The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [83]
Dr. C. W F. Sittings: “At my third sitting, ‘Phinuit’ said: ‘William Pabodie sends his love, says he has suffered remorse of conscience and if he had to live his life over again, he would not do what he did.’ ”
The doctor had driven from Rhode Island for the sitting. William Pabodie was a friend of his who had committed suicide almost twenty years earlier.
Mr. J. R. R. Sitting: He handed the medium the collar of a dog he had once owned, asking “Phinuit” if there were dogs where he was. “Thousands of them,” he said, then suddenly he cried, “Here is your dog coming, a long way off. You call him.
“I gave my usual whistle.
“Here he comes.... Rover, Rover, no G-rover, Grover, that’s the name.”
The dog was once called Rover, but was changed to Grover in honor of the 1884 election of President Grover Cleveland.
And then there was the sitting with William’s wife, Alice, and his younger brother, Robertson James, on the morning of March 6, 1889. The brothers’ aunt Kate—their mother’s sister—had been ill, and Alice asked about her health.
“She is poorly,” Phinuit replied shortly. Alice confessed to being disappointed by the baldness of the answer. She was just planning to ask again when the medium suddenly threw back her head and said, in a startled way, “Why Aunt Kate’s here. All around me I hear voices saying, ‘Aunt Kate has come.’ ”
When pressed, Phinuit told them that Kate Walsh had died very early that morning. He just wasn’t sure about the precise time, maybe around 2:00 a.m. or so.
The sitting made Bob James so nervous that he went directly from Mrs. Piper’s house to Hodgson’s office in downtown Boston. As he’d hoped, he found his brother William there, deep in conversation. On hearing the account, Hodgson immediately wrote a statement of what had happened, noting date and time, and adding, “This is written before any dispatch has been received informing of the death.” He insisted that it be signed by all three of them.
The meeting broke up shortly, and James returned home. A few hours later, he received a telegram from his cousin. His aunt Kate had died early that morning, a few minutes after midnight.
It was one more mystery for William James to take to the meeting in Paris.
“I AM QUITE thick now with Sidgwick, whom I like amazingly, odd as he is,” James wrote to his wife from the Congress of Experimental Psychology.
Sidgwick had charmed James with his unself-conscious sweetness. James had enjoyed watching the fifty-year-old British philosopher keep up his exercise program, jogging down the Paris streets with coattails flapping behind him. He’d admired Sidgwick’s shy effort to overcome his stutter: “It was pitiful to hear him try this a.m. to express himself in French, with his bad choice of words, his bad accent and his fearful stammer. Myers did quite well, and I not so badly.”
All three of them, and Richet as well, argued to expand the Census of Hallucinations into an international program, resulting, James said, in a “somewhat stormy” session. The “orthodox” scientists resisted the idea strenuously, even ones that they’d expected some support from, such as Pierre Janet, Richet’s colleague in hypnotism studies. Janet explained that he didn’t want to see his research associated with ghouls and ghosts and goblins. In the end, James and his friends mostly prevailed. The Swiss, the Germans, the Italians, and—unexpectedly—the Brazilians had agreed to conduct surveys in their countries as well. James was now, somewhat to his dismay, the official coordinator for the U.S. part of the census. A report was due at the next meeting of the congress, in 1892.
As James wrote to his wife, he’d found the session much more energizing than the usual research conference: “The whole thing is amusing and exciting to the last degree—so