The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [148]
An organized woman by nature, Mrs. Verrall worked out a careful system for contacting a spirit. First, she chose automatic writing as the best way to converse with Myers. Then she set aside a time in the late afternoon to try to acquire this skill. Then she waited. For three months she sat at her desk daily, holding a pencil against a piece of paper for at least an hour, listening to the mantel clock tick away the time. Day after day, she arose stiff with sitting, the blank tablet mocking her.
Gradually she became so bored that she quit focusing on the elusive Myers and fell into musing on her work, her garden, her household duties, her family. Lost in that daydreaming haze, she found herself suddenly snapping to attention, the tablet covered with simplistic messages in Greek and Latin—much cruder versions than she usually used—but with the signature “Myers” at the end.
The scribblings seemed almost meaningless, except for one curious coincidence. Over in Boston, Mrs. Piper’s spirit guide Rector suddenly began reporting conversations with Myers. And on those particular days, the messages, although in English, were often startlingly similar in content to the Greek and Latin notes taken by Mrs. Verrall. Meanwhile, Mrs. Verrall’s daughter, Helen, became intrigued enough to experiment with automatic writing herself. She too discovered that occasionally she’d jotted down a message that was duplicated in notes taken down by her mother or Mrs. Piper.
By early 1906, the three women’s writings seemed to form an unlikely kind of chain letter from the dead. Other lost colleagues appeared. Some notes purported to be from Edmund Gurney, some from Henry Sidgwick. Back and forth across the Atlantic, Nora Sidgwick, Oliver Lodge, and William James began comparing the messages. Taken separately, each woman’s writing seemed a kind of stream-of-consciousness jumble of words and thoughts. Taken together, though, the messages seemed connected, as if ideas were relayed on some circuit impossible to detect. As she admitted to her friends, Nora began to wonder for the first time if her Henry had been wrong, if there was a chance, after all, of proving conversations between the living and the dead.
IN JUNE 1906, Mrs. Piper received a friendly invitation from Oliver Lodge’s wife, Mary. The SPR wanted her to return to England for a second round of investigations—and, more personally, Lady Lodge would be delighted to see her again.
Many strategy discussions and letters had preceded this invitation. Nora, Lord Rayleigh, Oliver Lodge, William James, and a new SPR administrative secretary, a slight, dark Cambridge graduate named John Piddington, all debated how to properly study this curious messaging system.
The invitation came only after the experimental plan was in place. Nora would oversee the Verralls in Cambridge, and Piddington would keep Mrs. Piper sequestered in London. None of the details of the study would be revealed to the three women, only that they were participants in a new series of tests.
The British Society for Psychical Research, thanks to the determination of Nora Sidgwick and Oliver Lodge, had rebuilt itself with some real success. John Piddington was one of two honorary secretaries; the other position belonged to the Hon. Everard Feilding, a younger son of the earl of Denbigh. At the moment, Feilding—who had a known affection for the more peculiar phenomena—was investigating a candle-throwing poltergeist. The more staid and methodical Piddington seemed a logical choice for the correspondence study.
Piddington had a businesslike style about him and a fondness for organization. He had helped set up an endowment for the SPR so that it could pay full-time