The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [30]
Meanwhile, the pretty little girl ghosts tended to gravitate admiringly toward the handsome Gurney. One evening, according to Myers’s notes, a veiled spirit kissed Gurney two or three times and then, apparently feeling this inadequate, paused to “materialize her lips,” peeled back the veil, and delivered another kiss with uncovered lips. Although Gurney reported the kiss as a solid smack, the spiritualists contradicted him, insisting that the affectionate ghost was no more than empty air under her veil. Obviously, there was no way to conduct an objective study while surrounded by enthusiasts. Myers, Sidgwick, and Gurney decided to evaluate the mediums on neutral territory and moved the whole investigation to London.
They met at the home of a new member of their group, Arthur Balfour, a wealthy aristocrat—and future British prime minister—who lived in the elegant neighborhood of Carleton Gardens. Balfour set aside a small room for the spirit cabinet and kept the door locked. When in the room, the mediums were confined by a harness of leather straps and combination locks to the wrought iron surround of a fireplace. They were allowed a drawn curtain to provide the closed “energy” of a cabinet.
The investigators neither sang nor quoted poetry. It had occurred to Sidgwick that those long, tedious hours of singing allowed the girls, especially if they had a confederate, to slip, or break and replace, any ties. Meanwhile, the noisy harmonies would have masked such deception.
So in London, the investigators just waited. And waited some more. It was hard to say whether the mediums or their watchers were more stubborn about it. But by the twelfth night, only Sidgwick and Balfour’s two sisters, Eleanor and Evelyn, were still wearily observing the limp curtains that screened the mediums. At long last, a small white form appeared. Squint as he might, Sidgwick could not convince himself that he was looking at a spirit. “We all thought the movements of the small figure just like those of a girl on her knees,” he wrote Myers. Even worse, Eleanor Balfour had asked to search the mediums. They refused to allow her near them. The whole Newcastle production was clearly just that, a production.
Curiously, Sidgwick was not depressed. As he once told Myers, he approached spirit phenomena much as he did religion. “I believe there is something in it; don’t know what.” He was determined to see past the “obvious humbug” to what might actually exist. This time, if nothing else, the investigators had proved themselves reassuringly capable of ferreting out fraud. And he had become acquainted with Nora Balfour.
“FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN the sexes is, you know, after all a devilish difficult thing,” Sidgwick wrote to a friend that summer. “How are you to prevent mistakes on one side or the other?”
He feared nothing more, at that moment, than the humiliating mistake of unrequited love. Sidgwick’s attraction to Nora Balfour had continued to grow. Every time he met her, he liked her more. But how did one approach a woman so perfectly contained, so elegantly composed, so concealing in her nature?
Nora Balfour turned thirty in 1875. She was a slight woman, straight in posture, crisp in manner of dress. Her hair was a pale ash brown, pulled severely back from a thin, fine-boned face. Her eyes were ice-water silver, and her voice as cool as a winter’s day.
She rarely laughed, never joked, loathed small talk. But she was amazingly, fearlessly, openly intelligent. One of her favorite pastimes was doing mathematical calculations with her sister’s husband, already a noted physicist, John Strutt, Lord Rayleigh.
Rayleigh had married Evelyn Balfour in 1871, the same year he’d published his