The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [145]
“Ah,” said Mrs. Pepper. “I see an old man in Continental uni- , form. There is an Indian beside him. The old man is reaching out for you. He says his name is Gen. Montcalm. Tell me, did not Gen. Montcalm leave something which was lost and which you have never found?”
“Yes, yes,” the man replied; his mother had been searching for years, following the rumor of a hidden family treasure.
“Never mind about mamma,” Mrs. Pepper replied. “The General says he wants a man to do the hunting.”
From the journalistic point of view, the story only got better from there. The Anti-Fraud Society of Manhattan had stationed members in the church, who began to make fun of Pepper’s visions. Her supporters then came to her defense, detonating an explosion of fistfights that spread across the church.
When the melee ended, spectators discovered that pickpockets had been busy while the battle raged around them, and a multitude of wallets and purses had gone missing. The event was front-page news. Pedantic reports of the psychical research community, meanwhile, rarely merited a mention in the popular press.
William Barrett might complain that scientists couldn’t see past the peculiar nature of the subject. Yet the antics of Rev. May Pepper and her comrades defined the subject for a far wider audience. It was all too easy to see the supernatural as a circus exhibit rather than a topic for serious investigation.
JAMES HYSLOP decided that a bolder approach was required to improve the image of psychical inquiry. He admired what the American branch of the SPR—and Richard Hodgson, in particular—had accomplished, but Hyslop, on his own, conceived of a program that would cleverly combine psychical research with traditional studies. He wanted to encourage scientists to see connections that seemed apparent to him—links such as those between abnormal psychology and medium abilities, hypnosis and trance states. Flournoy’s study of Helene Smith certainly provided an illustration of such intersecting fields of study. Hyslop wanted to create a research center that would accommodate both psychical and psychological studies. Once he’d settled on a suitably neutral name for his venture—the American Institute for Scientific Research—he got busy promoting it.
Hyslop wrote to the New York Times, describing his new institute as one that could easily become a “research organization of a national character,” and revealing that he hoped to raise an endowment of $1 million for its support. He bolstered his claim of national potential by boasting that some of the country’s best researchers already endorsed the plan and that the board of trustees already included such eminent men as Professor William James of Harvard. “It is certainly high time that this field should receive the attention of the scientific world in some other manner than mere recognition,” Hyslop continued. “The scandal of science is that it has not been endowed as many less worthy causes have been.”
William James admired Hyslop’s courage and dedication, but found his new associate deplorably lacking in the necessary social skills and graces. Hyslop had “all the heroic qualities of human nature and none of the indispensable ones,” James once complained. As a case in point, Hyslop had given James no warning that his name would be used for public fund-raising, leaving the Harvard professor to discover his new role via the newspapers. The result was a stiff letter in which James asked to be excused from the institute’s board of directors. He assured Hyslop that the plan was admirable, but “I didn’t at all foresee the newspaper campaign and I have enough to carry in the way of reputation for crankiness without shouldering that.”
Hyslop had taken James’s wholehearted support for granted, never dreaming that James would deny so worthy an endeavor. “I have had a hard enough task to fight this battle,” he wrote back. “I ought to find some moral courage in those who have spoken on this subject as you have done.