The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [36]
The medium in question was one more American, styling himself as the new D. D. Home. As such, Henry Slade cultivated an ethereal look. A London newspaper described him as possessing a “dreamy mystical face, regular features, eyes luminous with expression, a rather sad smile and a certain melancholy grace of manner.” Like Home, he could also make tables levitate and ghostly hands float through the air.
But his claim to fame was slate writing, described as a talent for inducing “spirits” to write directly onto slates, without any need for a planchettelike apparatus. Slade used small rectangular slates, or chalkboards, much like the kind that children use for lessons in schools. At its most basic, slate writing involved holding a blank slate and chalk pencil under a table. The medium and the visitor would wait until they could hear the scratchy sounds of writing, the pencil apparently propelled by a mysterious power. When the slate was brought up for examination, messages would be scrawled across the formerly pristine surface.
Lankester wasted no time putting this nonsense to bed. He met Slade, sat down at the appointed table, watched only for the writing materials to be placed beneath it, and then yanked the slate back out, not bothering to wait for any sounds of scribbling. As Lankester wrote to the Times, the slate in his hand was already fully inscribed with a written message. In other words, he explained to the newspaper’s readers, the medium had switched the first blank slate for one already containing a “spirit” message.
Lankester wasn’t content with merely embarrassing the visiting performer ; he insisted that Slade be prosecuted as a con artist. In the resulting October 1876 trial, Lankester also insisted that science dominate the proceedings, that the judge make a decision based only on “inferences to be drawn from the known course of nature.”
Despite a few eloquent defenders—including Alfred Russel Wallace—Slade was convicted and sentenced to hard labor. To Lankester’s disgust, however, the sentence was overturned on a technicality, and Slade fled to the Continent. Nevertheless, the scientist thought he’d achieved his goal to make it clear that researchers would no longer tolerate this endless series of murky and mystical claims. He hoped that the subject would be dropped, preferably forever, and that scientific discussions would no longer be “degraded by talk of spiritualism.”
IN THE YEAR 1876, the year of Slade’s trial, the year that introduced the player piano and the National Baseball League, the year the telephone was invented in America and the internal combustion engine in Germany, the year William James was named an assistant professor of physiology at Harvard, the year of Henry and Nora Sidgwick’s marriage, Fred Myers’s attention, heart and soul, belonged to a woman he could not have.
For Myers the winds of change blew dark, blew stormy, for 1876 was also the year that the woman whom Myers loved committed suicide.
He was riven by the belief that he should have known, should have prevented it somehow. The elusive Annie Marshall, with her unforgettable “sea-sapphire” eyes, had been desperately unhappy for years. Her life with husband Walter Marshall, Myers’s cousin, had descended into despair along the spiral of his mental illness. The extended family had tried to support the couple. Myers himself had gone to Switzerland, in 1875, to find some new doctors for Walter, to comfort his wife, and—to their mutual dismay—to fall in love.
Myers filled his diary with poetry about her beauty, her sadness and the way his “soul sprang to meet her ...”
After Walter’s behavior became so violent that he was institutionalized, Myers’s mother offered Annie a home, and Myers wrote her brisk, friendly letters. His instincts told him that the last thing Annie needed, at the moment, was a suitor. Resolved to hide his true feelings, he confided to his diary that he preferred “irredeemable woe to the slightest shadow of wrong.