The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [63]
None of these spirits were the chain-clanking, blood-spattered, terrifying ghosts of fiction. Sidgwick, who enjoyed telling a good ghost story—once enthralling a roomful of children with his harrowing account of “The Bloodthirsty Bluebells”—often complained that real ghosts were never so much fun as the gore-streaked phantoms that appeared in novels. Even Gurney admitted that reading up on crisis apparitions was “far more likely to provoke sleep in the course of perusal than banish it afterwards.”
The apparitions’ power was in their very repetitiveness, the similarities of “unlooked for detail,” the consistent way the visions appeared and faded, the person after person telling the tale, the documents and the double checks. Everyone had heard the occasional similar tale once or twice. But as he and Myers told their colleagues, it was hard to explain “the effect on the mind of a sudden, large accumulation of direct, well-attested and harmonious detail.”
As Gurney insisted to Lodge, the stories might be monotonous, but they added up. He had no doubt about that. The question was—added up to what?
“IT is NOT from professional mediums—so numerous in the United States—from slate writing ‘materializations’ and kindred performances, that we can look for any enlightenment whatever on the positive side in the course of psychical research.”
So wrote Richard Hodgson, in the summer of 1886, in the summation of his formal report on slate writing, detailing the elegant cons that he had run with S. J. Davey. Hodgson emphasized that he and his partner had merely copied the craft of working mediums. “I may conclude with a warning which I wish to give, especially to our members in America, viz: that nearly all professional mediums are a gang of vulgar tricksters who are more or less in league with one another.”
The members of the American Society of Psychical Research needed no such reminder. Their annual report on mediums—barring the curious anomaly of Leonora Piper—had degenerated into a list of exposures of professional practitioners, seven in Boston alone within one year. “Such a state of things hardly tends to encourage [the] committee in the active pursuit of this class of phenomena,” the report stated.
The American scientists had been dismantling other spiritualist claims as well, such as a popular theory that sensitives gained their power from an unusual ability to detect magnetic signals. Joseph Jastrow of the University of Wisconsin led that investigation. Jastrow began with a simple demonstration. He used a dynamo to charge a large magnet, generating a magnetic field. He then asked self-anointed psychics, sitting in an adjacent room, to tell him when the field was strong and when it was not. The first experiments yielded impressively positive correlations, leading him to wonder if some of the participants could, indeed, “feel” the magnetic pulse.
But gradually, Jastrow became aware of another possibility. He himself could occasionally hear the rumble of the dynamo and a low clicking that sounded with demagnetization. So he surrounded the dynamo and magnet with soundproofing insulation and then repeated and repeated the experiment—exhibiting a dogged, Henry Sidgwick-like patience. In the following 1,950 tests of the sound-muffled magnet on ten mediums, all the results were negative. Or, as Jastrow wrote: “We conclude then that our experiments, as far as they go, fail to reveal any sensibility for a magnetic field.” His conclusion was that these professional mediums had no special talent, making, them at worst liars and cheats, at best victims of a mental illness