The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [8]
They were almost expecting the telegram when it arrived. The strip of paper, the terse words, telling them that he had died in Lisbon that night, about the time they’d heard those creaking footsteps making their patient way back to his room.
The supernatural account, written out by both servant and mistress, was one of hundreds collected in The Night Side of Nature, which turned its author from a little-known writer of children’s stories to a celebrity advocate for the occult.
Ghost stories spilled from every page of The Night Side: Widowers saw their dead wives walking in the street. Murderers stepped back screaming from the bony brush of their victims’ fingers. A father dreamed three times that his son died in a wagon accident, dismissed it as superstition, and changed his mind only on the day that the child fell from a friend’s wagon and was crushed by the wheels. A family rented a house so haunted by mysterious voices that their servants left them; their child woke in the night, demanding to know who kept crying.
The author, Catherine Crowe, gathered her tales from friends, from newspaper accounts, other books, letters, and diary excerpts. Crowe had lived in Germany for several years before returning to her native Scotland. She took her book’s title from a German term for night at its darkest—on the side of Earth farthest from the sun. Nature’s night side in the hours after midnight, when tree branches curve like claws and shadows warp on the wind. But the German term that readers best remembered from her book was poltergeist. She was credited for introducing the word into the English language.
The Night Side stayed in print for more than fifty years, convincing thousands of readers that life remained, at its borders, a place of mystery, inexplicable and often terrifying. But Crowe didn’t intend her book as merely an anthology of ghost stories. She intended it as a manifesto. “I avow, that in writing this book, I have a higher aim than merely to afford amusement,” Crowe insisted in her introduction. “I wish to engage the attention of my readers, because I am satisfied that the opinions I am about to advocate, seriously entertained, would produce very beneficial results.”
She wanted to prod scientists into conducting serious investigations of the apparitions she described. She didn’t deny that ghost stories were often built on rumor and exaggeration and outright falsehood, but she urged the research community to look beyond, to see the rare flicker of something genuinely supernatural. “If I could only induce a few capable persons, instead of laughing at these things, to look at them, my object would be attained, and I should consider my time well spent.”
Crowe flung that hope, that challenge, against a solid wall of scientific hostility. In general, nineteenth-century scientists felt a personal responsibility not to investigate claims of the supernatural but to debunk them out of hand. One British physician had published a book, An Essay towards a Theory of Apparitions, which held that ghost sightings floated out of mentally defective brains and that the best cure was “the care of an intelligent physician.” Another proposed that ghosts resulted when the brain was excited by an overactive circulatory system and a wild influx of blood into the nervous system. Others simply discussed the human tendency to tumble into hallucinations. None allowed the idea that the ghost seers in question had actually seen something.
No wonder, then, that Crowe felt compelled to say that the stories she collected came not from asylums but from respectable citizens relating a moment of shock in otherwise ordinary lives. No wonder her tone was so defensive as she asked for scientific contempt to be replaced with humility. No wonder her demands were so modest: “I assert that whether these manifestations are from heaven or hell, or whether they exist at all, is a question we have a right to ask.”
IN THE VERY