The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [33]
For the first time, Crookes was genuinely unhappy with D. D. Home. His wife wrote to the ailing medium, saying she feared his revelations could do further harm to her husband’s reputation: “Of course, it is looked upon as a complete exposure of the whole subject by the biggest imposter of them all,” she wrote, adding that Home’s book was “the best weapon” their enemies could acquire. She and her husband had reason to feel defensive by then; Crookes had become involved with another female medium, moved into another “lion and cub” relationship, this time with one of London’s most artful psychic performers. His reports on Florence Cook were so smitten that the near universal verdict was that she had become his mistress.
Barely in her twenties, Cook was strikingly pretty, with big dark eyes, thick, curly hair, and a curvy body that she liked to emphasize with closely fitted black dresses. Of course, those black garments and matching black boots made her hard to see in the dark, which was where she liked to hold her seances, comfortably ensconced behind the silken curtains of her cabinet. What made Cook noteworthy was that while she was tied up in her cabinet, her “spirit guide” would wander into the room.
Almost all working mediums claimed to need a guide, a spirit to help them navigate the mysterious realms of the other world. Trance mediums called their guides “controls,” giving their trances a rather eerie suggestion of possession. When a medium was in a trance, the control would speak through her or him, summon other spirits, and impart advice to those gathered around. Cook claimed to be able to coax her guide right into the room, fully materialized as a graceful young girl named Katie King, a creature of flowing white robes and charming manners.
Katie King could flirt, eat (cakes), drink (wine), and tuck her plump little hands into William Crookes’s arm. The scientist confessed himself enchanted. He’d taken pictures of the lovely spirit, but “Photography is as inadequate to depict the perfect beauty of Katie’s face, as words are powerless to depict the charm of her manner.”
But Florrie Cook didn’t move in the elevated circles where D. D. Home held his exclusive seances. Until Crookes gave her special status, Cook had been just another pretty street medium. She moved in a circle where violent competition was the rule, and her resentful competitors were quick to bring her back down to their level. Stories spread that Cook was having an affair with Crookes, that he was more lover than scientific observer. One mother-daughter pair of jealous mediums forged letters to confirm the illicit relationship.
Crookes denied the charges vigorously. But he was increasingly aware that his explanations were dismissed and his denials brushed away. It was to D. D. Home that he then confided his sense of betrayal, writing a letter that overflowed with hurt pride and genuine hurt as well. As Crookes told Home, “were it not for the regard we bear to you, I would cut the spiritual connection, and never read, speak or think of the subject again.” He had decided not to hunt for another Home, at least not any time soon. Instead, Crookes determined that it was time for him to return to the safer—and definitely saner—world of mainstream science.
EVEN AS CROOKES WITHDREW, though, another conventional scientist, the first physicist to really embrace the idea of occult studies, made an unexpected foray into supernatural research.
William Fletcher Barrett had been educated under John Tyndall, that outspoken opponent of all things spiritual. Barrett had worked in Tyndall’s laboratory for four years before taking a position as professor of physics at Dublin’s Royal College of Science.
A big, tousle-haired bear of a man with a dramatic flair for telling a tale, Barrett may have lacked his mentor’s dazzling genius, but he was a thorough and conscientious researcher who had assigned himself the task of sifting through the electromagnetic properties of iron alloys. Barrett had little interest in the supernatural, although he had earlier