The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [152]
Hyslop’s complaint was that the newspapers seemed more fascinated by the scams than by the excellent investigation. The Times headlined Carrington’s report “Ingenious Frauds at Lily Dale Séances.” He wished it had been presented as “Brilliant Investigation by Psychical Researchers.”
PORING OVER THE cross-correspondence scripts, Nora’s assistant at the SPR, a Newnham College graduate named Alice Johnson, suddenly remembered a peculiar letter received from India a few months earlier.
The unexpected correspondence came from Alice Kipling Fleming, a sister of writer Rudyard Kipling and a longtime secretive psychic. For years, Mrs. Fleming, the wife of a British army officer, had been troubled by an uneasy sense of the occult. She did her best to keep her feelings secret, though, because her family disliked the subject.
“It puzzles me a little,” Mrs. Fleming wrote to Miss Johnson, “that with no desire to consider myself exceptional I do sometimes see, hear, feel or otherwise become conscious of beings and influences that are not patent to all. Is this a frame of mind to be checked, permitted or encouraged? I should like so much to know. My own people hate what they call ‘uncanniness’ and I am obliged to hide from them the keen interest I cannot help feeling in psychic matters.”
Mrs. Fleming had read Myers’s book Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, and it had inspired her to begin surreptitiously experimenting. After a recent afternoon of automatic writing, she’d found some lines that concluded with the signature “Myers.” They included some remarkably specific direction to send the text to Mrs. Verrall in Cambridge.
Mrs. Fleming didn’t know Mrs. Verrall, didn’t know if the directions were real, doubted whether any part of the message was authentic—but it was precise enough to make her feel that she should do something. She decided to hand off her scripts to the SPR: “Will you forgive me for troubling you with the writing? I do not like to suppress it as it gave me the impression of someone very anxious to establish communication, but with not much power to do it ...” If they did choose to use her work, Alice Fleming asked Miss Johnson and her friends to protect her by using a false name. They did. In SPR publications, she was known only as Mrs. Holland.
When she took a second look at the scripts from India, Miss Johnson found that the so-called Myers had given Mrs. Fleming a near perfect description of rooms in Mrs. Verrall’s house. But even more curiously, she’d written other details that suggested that Mrs. Fleming had unwittingly been pulled into their cross-correspondence experiments.
ON APRIL 17, 1907, Mrs. Piper suddenly began fumbling for the Greek word for death. “Sanatos,” she wrote, haltingly. “Tanatos.” Then several days later, it came out right: “Thanatos, thanatos, thanatos.”
Death, death, death.
One day earlier, Mrs. Fleming had mailed a script from India that read in part, “Maurice, Morris, Mors.” The last was Latin for death; it seemed to Miss Johnson that their India correspondent was reaching for the counterpart to Mrs. Piper’s thrice-times death. And Mrs. Fleming continued, “And with that the shadow of death fell upon him and his soul departed out of his limbs.”
A week later, Mrs. Verrall wrote, “Pallida mors” (Pale death), and then, “Warmed both hands before the fire of life. It fails and I am ready to depart.”
THE CROSS-CORRESPONDENCE experiments filled hundreds of pages. Not all connected so neatly; not all even made sense. But enough did; enough of those flares of similarity brightened the pages that the investigators saw only two meaningful choices. They must either accept a pattern of exceptional coincidences or accept that they were reading mental messages sent and received by both the living and the dead.
Almost all the psychical researchers reached the latter conclusion. They wished, of course, that the spirits could do a better job of getting their precise message across, that the results would