The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [26]
The message seemed clear enough. Investigating supernatural events was off limits to scientists, unless the findings proved fraud. Those who chose to ignore that rule—unspoken but strictly enforced—would find themselves off limits as well.
IT WAS A December evening in 1871. Myers and Sidgwick were shivering their way across the Cambridge campus. The air was as clear and chill as ice water. They walked under a sky netted with stars, those tiny silver points of light, so distant, so unreachable.
Myers felt that they glittered with mockery. He had moved no closer to understanding the secrets held so closely in the reaches of space. He had not resolved his doubts about life and death, achieved no means, it seemed, of finding answers. He had continued to delve into theological writings. Both he and Sidgwick had read Crookes’s articles and the response to them. As far as Myers could see, traditional science and religion seemed interested only in proving themselves, not in resolving confusion, much less the questions of a lone British classics scholar. He felt completely on his own.
As he wrote years later, he kept looking back at those starry bits of light in the dark, looking up, looking out, and seeing not just the stars but a vastness that, in that moment, spoke of all that he wondered about the limits of physical reality. If there was an existence beyond the obvious, the mortal, shouldn’t somebody be seriously, systematically trying to learn more about it? Shouldn’t he be that somebody—he and Sidgwick, and perhaps a few others, like their mutual friend and fellow Cambridge scholar Edmund Gurney? The risks that such an effort would carry were apparent. One had only to observe the reaction to William Crookes’s experiments to see how career-damaging an exploration into the unexplained might be.
Yet despite these misgivings, Myers turned to Sidgwick and asked whether the older man thought it was possible that by investigating “observable phenomena”—ghosts, spirits, whatever they might find—some valid knowledge could be uncovered.
Sidgwick, swathed in his dark coat and long scarf, was watching the stars, too. They seemed steady out there, timeless. He’d been thinking about what Crookes had done, thinking about the implications. As they stood wrapped in darkness, he made a decision. Yes, he told Myers, he did think a serious study of spirits might offer “some last grounds of hope” in reaching beyond the material earth and into unexplored worlds beyond.
Both men knew that whatever study was going to be done, the mainstream research community was neither willing nor prepared to take on this subject. So they would do it themselves.
Myers exhaled. He wasn’t sure if it was the sound of relief or anxiety. He wasn’t in the least sure what they would find. But he knew they were committed to looking. Sidgwick, once decided, was a man who always followed through. Myers hoped to measure up. “From that night onward,” Myers wrote, “I resolved to pursue this quest, if it might be, at his side.”
He was optimistic about their chances of success. But then, as he’ admitted to himself, he had always been the dreamer in the group.
3
LIGHTS AND SHADOWS
FUELED BY AN angry sense of purpose, William Crookes deliberately expanded his work in the supernatural realm. He methodically catalogued the phenomena he’d now observed: raps, levitations of people and objects, lights and luminous hands, and the very rare appearance of phantoms. According to Crookes’s journal, he’d seen the latter only with D. D. Home, who could sometimes apparently persuade the shadows themselves to coalesce into human shapes.
Crookes emphasized that sittings with Home were rarely consistent. Over a period of hours, the medium alternated between producing startling effects and producing nothing at all. Crookes hypothesized that a greater power generated the good results,