The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [75]
Even from across the Atlantic, Hodgson had a gift for stripping away the claims of British psychics. Early in 1887, the Sidgwicks discovered a stage psychic who appeared to possess astonishing telepathic gifts. When Sidgwick wrote enthusiastically to Hodgson, though, his former student replied with a warning about some new tricks in the “telepathic communication” business. Thus armed, Henry and Nora discovered that the “acumen of Hodgson had already suspected the code of signals,” which consisted mainly of a confederate systematically sighing, groaning, or puffing out a certain number of breaths—three breaths for clubs, four for diamonds and so on.
The same vigilance had led the Sidgwicks and Gurney to make a dismaying discovery about some of William Barrett’s favorite telepathic study subjects, three daughters of a Presbyterian minister. The girls had been regarded as particularly upright in their family circumstances, and some of Barrett’s favorite experiments had involved them. These were the girls who had so remarkably responded to his mental requests for oranges and hairbrushes.
But in the ten years since Barrett first discovered them, Alice, Mary, and Maud Creery’s abilities had become far less remarkable. “The children regretfully acknowledged that their capacity and confidence were deserting them,” Gurney wrote. Even worse, during card-reading tests, done shortly after the publication of Phantasms, Alice and Mary were caught signaling to each other.
Gurney had been worried about the girls’ later test results. When carefully watched, in situations similar to Barrett’s first work in separated rooms, they were now getting things consistently wrong. He decided to lay a trap, putting them in the same room, giving them an opportunity to cheat rather than admit failure. During an evening at the Sidgwicks, Gurney and both of his hosts observed the girls watching each other’s eyes before “guessing” a card.
When confronted, Alice and Mary tearfully confessed an elaborate strategy of eye movements—upward look for hearts, down for diamonds, to the right for spades, left for clubs, supplemented by different finger positions to indicate the value of the card. They confessed that if they couldn’t see each other, they signaled by noise: coughing, sneezing, loudly yawning, and shuffling their feet. “I am very sorry to have to tell that we have undoubtedly detected the two Creery girls ... in the use of a code of signals to produce spurious ‘thought-transference’ phenomena,” Sidgwick wrote to Barrett. “Or rather two codes.”
The SPR creed was strict on this point: once she was caught cheating, every claim by a particular psychic or sensitive became suspect. Sidgwick pointed out to Barrett that the girls’ detailed code system obviously dated back some time. He planned to strike all the Creery results from their catalogue of evidence. Barrett’s pen fairly flew over the paper in angry defense. In the first experiments, the girls did not act as agent and percipient; he asked them to read his mind or that of another investigator. In those tests, the daughters had no forewarning and no one to communicate with. He doubted that they’d worked out signals for randomly chosen cups and saucers.
“I expect the natural alarm which the Cambridge Expts. has caused in our minds is probably apt to make us unjust in our judgment of the earlier experiments,” he wrote to Sidgwick. “For my own part I am convinced that enough entirely trustworthy experiments exist with the Creery family to make it unwise to expunge the whole of their evidence.”
The later, troubling results might be attributed, Barrett suggested, to what the psychical researchers would come to call the “decline effect,” in which abilities seemed to lessen with time. One of the participants in Gurney’s experiments on taste transference, the middle-aged owner of a Liverpool drapery firm, said that he could tell that his ability to “transmit” was weakening. He’d decided to retire from telepathy work. Almost all the subjects the investigators