The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [168]
ON AUGUST 19, 1910, Frank Podmore, the last of the three authors of Phantasms of the Living, was found dead, floating in a small pond in the resort community of Malvern Wells.
Maintaining his role as in-house skeptic for the SPR, Podmore had recently infuriated his colleagues by suggesting that Eusapia Palladino’s dazzling performance in Naples, so different from the American tour, undoubtedly occurred with the help of an accomplice. After sending Carrington, Baggally, and Feilding into a frenzy of outrage and denial, Podmore had left for a golfing holiday. He’d spent a relaxing week at Malvern Wells and on a mild Sunday night gone out for a late-night walk, stopped for a cheerful conversation with a friend, and vanished. His body was found five days later in a small pond; at a same-day inquest, the coroner gave a simple verdict of “found drowned,” calling the death an unsolved mystery.
“Suicide has, of course, been suggested,” John Piddington wrote to James Hyslop, “but there is no proof of it and I see no hope of the mystery ever being cleared up.”
The previous year, Podmore had separated from his wife and resigned his longtime job as postal inspector amid a flurry of whispers that he’d been caught in a homosexual relationship. Piddington warned Hyslop to watch out for any references to such “grievous trouble” in séances yet to come, and begged him not to publish anything sexually revealing that “may be said about him or purport to come from him in script or trance.
“At the same time, I must not let you get the impression... that there is warrant for connecting his death with his troubles. There may have been a connection but there is absolutely no evidence of any. I know I can rely upon you to regard this letter as absolutely private and confidential and I think you would do well to destroy it after reading it.”
Hyslop kept the confidence. But he kept the letter too.
No ONE FROM the SPR’s office came to the small private burial for Podmore; as his friends noted resentfully, the association didn’t even send a wreath. But Nora Sidgwick wrote a heartfelt appreciation in the society’s Proceedings: “Ignorant criticism we can get plenty of, but when not harmful it is usually quite useless. What is not easy is to find a man with unflagging energy in keeping his knowledge up to date, unflagging belief in the importance of the investigation, who yet can put himself outside it.
“The Society will be fortunate indeed if it finds another critic equally friendly, learned, painstaking and accurate... to put the brake on where there are signs of running too fast.” As she reminded the membership, skeptics were as important to making a convincing case as optimists were. Perhaps more so.
WILLIAM AND ALICE JAMES left England near the time of Podmore’s death. They had arrived in the spring to stay with his brother, Henry, who had fallen prey to illness and depression and wanted company.
The Jameses had barely settled into Henry’s comfortable home in Rye, where he had moved from London, when a telegram arrived bearing bad news. Their youngest brother, Robertson James, was dead of a heart attack in his sleep. William’s reaction was partly grief, partly envy. His heart disease had worsened; he could hardly bear to take a step, even to breathe. He wished he would go out so easily, he said.
By August, William was so sick that he begged to go home. Alice and Henry, who had returned to good health, booked a voyage back to the United States and, once there, headed directly to Chocorua. William immediately took to bed, and the doctors they consulted predicted that he would gradually recover.
Within the week, though, William was so weak he couldn’t eat, could barely keep down a few swallows of milk. Early on the afternoon of August 26, Alice came into the sickroom and found her husband unconscious. She climbed into the bed and held him against her, listening to his painful