on atmospheric chemistry, including the discovery of argon, Rayleigh had received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1904, the fourth year that the awards were given.
Rayleigh still maintained an interest in occult experiments as well, keeping his membership in the Society for Psychical Research (and eventually becoming president in 1919). For Rayleigh, it was less a matter of conviction than principle. Like other physicists in the SPR—Oliver Lodge and William Barrett—he believed that science was the best tool known. It should always be used for exploring difficult questions, even questions of spirit life and supernatural powers.
Theirs could safely be called a minority view in the research community. Barrett, who followed Lodge in assuming the SPR presidency, noted that prejudice against the society’s work seemed to be dying down except among scientists, citing two primary reasons for that resistance. First, occult phenomena were not replicable; “the phenomena cannot be repeated at pleasure (any more than a shower of meteorites can).” Second, the strangeness of the subject and the peculiar personalities involved acted as an abrasive on the ordinary scientist’s sense of sanity.
THE WORD peculiar, indeed, could be applied to almost anyone who dabbled in the occult. One needed only to observe the latest rage in New York mediums, the Reverend May Pepper, who presided over the Church of Fraternity of Soul Communion in Brooklyn.
Pepper charged 25 cents for entrance to the temple. Once the pews filled, she ascended a platform, her long dark hair flowing over her black robes, and asked her assistants to tie a linen bandage over her eyes. She would then “read” letters brought forth by those in the audience.
One memorable evening, described in mocking detail by attending journalists, a young man stumbled up to the lectern bearing not a letter but a whole roll of paper covered with writing.
“Your coming was heralded to me,” the medium proclaimed. She’d seen a vision of an Indian reaching out toward him. “Tell me, was there ever an Indian in your family?”
“My great-great-great