The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [157]
It occurred to him that the timing was even better now. As author, he could stand on a lifetime of scientific achievement. Barrett had been knighted for his work in physics, shortly after Oliver Lodge achieved that honor, and been named a Fellow of the Royal Society. As Sir William Barrett, he believed his opinions would carry greater credibility.
Barrett’s book, On the Threshold of a New World of Thought, rang like a victory cry when it appeared in 1909, declaring that he and his colleagues had proved their case, from the newest results with Eusapia Palladino to more than twenty years of consistent evidence provided by Leonora Piper. “The paramount importance of psychical research,” Barrett wrote, “is found in correcting the habit of Western thought... that the physical plane is the whole of nature, or at any rate the only aspect of the universe which really concerns us.”
His book immediately sold out, rolling right into a second edition. At that moment of multiple successes, Barrett had no doubt that public opinion would carry science along with it and that—despite the fact that they were so outnumbered by their critics—the process of “correction” was finally under way.
12
A GHOST STORY
ON JANUARY 10, 1909, a headline in the New York Times caught perfectly the flicker of hope warming the psychical research community: “Sir Oliver Lodge Gives the Results of a Series of Remarkable Experiments Testing the Reality of Life After Death.”
Keeping with William Barrett’s theme—that proof was at hand—Lodge focused on the cross-correspondence study, explaining that he and his friends had kept the results to themselves until they were confident of what they meant. Only now would Lodge reveal a startling series of exchanges, pieced together over several months during 1907.
On a January morning, Mrs. Fleming, from her home in Calcutta, had written a script that included the names “Francis and Ignatius.” Five hours later in London, taking into account the time difference, Mrs. Piper’s penmanship suddenly changed during an automatic writing session, taking on the distinctive loops of Fred Myers’s handwriting. John Piddington asked immediately whether this was Myers and whether he was consulting with any other spirits. The prompt reply came in the form of two names scrawled across the paper: “Francis and Ignatius.”
A few weeks later, Mrs. Verrall in Cambridge drew three converging arrows. Both she and Nora puzzled over the drawings and decided not to mention them but instead to wait and see if anything related came from London or Calcutta.
The next day, as Piddington worked with Mrs. Piper, she produced a message from Richard Hodgson, saying that as a test, he had given “arrow” to Mrs. Verrall. A few days later, another message, signed Hodgson, reminded Piddington to “watch for arrow.”
At week’s end, Piddington received a letter from Nora Sidgwick, for the first time telling him of the arrow scripts at her end. He decided not to mention it to Mrs. Piper. The following day came a slightly impatient message from Hodgson, “Got arrow yet?” Piddington waited two months before letting the medium know the answer to that question, wanting to be sure that he didn’t influence the results himself “Whatever the agency is that effects the coincident phenomena, it is not a force that is working blindly and mechanically, but with intelligence and design,” Lodge said, promising more to come as the cross-correspondence tests were still ongoing, and still continuing to produce surprising linkages.
“Not easily or early do we make this admission,” he emphasized, but Lodge was now willing to commit himself publicly, to say that he was communicating with the spirits of his old friends, that on the other