The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [163]
Even Hodgson had never thought Mrs. Piper intelligent enough to understand her own capabilities, much less the metaphysical questions raised by spirit communication. “Mrs. Piper’s opinion, in any case, is of no value,” Hodgson once told an ASPR member, explaining why the medium looked to investigators for help with a mystery “which she herself had no hope of solving.”
Tanner didn’t claim to see an intellectual, but she did see a woman trapped and isolated by the mediumistic side of her life: “She hides from the general public as much as possible,” she wrote. As a longtime medium, Mrs. Piper had given up all traces of the friendly little girl from New Hampshire. She was suspicious of strangers. She tried to conceal her work from her neighbors, asking sitters to enter and go upstairs quietly, watching at the door so that visitors didn’t even sound the doorbell.
“She was brought up a Methodist, but when her parents moved to a town where there was only a Congregational Church she attended that. She would like to have some church connections,” Tanner wrote, “but seems to feel that probably she would not be welcomed in any church on account of her work as a medium. Here too she is isolated.”
Mrs. Piper had filled her life instead with her family, with art and music, and with the outdoors, becoming “unusually fond of nature and its beauties.” But that hardly balanced the more than twenty years in which she had been singled out, made into a freak, given up hours of her life to trances and tests, demanded by psychical researchers seeking that elusive crack in the wall between the living and dead.
If Tanner and Hall concluded that Leonora Piper had grown a tangle of secondary personalities, who could blame them? Both James and Lodge had already raised the possibility, particularly the concern that the often-domineering Hodgson might have inadvertently induced some of them. They had long suspected that the equally domineering control, Rector—who, unlike Mrs. Piper, could stand up to Hodgson—arose from her subconscious as a direct defense against the investigator.
Amy Tanner also wondered if the Mrs. Piper of 1909 was a worn-down version of a once more talented medium. If so, she thought, the investigators might be partly to blame. But she also pointed out that Mrs. Piper’s powers, whatever they were, had been strongest during earlier times of poor health.
During the period when the medium suffered severe abdominal pain, eventually diagnosed as an ovarian tumor, her readings had been extraordinarily impressive. G.P had appeared during the worst of that illness, including the time when Mrs. Piper was recovering from the surgery. He had faded away only as her health returned. Tanner speculated that perhaps in a physically fragile state Mrs. Piper became more of a mental conduit: “That is, the facts in the case seem to point to the theory that the mediumistic power is encouraged and, perhaps in the beginning, caused by nervous shock.”
In her way, it seemed, Dr. Amy Tanner was raising the possibility of the decline effect, the recognition that no psychic, even the best one, lasted forever.
SAILING ACROSS THE Atlantic to New York, Eusapia Palladino decided to hold a seance to alleviate her boredom. Passengers gathered round, clamoring to talk with their dead relatives. A woman fainted to the floor as lights winked in the air.
Onboard journalists cabled the story of the carnival-like spectacle to New York, where Hereward Carrington immediately received offers from music hall managers to host Eusapia. Deep in debt on the venture, Carrington quickly accepted the most lucrative among the invitations.
“Poor Carrington had