The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [49]
The journal’s editors had printed Newcomb’s text with an admiring editorial note concerning the astronomers “acute observation” of psychical research. James characterized him instead as a “critic without substance.” The one thing everyone could agree on was that this was not a good beginning for the pro-science approach to psychical research.
“THE WHOLE THING is a fraud,” Hodgson wrote to his friend Jimmy Hackett in March 1885, after four months hunting down his quarry, who had now reputedly left India under an assumed name. “I seal and register this letter because part of Madame Blavatsky’s performance consists in getting hold of letters, by bribing or otherwise, steaming them open, getting knowledge of contents and reclosing.” She also amended letters once they’d been opened. Hodgson admitted to a kind of reluctant admiration for her complete nerve: “She is a tolerable imitator of other people’s handwriting, will stick at nothing, and is one of those remarkable clever unprincipled women one reads about but seldom meets.”
His report to the Sidgwicks, also sent sealed and registered, provided the incriminating details at length. Hodgson interviewed witnesses to Blavatsky’s séances. He’d compared letters from the mahatmas with examples of her handwriting. He’d hired handwriting experts to analyze opened letters. He had asked to inspect the shrine and its miraculous cabinet, and when refused the first time, had turned up time and time again, so tirelessly that he’d finally simply worn her guardians out.
Once in, Hodgson had patted and pulled the shrine’s ornate walls until he’d discovered that some of the drawers were double-sided, opening into a chamber behind the gold facade, which turned out to be Madame. Blavatsky’s bedroom. He’d then managed to obtain a confession from her servants that they’d passed letters through the panels into the carved drawers on the other side.
Hodgson had scarcely left the building before it mysteriously burned to the ground, turning its secrets into ashes. He’d no doubt she’d ordered the destruction of evidence. Hodgson sent all the letters he’d collected to Nora Sidgwick, who reanalyzed the writing and was also impressed by the quality of the forgeries, not to mention the quantity.
The SPR’s report on Madame Blavatsky minced no words: “For our own part, we regard her as neither the mouthpiece of hidden seers nor as a mere vulgar adventuress; we think that she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished and interesting imposters in history.”
In its way, Hodgson’s report gave the British SPR a perfect retort to those who characterized them as gullible dupes. It was hard to imagine even the most accredited scientist doing a better job of demolishing a medium’s reputation.
WHAT WAS THE WORST, the most maddening, and the most annoying aspect of being a psychical researcher? It was “this perpetual association in the eyes of the world with ‘intellectual whoredom,”’ Edmund Gurney wrote to William James in the spring of 1885.
Gurney was only repeating a phrase used by the ever-waspish John Tyndall, who was still making it his business to discredit psychical research whenever the opportunity appeared. That attitude, that inflexible hostility, was “the real rub—the thing that occasionally makes the work so trying & galling.” Gurney was tired of Tyndall and his ilk assuming that he and the other SPR members enjoyed listening to stories of Himalayan gods who mailed letters to paying clients, that they thrilled to chasing down “humbug” and con artists, that somehow “this is what one likes.... But I did not mean to give vent to cursing & swearing when I began this letter.”
He did mean to pass along good news. Nora Sidgwick had finished her detailed, coolheaded analysis of ghost stories, almost four hundred in total. And he and Myers had begun sifting through the hundreds of responses they’d gotten through advertising for personal accounts of visions and dreams.
As Gurney told James, “Our plan