The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [54]
Leonora Piper settled herself into a fatly stuffed armchair, leaning back into a nest of pillows. They began talking about the weather. It had been an unusually gentle autumn. Late-afternoon sunlight glazed the room. Her eyes began to drift shut. Her head turned sideways against the pillows; a faint tracing of goose bumps rose on her skin. She would always describe the sensation of slipping into a trance as like descending into a dense and chilly fog.
Her voice seemed to deepen a little. Mrs. Piper began repeating the names she had given to Alice’s mother and sister. And then she began fumbling for other names, mumbling them, getting them not quite right. “The names came with difficulty and were only gradually made perfect. My wife’s father’s name of Gibbens was pronounced first as Niblin, then Giblin,” before the right name was fumbled out. It was as if she couldn’t pronounce the words at first, or couldn’t quite hear them right.
As Mrs. Piper added details to the names, James, as he later wrote a friend, became increasingly uneasy. It could be that the young psychic knew everyone in his wife’s family on sight. She could be incredibly lucky in guessing about the domestic life of strangers and their relatives. Or it could be that most improbable, scientifically impossible conclusion—that this woman “was possessed of supernormal powers.”
Before coming out of her trance, Mrs. Piper did ask about a dead child. But that too could be an easy guess. Many couples had lost children to illness. He watched the medium’s entranced face, her closed eyes, and the slight frown between them. It was a boy, she said, a small one. Herrin? Herrin ? No, she would finally conclude the boy’s name sounded more like Herman.
“PEOPLE WHO FLY into rages are such a bore,” Nora Sidgwick remarked to her husband in the fall of 1885. “I really think the spiritualists had better go.”
The British psychical research society maintained a policy of allowing all interested parties to join. The member list included some prominent mediums and some of their more devout spiritualist followers. These members professed to agree with the plan for skeptical research. But it now appeared that they hadn’t meant the word skepticism to be taken quite so literally.
Many spiritualists remained angry over the perceived negative findings in Nora’s analysis of ghost stories. Some quit in outrage over the expose of Madame Blavatsky. The mediums in the organization were infuriated by Henry Sidgwick’s distaste for professional practices. Most of them would no longer even speak to him. Sidgwick had learned from reading the spiritualist newspaper Light, that its editors were conducting an angry crusade against an Encyclopaedia Britannica decision to have Nora write the article on spiritualism. “And we had fondly thought they would be pleased!” he noted in his diary. They had assumed that spiritualists would admire dedicated researchers taking an interest in the occult, sorting out the legitimate phenomena from the fraudulent. Instead, it seemed that the churches of spiritualism were not so different from the churches of Christianity. To his perception, neither could tolerate evidence contradicting what they wished to believe.
It wasn’t just Nora who was antagonizing the membership. Richard Hodgson was back in England, cheerfully adding fuel to this already smoldering sense of resentment. This time, Hodgson wasn’t investigating a specific medium but a specific practice. He had decided to take apart the practice of slate writing.
Hodgson liked the direct approach. For this occasion, he’d persuaded a young conjurer to begin holding slate-writing seances, following the principles employed by some of London’s more acclaimed mediums. The conjurer in question, S. J. Davey, was a frail man, slight and bookish. Plagued by ill health, he had learned to wile away his resting hours by practicing magic tricks. An SPR member who had visited a number