The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [174]
Prelude
The first narrative: This story comes from William James’s report “A Case of Clairvoyance,” Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 1 (1907): 221—36. As James noted in the introduction, the research for this report was done in 1898 (interviews were largely gathered by a cousin of James’s wife, Harris Kennedy), and the report should have been published the following year. But due to the financial problems then ongoing in the ASPR, the organization did not resume publishing its journal until 1907, when James Hyslop headed the group. This report was published in the first volume of the renewed journal.
5: “had been a brilliant scientist”: The British pragmatist philosopher Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, a friend of James, told this anecdote about scientific hostility toward psychical research; it is recounted in “Some Logical Aspects of Psychical Research,” in The Case For and Against Psychical Belief, ed. Carl Murchison (Worcester, Mass.: Clark University, 1927), 215—28. This book was the result of a conference on the issue; participants also included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Jastrow, and the magician Harry Houdini.
1. The Night Side
Biographical information on William James—his character and that of his family, his childhood and the general nature of his upbringing—is widely available. This chapter primarily drew from three books. The first is Howard M. Feinstein, Becoming William James (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984). I relied on it in particular for information on the childhood of Henry James Sr. and for its trenchant analysis of the terrible accident that took his leg (pp. 39-43) and its influence on his further life. My favorite traditional biography is Linda Simon, Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), and my favorite intellectual biography is Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). Ralph Barton Perry, In the Spirit of William James (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1938), does a wonderful job of comparing William James to other philosophers of his time.
7: “like being in the dentist’s chair”: WJ to G. Stanley Hall, Houghton.
8: “priggish, sectarian view of science”: WJ to James McKeen Cattell, printed in Science, May 4, 1898.
11: Swedenborg’s life is explored to varying degree in the general books on spiritualism listed in the introduction to this section. In addition, there is an excellent short biography of the Swedish mystic in Eric Dingwall, Some Human Oddities: Studies in the Queer, the Uncanny, and the Fanatical (Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1962), 11-68, which was my primary source for the description of Swedenborg’s fire vision as investigated by Immanuel Kant.
12: “vermin revealing themselves”: Podmore, Mediums of the Nineteenth Century, 241.
14: The Night Side of Nature: Catherine Crowe and the influence of The Night Side of Nature are referenced in every book on the early history of spiritualism. In his book Ghosts, Demons and Henry James: The Turn of the Screw at the Turn of the Century (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), literary scholar Peter G. Beidler calls this work “the most influential single book about ghosts in the second half of the nineteenth century.” A 2000 reprint of Crowe’s book by Wordsworth Editions, Ware, England, contains a thoughtful introduction by Gillian Bennett, editor of Folklore.
16: a couple of farm girls: The life story of the Fox sisters has been dissected almost since they were born, and every book on the history of the supernatural discusses them. R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), on the history of spiritualism in the United States, contains an excellent description of the reaction of the clergy to the Fox sisters. For very different viewpoints, I also relied on Frank Podmore’s cynical look at the Fox family in Mediums of the Nineteenth Century and Arthur Conan Doyle