The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [58]
The reclusive psychic Home had finally lost his long battle with tuberculosis. At fifty-three years of age, he had died in southern France on June 21, 1886. His Russian wife buried him in a Paris cemetery under a tombstone inscribed simply, cryptically, “To another discerning of Spirits.”
Home’s career still haunted the field of spiritualism. As Podmore would write, most professional mediums were “imposters of a sufficiently common place type,” easy to catch in fraud and chicanery. The Davenport Brothers, Anna Eva Fay, Henry Slade, Florence Cook—to name a few on a very long list—all had been exposed with very little effort.
No one could say that of Home. There were whispers of exposures at private sittings, but never a public unmasking. His cheats, if that is what they had been, went undetected. Even Robert Browning, who had so deftly skewered Home as “Mr. Sludge,” confessed to Myers and Podmore that he had never been able to catch Home in fraud. Browning only wished, as so many other critics had done, that he had been so lucky. As Podmore wrote, “commonplace is the last epithet that could be justly applied to Daniel Dunglas Home.”
Like many before them, Myers and Podmore could not agree on how to define D. D. Home. Myers was inclined to consider Home a rare talent, a medium with unusual gifts for tapping into occult forces. Podmore was inclined to consider him an unusually deft conjurer, one of the greatest hypnotists of his time, or some combination of the two.
If Home could induce mass hallucinations, that might explain some of his more improbable effects—floating out a third-floor window into the London night, summoning shadows into shapes, elongating his body so that he appeared to stretch as thinly as a bit of India rubber. “Probably some of the more marvelous feats described at Home’s seances can be analyzed into sensory deceptions of this nature,” Podmore would eventually conclude.
Hypnosis would not serve to explain the carefully catalogued experiments that William Crookes had conducted. Podmore could only speculate that in such cases Home cheated, and that scientific procedures were insufficient to detect such a sophisticated manipulator at work. But that left the depressing conclusion that one unusually deft medium could easily outwit some of the best scientists of the day. “In Home and his doings all the problems of spiritualism are posed in their acutest form,” Podmore would write ruefully. “With the marvels wrought through him or by him the main defenses of Spiritualism must stand or fall.”
Meanwhile, Phantasms of the Living was nearing completion. The authors and their friends debated every aspect of it, including the title, which seemed adequate rather than engaging. Still, they couldn’t decide on a better one, and “phantasm,” meaning illusion or hallucination, seemed an objective way to describe what Gurney, Myers, and Podmore had collected: reports of phantoms and ghostly voices, premonitions and warning dreams, flickers of connection between the living and the dead, and the implications of what lay behind them.
It was the implications that worried Henry Sidgwick, or at least, how to present those controversial ideas. The plan had been for Myers and Gurney to share equal billing as lead authors. But Sidgwick began to think that a poor decision. True, Myers was the more graceful, more literary writer. But Gurney wrote with more simplicity and thus greater clarity. More important, Sidgwick admired Gurney’s methodical approach; he was less easily carried away by an idea than was Myers. Given the hostility simmering around them—from scientists and now spiritualists—Sidgwick suspected that one strong voice rather than “two heads on one neck” would best serve the project. He wanted Gurney’s level head to represent the project. The sensitive Myers, however, would need careful handling.
Sidgwick set the stage over dinner. For the discussion after the repast, he made sure that a soothing fire warmed his library, which he stocked with plenty of good brandy. As the snifters