The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [77]
As for Hodgson, James told her, if they were ever able to understand her gifts, ever able to impress their critics with them, he was their best hope. James himself had been doubtful of the tough-minded Australian at first. But he had come round to Gurney’s point of view. Hodgson, he wrote to Mrs. Piper, is “perhaps the most high-minded and truthful man I know.”
LEONORA PIPER BECAME Richard Hodgson’s personal obsession.
He paid the news seller in the Pipers’ neighborhood to limit the family’s access to information, only deliver morning newspapers on days when no sitting was scheduled. He hovered over the house like a bird on a nest, ignoring even the worst weather in order to maintain his watch. The winter of 1888 was one of the worst in history; the blizzards that swept the East Coast in March would kill more than 400 people. Hodgson remained undeterred. When conditions were so dismal that the Pipers’ hilly street was just a glare of ice, he borrowed a sled and coasted back down toward the train station, three-fourths of a mile through the blurring cold.
He made a memorable and unnerving impression on five-year-old Alta Piper when he loudly lectured one visitor who had made the mistake of leaving a wet umbrella in the downstairs umbrella stand.
As she recalled it, he was shouting, “You idiot! Haven’t you more sense than to do a thing like that? Don’t you know you might be accused of being in collusion with Mrs. Piper if you leave your umbrella there?” It could be that she’d concealed a note in the folds, to be plucked by one of the daughters and slipped up to the medium. And even if she hadn’t done that, the possibility would ruin her sitting. “Bring your umbrella up, even if it is wet, and in future mind what you’re about.”
Visitors couldn’t use their real names or provide any personal information to Mrs. Piper. Hodgson sat in a corner, glaring, making sure they didn’t. Since the ASPR couldn’t afford a stenographer, he took notes himself, pushing his bedtime back to laboriously transcribe his scribbles into readable transcripts.
He was doing an admirable job, James said, but “one man can’t do everything, and is well nigh single-handed in the matter of investigation.” James knew he was providing little support. His publisher, Henry Holt, was still berating him about the unfinished psychology book, and there were the usual teaching and research duties at Harvard. He and Alice had a fifth child, a baby daughter named Margaret. There was the apparently never-ending job of remodeling the old house at Chocorua.
James deliberately made time where he could to meet with Hodgson and even visit a few other mediums with the Australian. He was increasingly annoyed by the attitude of his own profession toward such work. The Seybert Commission had squandered its opportunity, and the ASPR researchers hadn’t been much better.
“IT IS A MERCY that Hodgson exists,” Gurney wrote to James in late May. “I cannot help being glad that he is likely to stay a bit longer with you, though he will be very welcome when he returns.” Like James, Gurney was mixing other interests with psychical research. He’d published a book of essays on medicine and philosophy for the pure pleasure of writing out the ideas. He had in mind next to do a book on hypnotism, which he thought offered a fascinating way to understand the human mind as well as to explore questions of mental communication.
He wrote of all those