The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [162]
Alta Piper, now twenty, was furious. Was this what “real science” was all about? Injuring a woman who was, as ever, trying to be helpful? Alta fired off the accusations to Hall, who acknowledged that perhaps “we went farther than we should” and asked to be allowed to continue the sittings. Alta voted no; she wanted the door slammed in Hall’s judgmental face. But her mother said yes. She was willing to forgive the first painful experiments, and had “no objections to experiments of any sort if they left no bad after-effects,” Mrs. Piper wrote to Professor Hall.
Leonora Piper was weary of being a mystery, most of all to herself. She clung to the hope that this highly respected psychologist would be able to give her some answers.
MRS. PIPER’S SO-CALLED spirits were a joke, Hall reported.
Her primary control, Rector, fished for information and couldn’t tell if it was accurate or not. At one point, Hall invented a dead niece, who then “sent” ghostly messages in later sittings. The so-called Hodgson control was no better, claiming to remember conversations with Hall that had certainly never taken place. Mrs. Piper’s trances seemed genuinely odd, yes; occasionally, she revealed information she shouldn’t have known; but overall, his diagnosis was that a competent doctor, one experienced in mental health, could have cured her years ago.
“In fine, at the very best, I for one can see nothing more in Mrs. Piper than an interesting case of secondary personality with its own unique features,” Hall said. He could only conclude that people found meaning in her trance utterances because they wanted to find it. He included his colleague William James in that group of self-deceiving dreamers.
Hall hoped that the rest of society would appreciate the short work that a good scientist could make of even an acclaimed medium. He hoped that people would see it as he did, as a battle of good science against evil mysticism: “Science is indeed a solid island set in the midst of a stormy, foggy, and uncharted sea, and all these phenomena are of the sea and not the land. If there have been eras of enlightenment, it is because these cloud banks of superstition ... have lifted for a space or a season.
“Spiritism is the ruck and muck of modern culture, the common enemy of true science and true religion, and to drain its dismal and miasmatic marshes is the great work of modern culture.”
In the interests of honest reporting, Oliver Lodge wrote to Hall and asked to publish his study of Mrs. Piper in the SPR journal. The experiments should be kept in context with the others, Lodge pointed out; “the full moral ought to be extracted from them and they ought to go on record with the rest. In so far as they have been painful, it is the more desirable that they not be wasted.”
Hall refused. He had other plans for the material, he said, perhaps a book with Tanner on spiritualism itself; perhaps later publication in “some journal,” perhaps a report or two in his own Journal of Psychology. He suspected the SPR, given the chance, would pretty up his findings. As he wrote to Lodge, Hall wanted to be sure that his own inferences, which “are pretty negative,” would be fully included, and he doubted that would happen in any publication edited by believers.
Lodge sent Hall’s letter over to William James with a terse note: “By this morning’s post, I have received from Stanley Hall a letter, which strikes me as arrogant and unsatisfactory. I enclose a copy and do not wish a reply.”
AS EXPECTED, Amy Tanner’s book Studies in Spiritism, published the following year, detailed every fault in the Piper sittings