The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [55]
As they set it up, Hodgson would schedule performances, inviting sitters to witness the amazing talents of his friend. Davey would do the rest. As a team, Hodgson and Davey held more than twenty memorable “séances” in which Davey caused messages to appear on the surface of locked slates, the answers given with amazing precision. When Hodgson wrote, “What is the specific gravity of platinum?” the responding message was a scientifically accurate snap: “We don’t know the specific gravity.”
Hodgson and Davey were explicit from the beginning. All of this was accomplished through stage magic. The “platinum” message had involved a rather neat exchange of locked slates while Hodgson was inspecting a table from below. There were no spirits in these seances, merely fast hands, hidden devices, distraction—and a wish by those participating to believe in magic. Following hard after the SPR’s earlier exposes, this struck the spiritualists as a gratuitous attack. They did indeed fly into the kind of accusatory rage that Nora Sidgwick found so tiresome.
They also refused to accept that the Hodgson-managed seances weren’t real events. Davey was too good; he must be a renegade medium, maliciously seeking to discredit his own profession. Even Alfred Russel Wallace was drawn into the fight, taking the side of the spiritualists and making it obvious how far he had drifted from the Darwinian mainstream for the moment. “Unless all can be explained,” Wallace declared in late 1885, “many of us will be confirmed in our belief that Mr. Davey was really a medium as well as a conjurer, and that in imputing all his performances to ‘trick’ he [Davey] was deceiving the Society and the public.”
ACROSS THAT INTRACTABLE ATLANTIC, the psychical researchers suffered through no such dramas, but then, their best work was being done in careful secrecy. Afraid that he was somehow being gulled, James had asked the Reverend Minot Savage, his partner in other medium investigations, to take his own look at Leonora Piper.
Savage paid an anonymous visit to Mrs. Piper, telling her only that he’d heard of her trances and wished to observe one. At Savage’s first sitting, Mrs. Piper talked about his father, who had died years before in Maine. “He calls you Judson,” she said. Judson was Savage’s middle name. Only his father and his half-brother, also dead, had ever called him that.
Savage wrote up a detailed, somewhat incredulous description of the sitting: “She went on to say, ‘Here is somebody else besides your father. It is your brother, no, your half-brother, and he says his name is John.”’ Savage noted that his half-brother’s name was John, which was not an uncommon name and could easily have been guessed. That wasn’t the part that shocked him. It was what came next, the way Mrs. Piper went on to describe with painful accuracy, partly in pantomime and partly by speech, the method of his half-brother’s death. She finishing by saying, “When he was dying, how he did want to see his mother.”
Savage’s half-brother had never lived in Boston. He had died in Michigan, two years earlier, “in precisely the way the medium had described the facts.” John was a “mother’s boy,” Savage said; he’d died calling out to her. Aside from the details, the way Mrs. Piper talked in trance, as if these dead people were somehow sitting beside her, was unnerving, to say the least. Still, both Savage and James had learned that trusting any medium was a risky business. Perhaps Mrs. Piper had some kind of detective bureau at her service; perhaps she’d somehow discovered both men’s extended family history. Savage decided to give her a test that even the best spy network would find hard to beat, a complicated, multilayered kind of experiment.
To start, Savage told his daughter to visit Mrs. Piper, using an assumed name. His daughter