The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [52]
Herman died in his mother’s bed on July 9. Two days later, they buried him under a small pine tree in the family plot in Cambridge Cemetery. William and Alice wrapped a little white flannel blanket around their son’s casket, and when it was lowered into the ground, they surrounded it with flowers and leaves. James confessed later to one of his aunts that he’d always looked down on such rituals. “But there is usefully a human need embodied in any old human custom and we both felt this.” They left their son cradled in wicker, smothered in branches and leaves, and “there he lies.”
And, yet, on this night in late August, James walked back to their old rental house just to stand there in the hazy moonlight. He mourned the brief flutter of his son’s existence. On the following day, James wrote to a cousin, “It must be now that he is reserved for some still better chance,” some promise beyond life on Earth.
He had no intention of trying to prove a very personal wish; no plan to consult a medium on behalf of his son. That he ended up doing both, William James would always consider a strange and remarkable coincidence.
LEONORA EVELINA PIPER was twenty-six years old in 1885. The wife of a Boston shopkeeper, she was slightly chubby, neatly dressed, her light brown hair caught carefully up into middle-class respectability. The Pipers were middle-class respectable. Leonora, her husband William, and their one-year-old daughter, Alta, lived with his parents in a tidy house in the Beacon Hill neighborhood.
But the neighbors whispered that young Mrs. Piper wasn’t quite as ordinary as all that. She could tell people things about their lives that she couldn’t have known. Sometimes she told them family secrets that they didn’t know themselves. The rumor was that she could hear the voices of the dead.
According to Leonora’s parents, the first hint of any such ability occurred during her childhood in Nashua, New Hampshire. At the age of eight, while playing in the garden, Leonora felt a sudden, sharp blow on her right ear and heard a sudden sibilant hiss. The child stood shocked as the snakelike sound slowly resolved itself into an S, then the name Sara, then a sentence.
Screaming, she ran into the house, calling for her mother, holding the side of her head. At first her mother could get no sense from the hysterical girl. Finally, the child stammered, “Oh, I don’t know! Something hit me on the ear and Aunt Sara said she wasn’t dead but with you still.” She was so upset that she scared her mother, who wrote up the incident, the day, and the time in her diary that night. Several days later, they received a letter from the aunt’s husband, telling them that she had died, on the day, about the time that hissing voice had spoken into the child’s ear.
Young Leonora (then Symonds) and her family wanted nothing to do with any of it—the whispering voices or the whispering neighbors. There were children celebrated for psychic gifts; the notorious Fox sisters came to mind. The Symonds family had no intention of seeing Leonora become such a freak. They put the eerie little moment behind them and raised their daughter as an upright member of the Methodist Church. She married William Piper when she was twenty-two, and if it hadn’t been for a troubling illness, she might have left it at that, a moment of otherworldly fright in a country garden.
From her sixteenth year, Leonora had walked with a slight limp, the result of an ice-sledding accident. Another child’s sled had crashed into her on a snowy hill, damaging a knee and, more seriously, causing internal abdominal bleeding. In the years after, she’d been conscious of a dull ache across her midsection, and now, after the birth of her first child, the pain grew sharper.
Frustrated by the inability of doctors to diagnose the cause, she visited a clairvoyant, an elderly blind man who claimed that he could contact spirits to aid in healing. When the psychic touched