The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [154]
When he returned, the spirit Hodgson added another detail. The last time he’d seen the woman, “I proposed marriage to her, but she refused me.”
James had never heard a word of this from Hodgson when alive. He doubted the claim. Nevertheless, he wrote to the woman in question, receiving an answer that he hadn’t expected: “Regarding the utterances of Mrs. Piper, I have no difficulty in telling you the circumstances on which she may have founded her communications. Years ago, Mr. H asked me to marry him, and some letters were exchanged between us which he may have kept.”
Holding her letter, James felt a leap of euphoria. In this secretive part of Hodgson’s life, it seemed possible to demonstrate “the return of a ‘spirit,’ proven by extremely private knowledge.” The trick, of course, was in the privacy of the knowledge. Carrying through with his resolve to investigate thoroughly, he interviewed a dozen of Hodgson’s friends. None knew of the relationship, but one did tell him that Hodgson occasionally consulted with Mrs. Piper’s Rector on his private life. So there was a possibility, admittedly slim, that Mrs. Piper knew about the hidden letters and the failed proposal. She showed no signs of knowledge, but perhaps it was locked away in a “trance memory.” On that slim possibility—and he knew some would consider it slim to the point of being meaningless—James found he could not quite declare for proof of spirit communication. He admitted, though, that by such standards one might never find acceptable proof. “It would be sad indeed if this undecided verdict will be all I can reach after so many years,” he wrote to Flournoy.
WITH JOHN PIDDINGTON consumed by the cross-correspondence experiments, many of the SPR’s other endeavors fell to Everard Feilding, a forty-year-old aristocrat with a quick intelligence, an irrepressible sense of humor, a love of odd causes, and—since the drowning death of his twin brother in 1906—a serious interest in the possibility of survival after death.
Feilding had found his Christian faith shaken by the tragedy, the consolations of his church unconvincing. The alternative offered by modern science—German biologist Ernst Haeckel ascribed the notion of soul to “plasma movements in the ganglion cells”—struck him as even less sustaining. With clergy decrying science and scientists denying religion, Feilding had turned to psychical research as the last hope for a man of rational faith. At least, he felt, this was a group trying to make some sense of the world, displaying prejudice against neither flesh nor spirit.
Despite that underlying seriousness of purpose, Feilding sincerely enjoyed the comedy that seemed ever to color psychical research. In shredding the reputation of a physical medium working in London, he wrote, “He promises good conditions, and gives them; so good, in fact, that his fraud is perfectly obvious. It is though having told you that a spirit would appear in full daylight from the next room, I presently were to emerge thence, dressed in a white sheet and a mask, and say I was your grandfather.”
Feilding admitted to having a wonderful time questioning the medium’s manifested spirits, even pretending to recognize them:
“What! Sidney Parry!”
(It was really quite like him but Sidney Parry isn’t dead.)
Great emotion and assent.
A few other words from me, ending with, “But my dear fellow! When did you pass over?”
The spirit, Feilding reported to his colleagues, fled the room. He’d envied the muscular, energetic nature of its stride.
He’d seen nothing to convince him that spirits existed or that mediums could contact them. But the theater was so good, the fraud so entertaining, that Feilding couldn’t persuade himself to abandon it.
CHARLES RICHET HAD renewed his request to Nora Sidgwick that the SPR take another look at Eusapia Palladino. Nora kept repeating that she wanted no further contact with the grubby and distasteful Eusapia. The British psychical researchers were busy with the cross-correspondence