The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [146]
James recognized some justice in the accusation. It was reminiscent of what Fred Myers said years earlier, that James failed to lead because he deliberately pulled back from full engagement. He wrote to reassure Hyslop that, even though he was withdrawing from the board, they were indeed on the same side: “My Excellent Hyslop—I am sorry that the rumor of my leaving the society you are founding should cause any donation to cease. I thoroughly believe in endowing research in the psychical direction and had I money to spare I would make over to you several thousands.
“Please show this letter to the friend in question [and previous correspondence if it will help] ... I repeat my position. I believe in psychical research and its endowment. I disbelieve in ... the substitution of ‘audiences’ for investigators, ’popular interest’ for investigation and newspaper tattle for facts.”
THE NIGHT HELD too many shadows; Leonora Piper could not summon sleep. It was December 20, 1905, in the last bright days before Christmas. She’d gone to bed early, tired by some shopping chores. There was no reason why she should feel so chased by darkness.
She tossed, turned, got up about midnight to make warm milk, returned to bed, but found herself listening for footsteps, troubled by a sense of someone walking around her room. Finally about 1:00 a.m. she fell asleep, only to wake three hours later, still half caught in a dream.
She’d been trying to enter a tunnel, walking toward its entrance. As she approached, she saw a man ahead of her. She could tell that he was bearded, but a slouch hat hid most of his face. She got closer; he raised a hand to block her way. As his fingers reached toward her, she startled awake.
The room was black in the early morning. She went to the window. The casement stood partly open; the rain was beating in. She closed it and went back to bed, tumbling into dreamless sleep. At half past seven, her daughters came into her room. She blinked awake, and the memory of the dream came back in such detail that she immediately began telling them of it.
The hand had looked remarkably like Richard Hodgson’s, she told Alta, with its strong long fingers and callused palms. She wished she’d stayed in the dream a little longer, just to be sure, but she was quite certain. It made no sense to her, the hand raised in denial, the shadowed face, the tunnel stretching away into darkness.
Exhausted and still oddly troubled, she decided to stay in bed. An hour later, she heard Alta’s feet scrambling up the stairs. Her daughter came in crying, carrying the morning paper’s news, which told of the death of Richard Hodgson.
He had gone to one of his favorite hangouts, the Tavern Club, for lunch before a game of handball. An increasingly loud argument occupied the clubroom just then, with one man defending an unpopular cause against angry disagreement.
Hodgson leaned over the stair railing, jokingly emphasizing the unfair, one-sided nature of the fight. “Go for the scoundrel,” he boomed. “Don’t give him a chance to speak! Down with him, don’t let him be heard.”
The quarrel broke up in laughter.
“How can anyone be heard when you’re in the room, Dick?” countered a friend.
Hodgson had continued on to the Union Boat Club for his regular game. It had barely begun before he’d collapsed on the court, dead of a massive heart attack.
“Absolutely sudden, dropt dead while playing violent handball.... All his work unfinished,” James lamented. “No one can ever learn those records as he knew them—he would have written certainly 2 or 3 solid books. Too bad, too bad!” That was only part of it though. James mourned more than the loss of yet another of psychical research’s best workers; he mourned the loss of “the manliest, unworldliest, kindliest of human