The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [151]
The reverend, her elderly husband, and her spirit control, an Indian child she called “Little Bright Eyes,” planned a simple and happy life together, she told reporters—a life enlivened by occasional private seances. But not if Vanderbilt’s daughter could prevent it; she had demanded a formal hearing into her father’s sanity.
At the hearing, witnesses revealed that Mr. Vanderbilt had given Little Bright Eyes gifts of candy, clothes, and cash, illustrating, as the Times gleefully noted, that “girls in Spookland, as here, have a weakness for bon-bons and caramels at 80 cents a box, that they can find use for wearing apparel and can cash checks.”
The spirit also exhibited a talent for giving very specific instructions to Mr. Vanderbilt. Letters produced in court revealed that through Bright Eyes, his dead wife had told Vanderbilt that she wanted the widower to marry May Pepper and, of course, to provide her with a comfortable home. “Bright Eyes is so good to me,” ran one such note, “that it behooves me to do all in my power to make her Medy’s [medium’s] life brighter and happier.”
The letters were delivered through automatic writing by May Pepper herself, who insisted that she never knew what her hand wrote while she was lost in a trance. Any wrongdoing, Mrs. Pepper-Vanderbilt told the court, was due to the spirit’s mischievous nature. A medium could not be held responsible for the morals of the ghosts that possessed her.
When the case had been fully presented, the jury agreed unanimously with Vanderbilt’s daughter that her father had lost his mind. No one could miss the corollary—that only lunatics wasted their time believing in ghosts and well-meaning spirits.
As Hyslop saw it, his only choice was to fight fire with fire, to show that his organization could expose frauds with the best of them. As May Pepper needed no more exposure—or publicity—he selected another target, equally high-profile in its way.
First, Hyslop hired a full-time investigator for the ASPR. His choice was Hereward Carrington, a soft-spoken young Englishman with a reputation as both an amateur conjurer and psychical skeptic. Carrington’s first assignment was to visit the western New York community of Lily Dale, billed as “the most famous and aristocratic spiritualistic camp in America.”
A mere scrap of a town about sixty miles south of Buffalo, Lily Dale contained little more than a railroad station, a few hotels, a scatter of white-painted houses, and an assembly ground. Nothing out of the ordinary except that the Church of Spiritualism owned it all. Only mediums registered to the church could become full-time residents of Lily Dale. Believers said that such a concentration of spiritualist power drew ghosts to the town the way a magnet summoned iron filings.
The hotels, the mediums’ parlors, and the wooded grounds—supposedly haunted—were open to any paying customer seeking advice, communication with the dead, or just a demonstration of unearthly powers. During the summer months, Lily Dale hosted some 500 visitors daily, all hoping to catch a glimpse of the ghost world. As Hyslop put it, “Such places simply invite investigation by the claims that they make.”
Since he was already a known critic, Carrington registered at his Lily Dale hotel under the name Charles Henderson. To his surprise and amusement, he discovered that the mediums of Lily Dale specialized in old-fashioned performances—slate writing, cabinets, and materializing spirits—which told him to set his expectations very low.
In short order, Carrington caught one medium busily switching slates, another smuggling confederates into a cabinet. His favorite moment—as reported in the New York Times—occurred when the lights accidentally came on during one cabinet seance, and a young female spirit, “instead of melting away,