The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [37]
But with Walter locked away, Annie fell apart. She seemed to blame herself, Myers’s mother wrote him. The morning after she sent that worried letter, fretting over her houseguest’s sudden silent withdrawal, Mrs. Myers could not find Annie Marshall in the house. She ran outside to look, eventually reaching a nearby lake, and to her horror found Annie’s lacy shawl crumpled by the water’s edge. Alongside the shawl was a bloody pair of scissors.
The body was found floating in the deep middle of the lake. When they pulled Annie out of the water, they realized that she had tried to slash her throat first, but the wound was too shallow to kill. In the despairing dark of early morning, she had then walked, bleeding, into the shallows, and on, until the lake closed over her head.
The news, Myers wrote, “made dim with woe the reeling world.” He was wrenched with feelings of guilt and inadequacy. He began to believe that he must talk with Annie again—for both their sakes.
The following year, Sidgwick insisted that Myers go to Paris to explore the medium scene there. Frankly, he mostly wanted to put his friend back in motion; Myers had remained miserable, uncharacteristically antisocial and lethargic. Certainly, Myers complained about the summer 1877 trip to France. Life seemed discouraging to him after Annie Marshall’s death. And, along with his friends, he was discouraged by their psychical results—or lack of results—thus far. But on his duty trip to France, for the first time, Myers caught the dark scent of the occult in the air.
He hadn’t expected it, and it came without flourish. In one visit to a tidy home where a pleasant middle-aged French woman specialized in table talking, the knocks in the wood had suddenly spelled out a name—“Annie.”
The startled Myers had demanded that the medium tell him what relationship this Annie had to him.
“Cousin,” came the reply.
It was, Myers wrote to Sidgwick, perhaps a case of thought reading, the kind of unexpected insight that William Barrett had detailed in his experiments.
A few days later Myers met with a fat old medium in a filthy Paris bystreet near the buttressed walls of Notre Dame Cathedral. She wore a too-tight dress with its lace-edged skirts flapping around her ankles. She sat on a small wooden stool and leaned against a stone wall, holding a tray of wooden alphabet tiles.
The medium claimed that when sitters touched the right letters on the tray, the spirits rapped in response. As he confessed, Myers had to fight to keep a straight face. He decided just to have some fun with it.
“I despaired of getting a high spirit thro’ this low woman & amused myself by laying traps—i.e. thinking of the right words but pausing & trembling at the wrong letters.”
To his surprise, though, he found the letters that the medium picked out seemed to follow his thoughts rather than his actions. Slowly they stumbled through an attempt at a name: ANNE ELISE MARSEH PAR MARESHELL.
Standing in the grubby alley, Myers thought he felt the oddest little chill down his back, unnerving as it was invigorating.
Even so, even as Myers welcomed that shiver of hope, he was aware it might be time to let Annie go in favor of living companionship. He was surrounded by domesticity. Not only was Sidgwick happily married, but in the spring of 1877, Gurney had also given up bachelorhood.
There were hints that Gurney’s pretty wife, Kate Sibley, had married for money. But the couple seemed happy enough together. Kate’s quick chatter and light laugh made a bright counter to Gurney’s quiet nature and occasional dark moods. She’d been keeping him unusually busy too, redecorating their home in London’s Montpelier Square, coaxing him out to the theater and to dinner parties.
Myers found himself more alone than usual, less satisfied with pursuing an affair with a ghost. And there was one woman he did, find charming, a dark-haired society beauty named Eveleen Tennant. She was looking for an older man to take care of her; she loved his enthusiasm, his intelligence, and his open-minded approach to the world. “With you,