The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [98]
If only there were more Hodgsons, thought Sidgwick. It wasn’t just that Nora was so busy. In addition to her Newnham administrative chores, she was also finishing a study countering claims that higher education was unhealthy for women. He, meanwhile, continued developing his utilitarian philosophy; James was traveling on sabbatical; Podmore remained a busy postal inspector; and Myers, a school inspector. Lodge worked away on the physics of wireless communication. Charles Richet, who had always devoted the bulk of his time to physiology research, had now taken up a hobby, building a glider in which he could pinwheel through the air around a family chateau.
“No one is saying—as Hodgson in America—‘Psychical Research is the most important thing in the world; my life’s success and failure shall be bound up in it,’ ” Sidgwick mused in his diary. “Yet I am convinced that only in this temper should we achieve what we ought to achieve.” It was only through the day after weary day of Hodgson’s kind of work that the unexpected suddenly revealed itself
In the midst of a sitting with a young married couple, Mrs. Piper, lost in a trance, talking in her deep Phinuit voice, had demanded that the watching Hodgson leave the room. This needed to be a private conversation.
“I want to talk to you about your Uncle C.,” Phinuit said, unusually gently for him, according to notes taken by the woman.
“Is he in the body?” the woman asked, although she knew perfectly well that her uncle was dead.
“No,” said Phinuit.
“How did he die?”
“There was something the matter with his heart and with his head. He says it was an accident. He wants you to tell his sister.... He begs you for God’s sake to tell them it was an accident—that it was his head, and that he was hurt there (makes motion of stabbing heart), that he inherited it from his father. His father was out of his mind—crazy.”
The control, the medium, one of them was somehow describing the woman’s family in Germany. As the sitter wrote to the ASPR, her grandfather had been mentally disturbed after falling from a horse and injuring his head. He’d remained half-crazy for a good three years, until his death in 1863. His oldest son, her uncle, had committed suicide, thirteen years after his father’s death, in “a fit of melancholia” by stabbing himself in the heart.
The family was ashamed of his insanity and the unpardonable suicide. Her family never spoke of it. Only two people in America, besides her husband, even knew the story, and those two people lived nowhere close. “It is absolutely impossible that Mrs. Piper got at the facts through information derived from these persons.”
Hodgson published that account, and accounts of many of the earlier sittings, in his first report on Mrs. Piper in the June issue of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. He knew that there was an audience waiting to hear what the famed debunker of psychics would say, an audience wondering if he would expose her as he had Helena Blavatsky, or if he would declare that he now believed in talking to the dead.
Hodgson managed, neatly, to disappoint expectations.
He admitted Mrs. Piper’s trance to be genuine. He’d put it to every test that he could reasonably conduct. He’d put ammonia-soaked cloth under her nose, dumped spoonfuls of salt, perfume, and laundry detergent into her mouth, pinched her until she bruised, all without provoking a flinch. Mrs. Piper sometimes complained of bruises, but often she was unsure how she’d acquired them.
To her the trance was entirely otherworldly. She said it began “as if something were passing over my brain making it numb; a sensation similar to that I experienced when I was etherized, only the unpleasant odor of ether is absent.” She said the room began to chill and the people in it to shrink. Light faded until the room was black. When she woke,