The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [51]
NORA SIDGWICK WAS fairly impervious to insult. But she could have wished that Simon Newcomb had actually read her analysis of ghost stories before deriding it as child’s play.
Her report had, actually, been so skeptical as to infuriate the British society’s most dedicated spiritualists and believers. Nora had flatly declared that most spooky tales were spun like sugar, thready creations of foggy nights and fevered imaginations, “of such a nature as to justify the contempt with which scientific men generally regard” such reports. Some angry members of the SPR had threatened to quit over her account; as her husband noted with affection, she was completely untroubled by that reaction.
As Nora saw it, she needed to eliminate illusions and hallucinations and then to decipher the meaning of the few credible stories. For instance, almost everyone who claimed to see a ghost described the dead person as fully dressed. Why should that be? Why should there be “ghosts of clothes,” as Nora put it? One might argue that a ghost represented a dead person’s spirit or spiritual energy, but it was difficult to accept that shirts and skirts also passed into an afterlife. Why would their wardrobe return with them? Why—as Fred Myers somewhat sarcastically said—should the theory of metaphysics encompass “meta-trousers and meta-coats”?
On the surface, Nora believed that clothes-wearing ghosts were a point against the stories being true. They made no scientific sense. On the other hand, Nora thought that if she could figure out why so many credible witnesses saw them, then she and her colleagues might move closer to understanding why people saw ghosts at all.
Because the one thing she did believe was that many of the people she talked to did see ghosts—or at least were convinced of the fact. “I can only say that having made every effort—as my paper will, I hope, have shown—to exercise a reasonable skepticism, I yet do not feel equal to the degree of unbelief in human testimony necessary to avoid accepting at least provisionally the conclusion that there are, in a certain sense, haunted houses.” If one accepted that conclusion, she said, then one also needed to ask what, precisely, created that “certain sense” of being haunted.
WILLIAM JAMES WOULD remember that summer night, the one that found him alone, thinking about a dead child, as darkness barely lit by a “clouded moon.”
He stood on a Cambridge street, looking up at a bedroom window in a house he had once occupied. The night was quiet and the window was shuttered, tucked under the eaves of the second floor, shadowed by memory.
His third son, Herman, had been born in that room, in January 1884, a child so irresistibly chubby and cheerful that he’d immediately needed a less serious name. James nicknamed him Humster. And now it was August 1885 and Humster had been dead for more than a month, buried in a wicker cradle basket near his grandfather’s grave, marking yet another month in a terrible year. ,
James’s wife, Alice, had been quarantined with scarlet fever in the early spring. For three months the children—six—year—old Harry, three-year-old Billy, and one-year-old Herman—lived with Alice’s mother in her nearby Boston home. Even after Alice began to recover, even after they washed the bedroom, disinfected it with sulfur fumes, stripped the wallpaper, and repainted the walls, James and his wife worried about allowing the children back home.
But their littlest boy begged to stay, clung to his mother on visits. Finally James and his sister-in-law, Margaret, removed Billy and Harry to New Hampshire and allowed the baby of the family to stay with his mother. It was a decision made with love, a decision that went rapidly wrong. Alice, still fragile, developed whooping cough. Herman caught the infection, which turned rapidly into a vicious