The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [156]
On good days, though, they weren’t sure what to write off.
With all the lights blazing, with Carrington gripping her hands and Baggally draped across her feet, the little table floated two feet off the ground and hung there. “No precautions we took hindered [the levitations] in the slightest,” the investigators reported. “She had no hooks, and we could never discern the slightest movement of her hands and knees. We very often had our free hands on her knees, while her feet were controlled either by our feet or by one of us under the table, and were generally away from the [levitating] table legs, a clear space being discernible between her and the table.”
The curtains blew toward them when she stretched out her hand, swirling like smoke: “There was no attachment to her hand as we constantly verified by passing our hands between her and the curtain. Nor would any attachment produce the same effect, as the curtain was so thin that the point of attachment of any string would have been seen.”
Lights glimmered overhead: a steady glowing turquoise, a yellow streak, a “small, sparking light like the spark between the poles of a battery.” Invisible objects solidified in the air, poking and prodding the researchers. Sometimes they formed into “more or less indescribable objects; white things that looked like handfuls of tow [fibers of flax], stalk-like bodies which extended themselves over our table, shadowy things like faces with large features, as though made of cobweb.”
In response to a query from England, asking if they’d seen any of Richet’s so-called ectoplasmic forms, Feilding wrote back to Alice Johnson, “Why my good lady, we are getting hands, white & yellowish; heads, profiles & full face; curious black long knobbly things with cauliflowers at the end of them; touches, visible & invisible; hand grasps from within the curtain, one yesterday (12/05/08) which held my hand with such force that I felt the nails.”
All three men finished shaken, puzzled—and convinced.
The phenomena in question were “in themselves, preposterous, futile, and lacking in any quality of smallest ethical, moral or spiritual value,” Feilding said. Both Baggally and Carrington were capable of conjuring up similar effects on a stage, given adequate props and preparation. The investigators were less impressed by the show itself than by an almost tangible sense of magic filling the room, an unnerving impression of a power beyond any of them, including Eusapia herself.
Feilding did not believe that he’d seen spirits at work, rather that he’d witnessed something less definable, “the existence of some force not yet generally recognized which is able to impress itself on matter and to simulate or create the appearance of matter. Thus the demonstrations—blowing curtains and floating tables—might seem rather silly except as a clue to something more, the other power in the room.”
Feilding still believed that psychic investigators needed to “approach the investigation of the phenomena themselves in a light, shall I say, even a flippant spirit. I sometimes think that in this way alone one can preserve one’s mental balance in dealing with this kind of subject.”
But in the same way that Piddington had looked upon Dick Hodgson’s old star anagrams and felt a ghost breathing down his neck, so Feilding found himself sure that he’d seen beyond the ordinary, that Eusapia’s phenomena were “the playthings of the agency which they reveal.” On a rare note of complete earnestness, he recommended that the study of that agency, whatever it was, “is surely a task as worthy of the most earnest consideration as any problem with which modern science is concerned.”
WILLIAM BARRETT HAD been waiting for that conclusion for more than a decade. Since 1895, to be precise.
That was the year that Barrett had written a book on the importance of psychical research, inspired by the moment when Lombroso and Richet had declared in favor of Palladino. Following the