The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [82]
The World reporter planned to turn the confession into a book. He was going to call it Death Blow to Spiritualism, and he expected it to sell very well. Kate was overwhelmed by outraged spiritualists demanding that she prove her sister wrong.
She thought she might do that—see if there was a little money in it, find out if there was any chance of salvaging their reputations. “They are hard at work to expose the whole thing, if they can; but they certainly cannot,” Kate said, although she acknowledged that many former friends thought that she and Maggie were now traitors to the cause.
BY THE SPRING OF 1889, with the wretched past year behind them, Sidgwick and Myers were determined to return the momentum to psychical research. They’d organized a volunteer workforce of more than four hundred SPR members to carry out Gurney’s plan for an expanded Census of Hallucinations. They were determined, as Sidgwick put it, that Gurney’s “six years labour should not be lost.” Phantasms of the Living—following James’s prediction—had set off a new swell of interest in their work, a membership stirred by a vision of possibilities beyond the bumbling of the professional medium circuit. The first order of business was to do that larger statistical sample and a more rigorously controlled survey.
They had a straightforward question they planned to ask: “Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?”
Every SPR volunteer was asked to put the census question to at least twenty-five adults. No one from Gurney’s earlier survey could be included. Anyone who claimed a history of seeing visions was automatically eliminated. Volunteers were encouraged to query among groups likely to contain a disparate assortment of people, such as workers at a factory, residents of an apartment complex or office building, guests at a dinner party. They hoped to present their preliminary findings at the International Congress of Experimental Psychology, meeting in Paris that summer. Psychical research wasn’t normally part of the program, but thanks to Richet’s influence, the organizers had included a session for the SPR’s very experimental branch of science.
It was a heady moment, and it reinforced a sense that, despite obstacles and discouragements, they were making progress. Psychical researchers from all over Europe, from Asia, from North and South America, planned to attend. Sidgwick had been invited to speak. So had Myers. And so had William James.
James planned to give some account of what Richard Hodgson was doing with Leonora Piper. Although Hodgson’s year of donated salary was over, Sidgwick and Myers had taken over paying him. Obviously, American scientists had not rallied to the work, but as Myers said, to give it up now would be “deplorably hasty.”
Hodgson was building a detailed picture of work with a credible medium, leaving out nothing, documenting every disastrous sitting, every dubious encounter, and every moment of dumbfounding accuracy. His reports were terse, to the point, and made fascinating reading:
Miss Mary A. T. Sitting: This was a complete failure.
Mr. X. Sitting: This was a complete failure.
Mrs. H. O. Sittings: “My first sitting was not satisfactory, there seemed to be much guessing.” Further, as Mrs. H. O. left the house afterwards, she met some friends going into the house. On her return, the medium gave full names of her relatives with accuracy “but nothing was given that these friends did not know.”
Mr. A. Y. Sittings: “At the first interview several remarkable phenomena occurred. Although I was introduced by another name, my true name was early given and some incidents of my life stated which could not have been known to the medium.”
Mr. E. D. C. Sitting: “The communications I had through Mrs. Piper were of such a nature, I should hardly like to put on paper. I will