The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [158]
William James’s mood was chillier. He was writing up his analysis of Mrs. Piper’s Hodgson personality into a formal report for the SPR. The self-proclaimed spirit still seemed troublingly ambiguous to him, and he worried that his uncertainties might dampen the feeling of confidence rising from the cross-correspondence work.
James’s health was faltering again, draining him of optimism and energy. While resting-relaxing at Chocorua, reading in his Cambridge home library—he felt comfortable enough. But with even mild exertion his heart clutched painfully in his chest.
He barely stirred from home while he struggled to make sense of what had been real, and what had not, in the shadowy reappearances of Richard Hodgson.
The Hodgson spirit or personality or control, whatever one wanted to call it, seemed sometimes a believable ghost, other times an uneven recreation shaped by the medium’s mind and memory. But when believable, it could be downright eerie.
William Newbold, a professor from the University of Pennsylvania and a longtime friend of both James and Hodgson, had come to sit twice with Mrs. Piper, maintaining an attitude of easy skepticism with some difficulty.
“I heard you and William discussing me. I stood not one inch behind you,” the Hodgson-control said during Newbold’s second visit.
Sitter: William who?
Hodgson personality: James.
Sitter: What did William James say?
Hodgson p.: He said he was baffled, but he felt I was talking at one moment, and then at another he did not know what to think.”
(Perfectly true of my conversation with Newbold after his sitting with Mrs. Piper a week previous-WJ)
Sitter: Did you hear anything else?
Hodgson p.: Yes, he said I was very secretive and careful.
“Did you hear him say that?”
“He did. He said I was [keeping information back].”
“I don’t remember him saying so.”
“I tell you, Billy, he said so.”
Newbold related this exchange to James, leading to a discussion of the conversation in question. The Pennsylvania psychologist remembered that James had expressed puzzlement over the on-off nature of the Hodgson personality. He didn’t recall any mention of Hodgson’s secretive nature.
But James did.
He’d told Newbold that sometimes the Hodgson personality seemed to be protective of what he knew, refusing to answer questions, in a way that brought back the living Hodgson’s obsessive demands for secrecy.
That neurotic sense of privacy had colored the sittings, making it more difficult for James to verify information. But Hodgson had been a complicated personality in his lifetime; should anyone have expected him to become an easy man after death?
The impression of a strong-willed and opinionated Richard Hodgson—again, as he was in life—resounded during a sitting with James’s wife, Alice. She’d asked, “Do you remember what happened in our library one night when you were arguing with Margie [her sister]?”
Alice James had hardly finished the sentence before the medium’s arm shot forcefully out, one hand forming a fist, shaking the clenched fingers angrily into the air. “Yes, I did this in her face. I couldn’t help it. She was so impossible to move. It was wrong of me, but I couldn’t help it.”
James and his family had laughed over that incident. The explosive response had come during a family dinner, when Hodgson and Margie Gibbs were both invited, and James’s sister-in-law gave an admiring description of a slate writer she had seen in California. Hodgson—who never could abide slate writers—had become so exasperated that he’d leapt loudly to his feet to challenge her, his fist waving under her nose.
The private jokes, intimate details, embarrassing recollections that the sitters asked James not to mention—in an era not yet much removed from the buttoned-up repression of the Victorian age—left a powerful impression. “More than this—most of us felt during the