The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [89]
Lodge—and Fred Myers, who had come to help with experiments—began by testing her trance state. How deep was it? Could it be penetrated, broken by sensations? The men pricked her with pins, burned her arm with a match, held ammonia under her nose. Nothing seemed to disturb the sleeplike daze. They also learned quickly, as James and Hodgson had before them, that a credible trance didn’t guarantee good results from the improbable Dr. Phinuit.
Some days Phinuit had nothing to say. His rumbling voice did no more than fish for answers, ask questions of the sitters, repeat what they had told him as if it were an incredible discovery. Anyone who sat with Mrs. Piper only once, and arrived on one of Phinuit’s bad days, was likely to leave disenchanted, Lodge said. But as the investigators discovered, the transcendental eeriness of the good days could make one forget that.
Lodge persuaded a physician friend to visit. The doctor informed him, resentfully, that he would come for friendship but would do nothing helpful, not say one word to this so-called medium. He would give the same response to anything she said—correct or incorrect. He planned to do nothing but grunt.
Phinuit told the doctor that he had four children, one a little girl, aged thirteen, a “little daisy” who had beautiful dark eyes, with a curious little mark or scar over one eye, and who unfortunately was lame. The man also had a boy who was not so sweet and who should be sent to school for his own good. The doctor himself drank hot water when he had indigestion. Oh, and Phinuit said the doctor had recently had a bad experience, when he “nearly slipped once out on the water.”
The doctor stalked out in silence. It was only later that he told Lodge that almost every fact was correct. He and his wife had been discussing whether the boy should go to school. The doctor had been in a dangerous yachting accident that summer. His daughter, Daisy, was dark-eyed, with a small scar over her left eye from a tumble as a baby. But she was not lame.
The doctor returned for a second visit. Lodge introduced him, simply, as the man who was here yesterday.
Oh, Phinuit said, he’d made a mistake the day before. The man’s daughter had a friend who was lame. Daisy was deaf.
And that was exactly right. His little Daisy had lost her hearing after a fever. The doctor decided not to come back. He didn’t want to know what Mrs. Piper might reveal next.
Still, Lodge pointed out to Myers, the doctor’s surprising encounters with the medium, and other similar successes, didn’t prove spirit communication. The psychic researchers could be merely gathering evidence of an exceptional telepath at work. Perhaps Mrs. Piper just picked up stray thoughts from the physician or others standing near. Lodge thought they needed to go further, to create a situation that would challenge her to provide information unknown to anyone in the room.
He had an elderly uncle, Robert, living in London. They weren’t particularly close. But since they were family, Lodge would ask a favor of his uncle. Robert’s twin brother had died twenty years earlier. Lodge would write to his uncle and ask for an object belonging to the dead brother. The Americans claimed Mrs. Piper had a gift for psychometry. He and Myers would see what she made of whatever object turned up.
“By morning post on a certain day I received a curious old gold watch, which this brother had worn and been fond of; and that same morning, no one in the house having seen it or knowing anything about it, I handed it to Mrs. Piper when in a state of trance.”
She turned the ornate gold watch over in her hands, over and over yet again. This belongs to one of your uncles, she told Lodge in her rumbling Phinuit voice. The owner of the watch was very fond of another uncle. The name of the other was Robert. In fact, Robert was now the keeper of the watch.
Her hands moved the gold timepiece back and forth, restlessly. Her voice changed;