The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [153]
“Back in the old despondency,” read one passage, taken down by Alice Fleming and signed “Edmund Gurney.” “Why don’t you write daily? You seem to form habits only to break them.”
Mrs. Fleming told Alice Johnson that the complaint spilled out after she had been too busy to spare time for automatic writing. “If you don’t care to try every day for a short time, better drop it all together. It’s like making appointments and not keeping them,” the Gurney message continued. “You endanger your own powers of sensitiveness and annoy us bitterly.”
Some of the messages signed by Myers seethed with frustration: “Yet another attempt to run the blockade—to strive to get a message through—how can I make your hand docile enough—how can I convince them?
“The nearest simile I can find to express the difficulties of sending a message is that I appear to be standing behind a sheet of frosted glass—which blurs sight and deadens sound—dictating feebly—to a reluctant and somewhat obtuse secretary.
“A terrible feeling of impotence burdens me.”
WILLIAM JAMES WAS a retired professor now, having taught his last class at Harvard in January 1907. At the age of sixty-five, he seemed noticeably thinner and grayer, but he assured his many well wishers that he planned only to slow down a little, to put more time into his work as a philosopher.
Of course, James also spent many of his newly liberated hours in the company of the self-proclaimed spirit of Richard Hodgson. His desk stood stacked with piles of transcripts, records of the sittings held before Mrs. Piper left for England to do the cross-correspondence work.
He was sifting, analyzing, fuming: “It means much more labor than one would suppose, and very little result,” he wrote to his brother, Henry. “I wish that I had never undertaken it.”
Encounters with the Hodgson control veered between a presence so real that James remembered breaking out in a chill during the sitting and, at the other extreme, tedious hours with what appeared to be some peculiar creation derived from Mrs. Piper’s interpretation of the masculine personality.
The Hodgson control tended to announce himself with the unfamiliar heartiness of a campaigning politician, exclaiming, “Well, well, well! I am Hodgson. Delighted to see you. How is everything? First rate?”
Hodgson had never talked like that in his life.
Yet the glad-handing usually gave way to a familiar friendliness, as if the ghost—if it was such—had to pull free from Mrs. Piper before emerging as himself.
The spirit Hodgson teased his old close friends, turned quiet and serious with those he knew less well. One woman had told James that she and R.H. “were such good friends that he was saucy toward her, and teased her most of the time,” which was exactly as the control treated her, “absolutely characteristic and as he was in life.”
Another former friend left his sitting feeling dizzy and shaken. After the irritating greeting period “came words of kindness which were too intimate and personal to be recorded, but which left me so deeply moved... it had seemed as though he had in all, reality been there and speaking to me.”
James was determined to be as ruthless an investigator as Dick Hodgson had ever been. Emotional responses were all very well, but they weren’t facts. And facts didn’t count until they’d been dissected into pieces and every fragment examined.
In one sitting, the Hodgson personality had asked a friend to destroy some letters written to a woman and hidden in his desk. “Look for my letters stamped from Chicago. I wouldn’t have them get out for the world.”
Unable to find the letters, which had apparently been shipped to England already, James had demanded further information about the woman in question. Came the response: “There was a time when I greatly cared for her and I did not wish it known in the ears of others. I think she