The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [53]
Voices were ringing in her head. She could hear only one of them clearly. She gathered herself up, went directly to a table, scribbled a note, and handed it to an elderly gentleman waiting his turn with the psychic. The gentleman, a Cambridge judge, said it was a message from his dead son, “the most remarkable I ever received.” She went back several more times to the psychic’s parlor, but she found she was becoming the attraction.
Strangers were now coming to the Pipers’ home and asking Leonora to go into a trance for them. Alarmed, she retreated. She didn’t want to be a medium. She was expecting a second child. She wanted to be a mother and a respectable wife. Still, she had to wonder if this was some God-given gift. Leonora Piper prayed over it. She couldn’t quite bring herself to turn away all the callers. In the late summer of 1885, she let a friend talk her into sitting with a Boston widow.
The widow was Eliza Gibbens, the mother-in-law of William James.
As James recalled it, some two months after Herman’s death his mother-in-law came to visit, fizzing with excitement and disbelief. The young Beacon Hill medium had told her about family members, both names and facts, “the knowledge of which on her part was incomprehensible without supernormal powers.” It was so impossible that Mrs. Gibbens determined to investigate further. She sent her daughter Margaret to visit Mrs. Piper the following day with a tougher test, a letter in a sealed envelope.
Don’t open it, Margaret said to Mrs. Piper, just tell me something about the person who wrote it.
Reading sealed letters was an easy trick for mediums of the time. They could conceal an alcohol-soaked sponge in a hand or sleeve and surreptitiously soak the paper with it, rendering it transparent—and decipherable—until the alcohol evaporated. They had only to briefly distract the visitor until they could return the envelope and reveal its contents. With a good distraction, most mediums also showed a flair for opening and resealing envelope flaps in time to avoid detection.
But Mrs. Piper kept things simple that day. She held the letter in front of her. And then she slowly described the writer—where she lived, why she had moved across the Atlantic. Even if she had somehow been able to sneak a look at the letter, Margaret had deliberately chosen from a correspondence written only in Italian, which Mrs. Piper definitely did not know. Margaret Gibbens and her mother decided to tell Alice about their find. She was still so thin and pale after the whooping cough and Herman’s death; like William, she had found it difficult to let the little boy go. Perhaps this would intrigue her, cheer her up a little, perhaps she could ask this odd medium about her lost son.
“I remember playing the esprit fort on that occasion before my feminine relatives,” James wrote later, “and seeking to explain by simple considerations the marvelous character of the facts which they brought back.” He considered himself something of an expert on psychic performances. He and the Reverend Minot Savage, of the ASPR, had been visiting the more notable mediums of Boston, meticulously attending seance after seance, and learning lessons in what both men considered to be brazen fraud. “This did not, however, prevent me from going myself, a few days later, in company with my wife, to get a direct personal impression.”
Mrs. Piper met them in the front parlor of her in-laws’ home, offering the couple seats in a pair of stiff wingback chairs. They had not given her their names, and to James’s relief, his mother-in-law and sister-in-law had earlier refused to disclose their identities.
He’d emphasized to Alice that she must follow strict psychical research rules. They wouldn’t mention any connection with the earlier visits. They wouldn’t provide any information about their family at all. They wouldn’t ask leading questions. They wouldn