The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [68]
Gurney’s other name for crisis apparitions was “hallucinations of the sane.” Almost everyone interviewed described these events as one time only. Almost everyone was uncomfortable or unhappy with the fact that they’d seen a dead woman while driving in the street, heard a deceased friend’s voice. Most of those interviewed insisted that they were not superstitious, loathed spiritualism, and were baffled by the experience.
The question that needed to be answered, then, was how often did rational people, in the course of their everyday lives, find themselves caught up in such a hallucination? Clearly some kind of survey was needed, a census of hallucinations, which was exactly what Gurney proposed. He had done some preliminary sampling, randomly mailing out questionnaires and receiving 5,705 answers to the question, “Since January 1, 1874, have you—when in good health, free from anxiety and completely awake—had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a human being, or of hearing a voice or sound which suggested a human presence, when no one was there? Yes or no?”
Twenty-three persons during those twelve years had reported a “visual hallucination.” This might seem small, Gurney said, but based on the adult population of Britain and the number of deaths, he calculated the random chance of such a vision was perhaps a trillion to one. That made 23 positive responses out of 5,705 people seem a rather startling preliminary result. Emphasis on preliminary; Gurney thought only a much larger census, with perhaps ten times as many people, would eliminate statistical doubt.
The survey, inadequate though it was, also yielded another interesting correlation. All of the visual hallucinations occurred within twelve hours of the death of the person seen. If Gurney also analyzed the 702 crisis apparitions recounted in Phantasms of the Living, more than half of them, 401 to be exact, appeared near the moment of death, and another 25 occurred toward the end of a fatal illness.
Questions and obstacles jostled for room in his thoughts. There were cases when a group of people reported seeing a crisis apparition. Did a dying person really have the energy to send out multiple messages? And if haunted houses were ever proved to exist, it would be hard, not to say impossible, to argue that a momentary flash of connection could account for a ghostly presence seen by many people, over and over again, for many years. For that, one would have to prove psychometry, the idea that the traumatic energy of a death could permeate an object or a place indefinitely. The intrinsic weirdness of the work seemed an obstacle in itself.
“The peculiarity of the subject cannot be gainsaid and must be boldly faced,” Gurney wrote. “For aught I can tell, the hundreds of instances may have to be made thousands. If the phenomena cannot be commanded at will, the stricter must be the search for them; if they are exceptionally transient and elusive, the greater is the importance of strong contemporary evidence.” But even without that, he could feel himself slipping into certainty—that peculiarity was simply characteristic of the way that the dead said their good-byes.
PHANTASMS OF THE LIVING’S 1886 publication placed it in the midst of another tumultuous, hectic, forward-thinking year. In Paris, Louis Pasteur founded his medical institute; in New York, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated; in Tokyo, the Imperial University was completed. A sense of perpetual notion, of a life “chopped up by multifarious things” weighed upon William James.
He and Alice had decided to buy a retreat in Chocorua, New Hampshire, “a bit of land on a lovely lake in New Hampshire, with a mountain 3500 feet behind it, and 90 acres of land, oaks, pines, etc., brook, water, house.” It had cost a hefty $750, but he thought the investment in contentedness worth the price. James needed a getaway place; he was constantly stressed, headachy,