The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [32]
No one doubted Wallace’s sincerity, but his colleagues began to perceive in him an urge to provoke. There was no doubt that provocation rang like a bell in his recent declaration that the facts of spiritual phenomena “are proved, quite as well as any facts are proved in other sciences.”
The problem with Crookes took a different shape—a feminine one. Sidgwick and his friends were coming to suspect that the chemist was measurably more objective about male mediums than about their female counterparts.
Fred Myers was the first to perceive the risk. He’d gone to London to investigate a very pretty new medium, a blond American named Anna Eva Fay, who performed in Davenport Brothers style with a showy cabinet, ghost hands, and mysterious music. Crookes had immediately warned Myers off, saying that he had priority claim on such investigations.
“The lion will not be robbed of his cub,” Myers wrote to Sidgwick, adding, “nor the cub her lion.” Fay visibly appreciated Crookes’s protection, as well she might. The resulting experiments seemed unusually accommodating. The medium asked to work in a darkened room. Crookes, in a reversal of his earlier insistence on light with D. D. Home, agreed to that request. He also quickly announced the tests successful.
There was no doubt, Myers wrote to Sidgwick, that the newcomer was beautiful and charming. He himself found her delightful. He just wasn’t sure she was trustworthy. Myers persuaded Fay to visit Balfour’s home, for just a few little experiments. Actually, he had one in mind—simple immobilization. They tied the medium’s hands to widely separated metal rings, fixed to a board, and then waited for the “spirits” to help her out. The observers waited until it became obvious that nothing was going to happen. When Myers went home that night, he pulled out his journal and drew a fat black line through Fay’s name. Equally irritated, Sidgwick proposed that they begin avoiding professional spiritualists.
It appeared, he said, that paid mediums brought nothing to the enterprise but “persistent and singular frustration.” They could only hope that a professional scientist, like Mr. Crookes, would be as wary. But the Sidgwick group was reaching a new awareness—that in their smug sense of superior intelligence and capabilities, trained scientists did not always see what was obvious to others.
EVEN THE FAMED spiritualist medium D. D. Home now warned that the profession was rife with fraud, to the point that he felt a need to provide some exposure. In particular, Home decried the increasing use of “dark séances,” conducted in a gloom so dense that no one could follow a medium’s actions, a darkness justified by the claim that spirits preferred the shadows. “Light should be the demand of every spiritualist,” wrote Home in a book he completed in 1876. “By no other [tests] are scientific inquirers to be convinced. Where there is darkness there is the possibility of imposture—and the certainty of suspicion.”
Home’s tuberculosis symptoms were creeping back, sending him to the south of France in hopes that a softer climate might prove healing. His days of calling up spirits and floating off the floor were over. Ever a man with a mission, Home had decided on his own last act—to expose and help remove fraud from his profession.
In Lights and Shadows of Spiritualism, written with the help of his longtime lawyer, Home took a fierce stand against not only dark seances but the wide range of conjuring tricks used by his fellow mediums. He went on to explain some of them in detail, including the way to fake “full-form materialization,” the type favored by the unfortunate Newcastle mediums. According to Home, a medium only need conceal fine muslin fabric—the filmy stuff produced in France was a favorite—in her underwear. She could count on the fact that no gentleman would invade a woman’s privacy by searching there. After retiring into her cabinet, the medium could wiggle out of any knots, strip, lay her dark clothes on pillows arranged on her resting couch, and flit out into the room draped in her floating