The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [24]
WILLIAM CROOKES was a thirty-nine-year-old Londoner, a big man with narrow blue eyes in a narrow, high-cheekboned face, a dark beard, and a splendidly imperious manner. A designer of scientific equipment and a gifted chemist, Crookes had recently discovered a new element, which he named thallium. A soft, malleable metal, thallium was also a neurotoxin so potent that later generations of scientists would speculate that Crookes became involved in spirit research only because of work-related brain damage.
As Crookes told it, though, he hadn’t found Wallace’s arguments particularly convincing. He thought he might be able to help straighten out the errant naturalist. Crookes’s initial plan was to scrutinize a few so-called mediums and finish the subject off.
One of the first mediums that Crookes visited was a thin, intense, small woman who held sittings in her neat little parlor. She seemed simple enough in technique, using one of the more popular devices of the time for spirit communication, a planchette.
A planchette was a heart-shaped piece of wood, mounted on small wheels so that it rolled. At its narrow end it held a pencil, point down so that it just brushed a piece of paper placed underneath. To operate a planchette, users put a hand on the wood, concentrated, and allowed “spirit energy” to flow through their fingers. As the planchette rolled, the pencil scrawled its way across the paper, sometimes tracing meaningless scribbles and sometimes what appeared to be written messages.
The medium, Crookes observed, shut her eyes, placed her fingers on a planchette, and waited for it to slide. As the chemist told the story, he was prepared to be entertained.
Could this invisible spirit, Crookes asked, see everything in the room, including things the psychic could not?
“Yes,” wrote the planchette.
Crookes stepped backward. He had noticed the Times tossed upon a small occasional table.
“Can you see to read this newspaper?”
“Yes,” was the reply of the planchette.
“ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘if you can see that, write the word which is now covered by my finger and I will believe you.”’
Standing with his back to the newspaper, he reached behind him, and pressed the tip of his right forefinger down on the newsprint.
The planchette hesitated unden the woman’s fingers.
“Slowly and with great difficulty the word ‘however’ was written. I turned round and saw that the word ‘however’ was covered by the tip of my finger.”
Crookes wasn’t the kind of man to be coy about his findings. In the winter of 1871 he published his planchette story—and his conclusion that it suggested some inexplicable power—in the Quarterly Journal of Science, a publication at which he served as editor. A few months later, Crookes published a more detailed and even more provocative report, the results of a series of tests he’d conducted on Daniel Dunglas Home.
The elegant Home still maintained his position as the professional medium most annoying to the scientific community. He’d risen above set-backs and controversies: Browning’s vitriolic portrait of him as Mr. Sludge, a very public lawsuit by a patron who wanted her money back, accusations that he was merely a talented magician, a proposal by an anthropologist that Home was actually a werewolf “with the power of acting on the minds of sensitive spectators.” The publicity always seemed to turn to his favor. His reputation flourished. In 1869, a trio of witnesses reported that Home had levitated off the floor of a second-floor room in a downtown London home, floated out from a window into the night, and drifted back in through the window of another room, his shadow flickering on the walls before his body slipped through the opening.
Home’s numerous critics had several years earlier asked Michael Faraday to debunk the great medium, as Faraday had debunked talking tables. The irascible physicist had agreed, but demanded that Home first sign a statement saying that even if Faraday