The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [147]
Hodgson’s funeral was held three days after his death. The ceremony took place at his beloved Tavern Club. His coffin was decked in ivy, violets, and white roses. Flowers were heaped around the room. After the formal service, his friends gathered round and sang the club song.
James marveled that the bachelor Hodgson, with no family nearby, no group of office colleagues or co-workers, could draw such a crowd: “Everyone was there from simple personal affection for the man in the coffin. I stood at the foot of the stairs and saw everyone come down. All the women, and many of the men, were crying.”
The rain that had begun earlier that week was still beating down, gray and cold against the windows.
IN THE MIDST of a written message from her trance personality “Rector,” Mrs. Piper’s pencil dropped onto the paper. Her fingers trembled convulsively, clutching whitely around the pencil when it was returned to her.
“What is the matter?” the sitter asked.
Her hand, still shaking, wrote the letter “H” on the paper, pressing so hard that the point broke. It then continued the word, wrote “Hodgson.”
“God bless you!” exclaimed the sitter.
“I am ...” and then the writing tailed away into wild scrawls.
“Is this my friend?”
The most dictatorial of Mrs. Piper’s trance personalities, Rector intervened: “Peace, friends, he is here, it was he but he could not remain, he was so choked. He is doing all in his power to return.”
A few days later, the H spirit flickered back again: “I am Hodgson.... I heard your call—I know you,” he wrote to a young woman sitting with Mrs. Piper.
“Piper instrument. I am happy exceedingly difficult to come very. I understand why Myers came seldom, I must leave. I cannot stay. I cannot remain today.”
And then, another two weeks later, on January 23, Alice James and her son Billy came for a sitting. “Why, there’s Billy! Is that Mrs. James and Billy? God bless you! I have found my way, I am here, have patience with me. All is well with me. Don’t miss me. Where’s William? Give him my best wishes.”
JAMES CONTINUED TO mourn Hodgson’s loss—and the dearth of people to step into his job. Increasingly, he feared for the survival of the small American branch of the SPR. Hodgson had been the only “real worker” in the organization, and the one who best understood the evidence they’d amassed (including twelve boxes of documented Piper sittings read by no one but Hodgson). James could think of no one suited to pick up that monumental workload.
It was true that James Hyslop—“so good but so impossible”—offered to assume Hodgson’s duties. But that simply would not do, James told the applicant, listing his defects without ceremony: “You lack the discretion that was so extraordinary a gift of Hodgson’s; you are too impulsive; and your enthusiasm leads you to relations with newspapers and the general public that would quickly undo the credit that the name SPR has slowly earned for caution and criticality.”
Yet James agreed with Hyslop that psychical research should continue. And as the “Hodgson-control” began to flicker in and out of Mrs. Piper’s sittings, it became obvious that here was another opportunity to prove or disprove a returning spirit, much as Hodgson himself had attempted with the G.P personality.
If he was going to set the standards so high, despite the troubling lack of depth among psychical researchers, if he was determined that the Hodgson-control be studied with the restraint and precision that he demanded, the best investigator—perhaps the only investigator really available—was William James himself.
MARGARET VERRALL HELD a position as classics lecturer at Newnham College. She was fluent in both Greek and Latin, the wife of a Cambridge philosophy professor, an old friend of the Sidgwicks and Myerses, and, most of all, a woman of tireless patience.
Since Myers’s death, she’d been pondering his wish to prove immortality. She’d liked him so much, and he’d believed so passionately in survival of the soul, that she wanted someone to make a concerted