The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [95]
As for the demonstrable existence of telepathy, wrote Jastrow furiously in Scribner’s, “nothing could be farther from the truth.” If Mark Twain perceived that he lived in a world too full of coincidences, he could be excused. He was only a writer, a former journalist at that.
In the late nineteenth century, Jastrow explained, with so many people connected by telegraph and telephone, traveling on fast trains and steam-boats, people crossed paths as never before. So did their thoughts and ideas. It was hardly surprising that some thoughts occurred simultaneously; it was a natural response of people receiving information at nearly the same time. Jastrow described Twain as a typical spiritualist, insisting on the supernatural explanation when an ordinary one would do: “He detects mysterious laws of fortune and freaks of luck ... and utterly refuses to believe the general doctrine of chances, because it is not obviously applicable to his particular case.”
There was one little coincidence involved in writing his essay. Jastrow had read Twain’s article while on a cycling tour of New Hampshire. Stopping at a library to consult a road atlas, he had seen the latest issue of Harper’s and been so outraged that he went right to his hotel and wrote to the competition, the editor of Scribner’s, proposing a counter article. As soon as Jastrow completed the trip and collected his mail, he discovered that the editor had simultaneously sent him a letter, asking for a response to Twain’s telegraphy article.
Jastrow was a meticulously honest man. He told that story himself, included it in the article. But he cautioned the reader not to make anything of it. His mind had not communicated with that of the editor. It made perfect sense that they might both happen upon the same notion when seeing Twain’s article. It could happen thrice over, and he would think no different.
SIDGWICK MIGHT BE hardheaded, Hodgson obsessive, Jastrow hostile in approaching the occult. None of them was armed, however, with all the cold, bare facts reported in a new insider expose of spiritualism, published in 1890 by an author known only as “A. Medium.”
Thoroughly impressed by it, Hodgson would spend years trying to find the anonymous author of Revelations of a Spirit Medium, but to no avail. A. Medium never surfaced to face the hundreds of spiritualists enraged by this perceived betrayal. Revelations was a manual—albeit a very funny one—on how to gull the gullible.
Take, for instance, the eerie lights that sometimes graced seances. A. Medium had a recipe for that: Take an empty two-ounce cough syrup bottle and fill it one-fourth full with water. Cut the heads off about one hundred parlor matches, drop them in the water, and cork the bottle. Once the phosphorus had dissolved off the match heads, remove the floating bits of leftover pine from the resulting brownish muck and recork the bottle. In a dark room, when the cork was removed and a little air let into the bottle, it would become “a beautiful yellowish luminous shape.”
“Try it, reader,” wrote the author. “You will be astonished at the results you can obtain from a bottle of this ‘cough mixture,’ a white handkerchief [draped over the glowing bottle] and a dark room.”
If a reader wanted to able to handle hot coals—as D. D. Home had sometimes done—A. Medium had a formula for that too: one-half ounce of camphor, two ounces of aquavitae (filtered water), one ounce of quick-silver (mercury), and one ounce of liquid styrax (a natural solution of myrrh), shaken well, spread over the hands, and allowed to dry. You could then “hold your fingers in the blaze quite a while without any bad effect.”
The writer offered tips for materializing spirits. There were shoemakers who would fit shoes with hollow steel heels for only $20. A. Medium advised filling one heel with fine white netting, to be draped over the body, and the other with an assortment of cloth masks “with which to transform your own face a