The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [38]
Evie Myers had no reason to doubt herself. A talented portrait photographer, she was known for her images of the well connected and powerful. The National Gallery would eventually acquire much of her portfolio, including a rather dreamy portrait of Nora Sidgwick’s brother, Arthur, during his political rise to prime minister and another of Robert Browning, glaring at the camera with the intensity of a trapped hawk. Yet for all her accomplishments, the artist clung to her new husband as if she were his needy child.
“You can live without me,” she wrote in one overwrought letter, “but I cannot live without you.” She sensed in Myers an emotional distance that troubled her. Did he compare her, she wondered, to women in his life who were more intellectual and independent? “Fred my king and my love,” she continued, “I will try & be worthy of you but do not want me to be like your dear mother or Mrs. Sidgwick. I can’t.”
He reassured her, but he didn’t tell her the truth. Of course he didn’t want her to be like his mother or Nora Sidgwick. He wanted her to be like Annie Marshall. Long after they were married, after their three children were born, Myers would still look at his beautiful wife and want her to be Annie Marshall, apparently forgetting that it was so much easier for the dead to keep their perfection.
IN 1881, after five years of conducting tests and compiling results in his spare time, William Barrett published his second report on the science of thought transference.
His results, summarized in the esteemed journal Nature, detailed test after test, done with a carefully chosen set of people, identified through their willing-game success or other evidence of mind-reading abilities.
Among them were three young girls, daughters of a Presbyterian minister, who seemed startlingly responsive to Barrett’s mental instructions. Barrett assured readers that he took constant measures to prevent cheating in the experiments. For one series, he settled the girls in the family parlor and then closed himself up in their father’s study. Once seated at the heavy oak desk, Barrett began slowly listing household objects on a sheet of paper.
The only instructions he gave the girls were to bring him the object that entered their minds. Only after they’d brought one object to the study—and he’d either accepted it or told the bringer to try again—would another command be put to paper. “Having fastened the doors. I wrote down the following articles, one by one, with the results stated: hairbrush, correctly brought; wine glass, correctly brought; orange, correctly brought; toasting-fork, wrong on first attempt, right on second; apple, correctly brought; smoothing-iron, correctly brought; tumbler, correctly brought; cup, correctly brought; saucer, failure.”
Lucky guesses were certainly possible, but, Barrett thought, not to this degree of consistency. Further, there could be no accusations of secret nudge-and-wink techniques, as with the willing game, “for there was no contact, and in some trials (as in the foregoing) the percipient was out of sight and hearing.” It was possible that the girls had cheated, but it was difficult to see exactly how. Barrett’s requests had sometimes been impromptu, and when they weren’t, he hadn’t discussed them.
What he saw was not a solution to the mystery he’d raised earlier but rather more mystery, “a large residuum of facts wholly unaccounted for.” There was a notable difference in this paper’s conclusion, though. Barrett asked no help from the traditional scientific community; he no longer expected it. The ability to conduct such an investigation, he wrote, seemed to lie “outside the scope of any existing scientific society.”
THE BRITISH SOCIETY for Psychical Research formally convened for the first time on February 20, 1882, representing a branch