The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [76]
The SPR investigators met to discuss this new challenge. Their subjects usually followed two different paths. The best ones quit after a few years, saying that it wasn’t the same, complaining that whatever gifts they’d once had seemed to wear away. Others, reluctant to lose their clientele and reputation, developed cover strategies. One could even charitably make that case for the Fox sisters. But Sidgwick wasn’t inclined to be charitable, not about the Fox family, and not in general. Fraud was the bane of every good result the SPR reported; it weakened every argument they put forth. A full retraction of all Creery experiments was ruthlessly published in the SPR journal.
The real problem, as Sidgwick noted in his diary, was not the lack of untarnished results. They still had plenty of those. He was more than familiar with “the transient glow of scientific enthusiasm.” But the society lacked the sustaining warmth of a good explanation, a workable, testable theory for how that mental transfer occurred. That such a theory remained so elusive was troubling in the extreme. “If only I could form the least conception of the modus transferendi!”
IN BOSTON, the ever-organized Hodgson arrived at his ASPR office at 9:30 a.m. six days a week. The first mail always brought a dozen letters or more. He promptly began reading and making notes. As instructed, at 10:30 a.m., Hodgson’s clerk brought him a sheaf of typewritten letters dictated the previous day for him to read and sign. He then dictated answers to the newly received letters. She mailed the signed letters. The two of them dealt with correspondence and other office business until 1:00 p.m., when she took her remaining work to be completed at home.
He then dashed over to the Tavern Club next door for a quick snack, usually hot tea and a dish of dates. He liked to schedule meetings and interviews in the early afternoon, go back to the office, and scribble more notes until the second mail delivery came. He’d take another quick dinner break, but usually he hadn’t finished making notes on those letters till late, didn’t get home till 11:00 p.m. or so, and even so brought a few more letters with him to finish. If he had time, he saved a little energy to write to friends and read a little philosophy or poetry for pleasure.
He didn’t complain to James or to the Sidgwick group back in England. Only in private, to his old friend, did he acknowledge what his life was becoming: “In one sense, I am sacrificing myself on the altar of psychical research,” he wrote to Jimmy Hackett.
At least he’d finally allowed himself one day off a week. He did not do psychical research work on Sundays, as he once had, but tried to relax—reading a biography of Shelley, going sledding with friends in the winter, swimming and hiking in the summer, but often, after a week of psychical research, he liked a solitary walk as much as anything. No wonder he had no woman in his life.
“I am perfectly sick of seeing so many people and shouldn’t visit more than two or three if I were here as a private individual. But it is all for psychical research. Great must be my reward in heaven!”
The detectives following Leonora and William Piper had provided Hodgson with a startling report. After a month of surveillance, they had discovered nothing, absolutely nothing.
Neither Mrs. Piper nor her husband had been heard asking questions about sitters; they’d had no mysterious meetings, made no unexpected journeys, checked out no past issues of newspapers from the library, and visited no cemeteries—all common practices of mediums gathering information about potential sitters. Further, Mrs. Piper had no detectives in her own employ, busily supporting Phinuit’s insights and explanations.
To Hodgson’s surprise, Mrs. Piper did not find this clearance to be good news. She found it embarrassing and insulting. As she angrily told him, and then William James, respectable people did not find that detectives had trailed them around town.