The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [87]
The Scythia carried them from an unseasonably balmy New England autumn to a frigid North Atlantic winter, where the liner had to mince its way between drifts of ice. When the trio arrived in Liverpool, Mrs. Piper was sick with a miserable cold. They checked into a small hotel, and all three tumbled into a warm, shared bed.
Two days later, Fred and Evie Myers came to meet them. Myers had sent a description of himself: “I am rather tall and stout, with short, grayish beard and probably great coat with fur collar.” Evie was dressed in her favorite dark blue, a matching hat tilted elegantly over her pretty face.
Mrs. Piper met them in her gray dress with the lace collar, her ash-brown hair caught sedately up behind her head. Her daughters hovered near, brushing her skirts with their white pinafores, big-eyed and shy. What Alta remembered years later was the relief embodied in the meeting: “Why Mrs. Piper,” exclaimed Evie Myers. “You are not at all like what I expected. I thought you would wear your hair in frizettes and be dressed in magenta.”
Fred Myers’s reaction was less obvious, masked by the friendliness of his welcome. But he too felt a gust of relief blow through him. As he would write later in an autobiographical essay, the sober little American medium stirred in him a sensation like the rising warmth of a hot-air balloon. He defined the feeling as hope.
THE PROSPECT OF finding a real psychic at last also caught the attention of Oliver Lodge, a physicist considered one of the SPR’s more promising researchers. Lodge was a classically trained scientist with a natural bent toward rebellion.
The son of a prosperous pottery merchant, he had refused his chance at the family business. Born in 1851, young Oliver had spent countless nights during primary school staying up too late, mapping the stars. In adolescence he had turned the family kitchen into a chemistry laboratory. As a young man, he’d built a basement workshop where he constructed a voltage regulator out of his father’s pocket compass, a battery from the pieces of a blown-down weathercock.
In the early 1870s, Lodge had moved to London to study physics at University College and attend lectures at the Royal Institution. For the rest of his life, he would remember, and be troubled by, the sensation of participating in a religious orthodoxy there. The Royal Institution was regarded as a sacred place, where “pure science was enthroned to be worshiped for its own sake. Tyndall was in a manner the officiating priest and Faraday a sort of deity behind the scenes.”
Lodge found himself increasingly uncomfortable. He respected completely the precise laws of physics, the elegant formulas of chemistry. In science there was undeniable truth, great power. But he did not see in it the Truth or an omnipotent Power deserving of worship. As much as he valued science, it was not to him the only system of thought, not a catch-all replacement for all previous belief systems. Unlike so many of his colleagues, Lodge did not view science and spiritual belief as mutually exclusive, incompatible ways to understand reality. Ever the rebel, as his father could have told his colleagues, Lodge rather wished to mend those divisions, even dared to wonder if science could be used to help explain a spiritual reality beyond the material.
His sense of unease, mixed with curiosity, had led Lodge into his early telepathy experiments and into the Society for Psychical Research. The deeper he got, the more intrigued he became.
Rebellion aside, by the late 1880s Lodge had acquired the requisite imperious manner of an established