The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [161]
Still, Lodge wrote, it worried him that James, who knew Hall better, remained so unenthusiastic. Usually decided in his opinions, Lodge opted to go along with whatever James decided was best.
IN THE WAKE of the SPR’s cross-correspondence study, especially in the receptive coverage by the American press, Hereward Carrington also saw a moment of opportunity. He invited Eusapia Palladino to tour the eastern United States, hoping that this was the right time for her strange talents-as demonstrated in Naples—to convert American skeptics.
For once, Hyslop and James found themselves in complete agreement. They both thought this an atrocious idea.
Hyslop warned Carrington, who had left the ASPR to pursue his own investigations, to proceed more cautiously. He reminded his former employee of Eusapias troubled history; he invoked the ease with which Richard Hodgson had exposed her as a cheat. She was untrustworthy, Hyslop said, exactly the wrong kind of medium to parade before skeptics. James also invoked Hodgson’s name in recommending against the project. He predicted that the flamboyant Eusapia would attract the worst variety of newspaper attention—exactly the type of publicity that he thought was most harmful to their endeavor.
Further, he thought Carrington was being naive if he thought American scientists wanted an honest investigation of the Italian medium. Long and bitter experience had taught him otherwise. James suspected that researchers would see her merely as an opportunity to further discredit psychical research.
“It would be one thing if the scientists would really investigate Eusapia,” James wrote. “But I have very little faith in the candor of such men, and doubt any important result accruing.” He hoped Carrington would follow his advice: “Let them [the scientists] perish in their ignorance and conceit.”
If this struck an unusually bitter note for James, it was also the sound of recent experience. He and his colleagues had allowed Stanley Hall to have his requested time with Leonora Piper. They were now reaping the unhappy results.
Once he’d achieved his object, Hall made it clear that he had never intended to find out whether Mrs. Piper could communicate with spirits. That concept belonged “more to the troglodyte age than our own.” His interest was in debunking her once and for all: “Seriously to investigate the problem of whether discarnate ghosts can suspend any of the laws of matter seems to me not only bad form for any and every scientific man, but an indication of a strange psychic rudiment... that ought to be’ outgrown like the prenatal tail or gills.”
What Hall had in mind—in the six sittings he’d scheduled—was a clinical dissection of this vestige of superstitious belief.
Dismissing earlier studies as inadequate, Hall and his research assistant, Amy Tanner, insisted on first retesting Mrs. Piper’s trance state. Hall counted her breaths, measured her pulse rate, timed the whole affair. It took about six minutes for her to drop into trance, he reported. At that point her breathing slowed from more than twenty breaths a minute to fewer than ten. Her pulse fell from eighty-four beats a minute to seventy.
It was in this state that Mrs. Piper would begin to scribble messages on paper. She resurfaced slowly, some fifteen to twenty minutes of gradual awakening. As the minutes went on, her breathing quickened, her pulse climbed back to normal.
The trance seemed real enough. But Hall thought he could prove otherwise. He mixed up a spirit of camphor (a slightly toxic compound known for its stinging taste and ability to numb sensation) and dripped it into her mouth. To his surprise, she did not startle awake. But on emerging slowly from the trance, she exclaimed in dismay that her mouth was numb. The next morning blisters covered her swollen lips and tongue. For days she had difficulty swallowing.
Hall’s next attempt to dismantle Mrs. Piper’s trance involved an esthesiometer,