The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [78]
It was barely a month later, on Saturday, June 23, 1888, that Gurney drove down to the resort town of Brighton, where he had been investigating a haunted house.
According to newspaper reports, he checked into the Royal Albion Hotel, a white wedding cake of a building directly opposite the bustling Brighton Pier with its carnival of penny mechanical games. He dined in the hotel coffee room and went to bed at about 10:00 p.m.
By two o’clock Sunday afternoon, he had not emerged from his room and had not responded to repeated knocking by both the maid and hotel manageress. They tried the door. It was locked from the inside. They called for the police to break the lock. The officers found Gurney dead in the rumpled bed, lying on his left side. His right hand held a small waterproof bag, a sponge bag used to hold toiletries, over his face. His mouth and nostrils were covered by it. A tiny bottle, containing a few drops of clear fluid, lay on the floor by the bed.
He was forty-one years old.
“ALAS! ALAS!”
On that Sunday, black and late on the day of discovery, Henry Sidgwick was sleepless with grief. He’d retreated into his study, lighting a single lamp, wrapping himself in the small pool of gold light. He sat by himself, writing in his diary, a private confessional of misery.
Fred Myers and his brother had brought “the terrible news” that afternoon. Arthur Myers, a physician, had gone to Brighton to identify the body, after police had found a letter addressed to him in Gurney’s pocket. After informing Gurney’s wife in London, he’d hurried to tell his brother, Fred, who’d collapsed into a numbed silence. The Myers brothers went together to tell the Sidgwicks. Fred Myers was still pale with shock and grief. He’d begged his weary brother to accompany him; he just didn’t think he could carry the news by himself.
“I can write no more journal this month,” Sidgwick wrote, alone in his quiet corner. “Fred Myers feels it terribly, but we too—Nora and I—do not know how we shall do without him.”
James still had that warm note of invitation from Gurney in his office. He could hardly believe the news. “It seems one of Death’s stupidest strokes,” he wrote to his brother, Henry. As a colleague in psychical research, James thought Gurney, if anyone, could have carried the field forward, helped it to achieve respect. “I know of no one whose life-task was begun on a more far-reaching scale or from whom one expected with greater certainty richer fruit in the ripeness of time.”
More, though, William James mourned a lost friend: “To me it will be a cruel loss, for he recognized me more than anyone, and in all my thoughts of returning to England, he was the Englishman from whom I awaited the most nourishing communion.”
The Brighton inquest concluded that the death had been an unfortunate accident—an inadvertent mishap resulting from Gurney’s regular use of chloroform to help him sleep. Sidgwick wanted to believe it.
Arthur Myers testified that he had known Gurney for nineteen years, both as a friend and as a physician. He’d treated Gurney for that reccurring neuralgic pain around his head and face. Gurney had been candid about his need to self-medicate. Dr. Myers had given him a number of prescriptions—morphine for sleep, sometimes chloral and belladonna for pain relief.
He knew that Gurney had also used the popular remedy chloroform to relieve neuralgia, traveling with it in case of an unexpected attack. Arthur Myers told the court that he was sure “Mr. Gurney had taken accidentally a larger dose than was his custom and had suffocated.”
Sidgwick sought comfort in that certainty. “One more line,” he wrote on June 29, returning compulsively