The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [60]
IF ONE DOUBTED the demand for physical proof, one needed only to watch the latest craze in spiritualism, “the talking board” phenomenon, sweep across the United States, catching everyone from workingmen to children in its fascination.
“Planchette is simply nowhere,” declared the New York Tribune, compared to this newest tool for talking with the dead.
Rectangles of shellacked and polished wood, talking boards had the words yes and no printed in the upper right and left corners. The entire alphabet was inscribed across the center. In the lower corners were the words Good Eve (for “good evening”) and Good Bye. The board was simple to use, relying on a planchettelike device that could slide across the surface, its point indicating answers. Users would sit on either side of the board, their fingers resting on the pointer, and watch for it to move, pointing to “yes” or “no” or using the letters to spell out more complicated sentences.
“I know of whole communities that are wild over the ‘talking board,’ as some of them call it,” one man told the Tribune reporter, and the eerie stories they told about its powers contained “things that seem to pass all human comprehension or explanation.”
Talking boards worked faster than spirit raps or table tiltings. They were easier to read, by far, than the scribbles of a pencil-wielding planchette. And they were so popular that they were soon being mass-marketed by companies including Sears Roebuck, who determined that they needed a more commercial name. By the late 1880s, the boards would be rechristened Ouija boards (or “yes-yes” boards, from the French oui and the German ja.)
The boards’ success, their apparent proof of spirit communication, also drove their popularity: “One gentleman of my acquaintance told me that he got a communication about a title to some property from his dead brother, which was of great value to him,” an excited user told the Tribune. “Attempts are made to verify statements that are made about living persons, and in some instances they have succeeded so well as to make the inquirers still more awe-stricken.”
GURNEY WAS so LOST in his search, so consumed by his determination to make others see what lay before him, that he had almost forgotten about his pretty wife and sweet young daughter.
Kate Gurney cared nothing for the metaphysical debates and theological questions in which her husband had buried himself alive. She liked parties, gossip, and lively conversation. Edmund seemed such fun when she married him; now he had become so very serious and, really, a bore. He encouraged her, of course, to enjoy society without him. If there was any advantage to her situation, it was that her handsome husband’s chronic inattention and habitual absence gained her a bit of sympathy. Even Myers had heard the sad plight of Kate Gurney discussed in elegant drawing rooms.
Phantasms of the Living sprawled through the Gurneys’ home. Papers overflowed Edmund’s study, spilling out onto furniture and the floor. It lay in packets, in piles, in stacks and drifts, so that the elegant Mayfair dwelling seemed at times submerged in Phantasms, just as Edmund’s life had become submerged. When the physicist Oliver Lodge, one of the SPR’s telepathy researchers, came to visit, he found himself rather alarmed at the state of the Gurneys’ paper-strewn home, the disorienting sensation of swimming through a vast ocean of documents. He wondered if Phantasms of the Living was worth its cost in time and reputation: “Attention to such gruesome tales seemed to me a futile occupation for a cultivated man.”
Surrounded by his