The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [84]
“A CURIOUS CHAPTER might be written on the pseudo-confessions of mediums,” Charles Richet wrote late in his life, ruminating on the downward trajectory of the Fox sisters.
As a class, mediums were notoriously unstable, he noted. Their abilities, if genuine, were unreliable and erratic. Even the good ones tended to eventually suffer from the decline effect. The weirdness of their profession often produced mental problems, if those didn’t already exist. The whole realm of psychic powers impressed Richet as transient, an ephemeral grasp on something in the air, which came and went, one of the problems with studying them. The Fox sisters, late in life, seemed to encapsulate every quality that made mediums so difficult.
In November 1889, Maggie Fox Kane confessed again, retracting her earlier confession to the New York World. This time, she insisted to the New York Press that her statements about faking the spirit sounds had been “false in every particular.” She had made up the story for money, she said. She had done it for “promises of wealth and happiness in return for an attack on Spiritualism,” and she was sorry to say that she’d reaped neither of those rewards. She wanted readers to know that she had not been paid to grant this later interview; she hoped merely to undo the damage she had done to her own reputation, to her sisters, and to the credibility of her profession: “Would to God that I could undo the injustice I did the cause of Spiritualism.”
Richet suspected that the truth about the Fox sisters lay somewhere in that welter of claims and denials. It was possible that when young and relatively unspoiled, the Fox girls had possessed some mediumistic talents. It was possible that whatever small ability they possessed had failed long ago, lost in the circuslike promotion that surrounded them.
It would have demanded extraordinary courage, not to mention upright character, for these mediums in particular to confess to a decline effect, to announce that their much-heralded abilities had vanished long ago. Richet didn’t find Kate and Maggie particularly upright; he doubted they had ever been notably talented. They were, however, a cautionary tale to mediums and investigators alike: “That the Fox sisters, after the enormous developments of spiritualism that followed on their early demonstrations, should have tricked is possible or probable, not to say certain.”
IT WAS SOME weeks after the death of James’s aunt that Mrs. Piper suddenly grabbed Hodgson’s right hand. Her grip was painfully tight; Phinuit seemed to have suddenly disappeared. The voice speaking was that of a woman, terrified, speaking in a desperate whisper.
“Help me, help me,” she said. “I’m so cold.” She tugged at him with her right hand, pulled until he grasped her left hand.
“That hand’s dead—dead—this one’s alive.” Her left hand seemed icy cold to him; her right had been hot and clammy.
“Who are you?” he asked
“Kate Walsh,” she replied
It was so different from the other Piper sittings, Hodgson told James. It was intimate and, somehow, terrifying. “It was the most strikingly personal thing I have seen.” James followed up by writing to his cousin Elizabeth, daughter of his late aunt Kate Walsh, and asking if any of it made sense to her.
Yes and no, Elizabeth wrote back. Her mother had suffered a partial paralysis as she lay dying. One of her hands had been “dead,” but Mrs. Piper had the side wrong. It had been her right side that was paralyzed, not her left. It might be that the medium was describing a spirit still feeling the effects of a last illness, but the sensations had come through somewhat garbled. “Queer business,” James wrote to Hodgson, eerie and uncomfortable in its effect.
And yet, as they both knew, mediums were unreliable creatures. The Fox sisters had reminded them of that, and in spades. Perhaps he and Hodgson had become too close to Mrs. Piper, too