The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [2]
The couple tracked down George Whitney, the mill manager, who was heading up the search team, and he—frustrated and desperate—called in the diver. The diver was a slim, wiry Irishman named Brian Sullivan. He thought they were all crazy. Sullivan worked for the Boston Tow-Boat Company, and he’d been diving for bodies for years. Bodies were sometimes hard to find, that’s all. That was reality. Dreams weren’t. Whitney told him that he didn’t believe in such dreams either. They were both rational men, he assured Sullivan; they both agreed that ghosts did not really creep into dreams.
But Whitney knew people in the village who were less “rational.” There were those who did believe in visiting spirits. And he told Sullivan, “As long as we have started to do all we could to recover the body, we ought to at least give this woman a chance.”
Sullivan continued arguing. He wanted to send to Boston for blasting powder and set off an explosion that would shake the girl’s body loose from the lake bottom, if it was there. He told Whitney that he was willing to take orders—but he did not want make a fool of himself, splashing in and out of the lake while Mrs. Titus spouted mystical nonsense and pointed at assorted dream spots. Whitney conceded the point. He had no intention of looking ridiculous either. They would give her one chance only.
Nellie Titus walked on the bridge again and stood where the horse had first stopped. She shook her head. No, she said, not quite right. She walked a few more feet and leaned forward a little, staring down into the lake. “Here,” she said. And she told the diver that the girl was wedged upside down in the wooden structure of the bridge, but that one foot was sticking up, still in its rubber overshoe.
Sullivan put on his dive suit and dropped a guideline, tied to a sinker, down into the water. The lake was so dark that once underwater, he could see nothing. He slid down ten feet into the black of the water, feeling his way down the bridge structure. Something bumped his face. He fumbled to feel it. It was a foot. His hand slid over the rubber boot and down a leg, and he began to pull. He tied the guideline round the body and scrambled up to give the news.
“She’s here,” he shouted as his head, monsterlike in its glass bubble, broke the surface.
Whitney shouted back, “I know.”
Even before Sullivan freed the body, the girl’s bonnet had tugged loose, floating upward until it hung just below the surface, like a sodden flower.
Later, at the inn tavern in Lebanon, Sullivan told his story to a fascinated crowd. Wasn’t he afraid, someone asked, when he was down there in the pitch-black with the girl’s body bumping his face? No, he answered. “It is my business to recover bodies in the water, and I am not afraid of them.” But he feared something else—or rather, someone else. He was unnerved by how precisely Nellie Titus had described the location of the body. They wouldn’t have found it without her, he said; he couldn’t even see the body when he was floating next to it. What power did she have that a dead girl walked in her dreams? “In this instance, I was afraid of the woman on the bridge.”
The woman on the bridge drew another audience, one that saw much more than a fearful oddity. Her story was investigated and then published by a surprisingly elite group of scientists and philosophers. They viewed it as evidence, a data point in an ambitious—and professionally risky