The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [73]
Hodgson sat silent. But when he returned to his rooms, a small apartment he’d rented on Charles Street, he jotted down some notes. “My cousin Fred excelled any other person I knew at the game of leap-frog. He took very long flying jumps, and whenever he did so crowds of school-mates gathered round to watch him. He injured his spine in a gymnasium in Melbourne, Australia, in 1871 and was carried to a hospital, where he lingered for a fortnight, with occasional spasmodic convulsions, in one of which he died. I was not present at either accident or death.”
There was more. Phinuit told him of quarrels he’d had while traveling in Europe, of another lost friend, a slim, dark-haired woman—“she was much closer to you than any other person”—who had died in Australia, some years after Hodgson had moved to England. The woman wanted to be remembered to Hodgson’s sister, who had been a close friend. And she had her own message for Hodgson. She wanted to make sure he kept a book of poems that he had given her and that her family had returned to him after her death.
Again Hodgson said nothing, although, in fact, the book sat on a shelf in his apartment, and he did plan to keep it. That night he contemplated a new set of problems. It seemed impossible to reconcile the extremes of Mrs. Piper’s trance—the Phinuit that she must have created, the information that seemed drawn from the air. The conclusion was obvious. She must be spying on him—and most probably on her other visitors as well. Hodgson decided to hire a private detective firm. He would have both Mrs. Piper and her husband followed for the next month. Just in case, he would tell no one of that decision, not even William James, and definitely not Leonora Piper.
ALMOST FORTY YEARS had passed since the bright-faced little Fox sisters first startled the country by demonstrating a new way of communicating with the dead. In the more sophisticated 1880s—the decade of the electric motor and the discovery of radio waves—Kate and Maggie Fox were long past their heyday as darlings of the spiritualist movement.
Kate lived in New York City now, after many years in England, where she had married a sympathetic barrister named H. D. Jencken and even befriended Daniel Dunglas Home. Now widowed, she had a small apartment on the Upper East Side, where she conducted slate-writing seances. In the 1850s, Maggie had become the common-law wife of a naval officer and explorer named Elisha Kent Kane, famed for his expeditions into the Arctic and his discovery of a channel that would eventually lead other explorers to the North Pole. Kane had spent five years trying unsuccessfully to wean her from spiritualism before his death in 1857. All these years after his death, she still called herself Margaret Fox Kane. Like her sister, she had worked as a medium throughout her life and still gave sittings in her Manhattan apartment.
Both women now struggled to hold an audience. Their spirit-rapping technique had become an antiquated relic. Years of increasingly mediocre demonstrations had cost them their following. Bitter, ignored, and impoverished, the sisters comforted themselves with alcohol. And both suffered for it, in health and reputation. Acquaintances described Maggie as “a dissipated looking wreck.” The few sitters who attended Kate’s slate writing evenings reported she was so drunk that she kept dropping the slates.
Nevertheless, a new scientific commission had asked to test Maggie’s powers, and she had agreed. Funded by a $60,000 bequest to the University of Pennsylvania from Philadelphia industrialist Henry Seybert, the commission’s stated purpose was to investigate the most credible supernatural claims and try to discover what lay behind