The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [99]
Her trance personality, the impossible Phinuit, was, Hodgson judged, obviously anything but what “he” claimed. Hodgson had never found evidence that the French doctor existed in reality. After Phinuit claimed to have been born in Marseilles, Hodgson had persuaded Charles Richet to go through birth records in the port city. Richet found nothing. Hodgson—along with Richet and James—declared the so-called doctor a secondary personality of Mrs. Piper.
The consensus was that Phinuit was a coping device, a subconscious way for the medium to protect herself against whatever mental battering took place in her trance state. As a fictional character and a mental buffer, the doctor made a kind of strange sense. As a spirit, he made no sense at all. But then, neither Hodgson nor James was convinced that Mrs. Piper did commune with spirits. They had yet to find what would qualify as undisputed proof of that communication.
Out of her trances came extraordinary personal insight. But it was muddled, tangled with vaguely Christian notions of life after death, ambiguous messages of cheery goodwill, and rather pointless conversation. The theory “of spirit control, is hard to reconcile with the extreme triviality of most of the communications,” James complained. “What real spirit, at last able to revisit his wife on this earth, but would find something better to say than that she had changed the place of his photograph?”
For the real believers, the positive note came in the report’s rather cryptic close, promising that other results, would be forthcoming. “Mrs. Piper has given some sittings very recently which materially strengthen the evidence for existence of some faculty that goes beyond thought-transference from the sitters, and which certainly [on its face] appears to render some form of the ‘spiritistic’ hypothesis more probable.”
Hodgson, it seemed, had chosen to end his report on a cliffhanger.
“BETWEEN THE DEATHS and apparitions of the dying person and the living a connexion exists which is not due to chance alone. This we hold as a proved fact. The discussion of its full implications cannot be attempted in this paper; nor, perhaps, exhausted in this age.”
Writing late and early, on gorgeous June mornings and damp July afternoons, Nora had finished the report of the Census of Hallucinations. Sidgwick planned to give a preliminary presentation at the International Congress of Experimental Psychology in August 1892.
Six countries had participated—England, France, Germany, Russia, Brazil, and the United States—and each group’s findings had confirmed the others’ work. The British census was the largest—17,000 surveyed—and the American study, coordinated by James and Hodgson, was second, with 7,123. All concluded that death-day apparitions occurred in startling numbers. The American survey found that these “ghosts” occurred at 487 times the rate predicted by chance. The British calculation was 442.6 times chance.
Both groups used a statistical formula worked out by Nora. Employing the British figures from the Registrar-General, she calculated that the chances of any one person dying on a given day were 1 in 19,000. The possibility of a given single event, such as a recognizable “hallucination” of a certain person, occurring on that same day was also one in 19,000. So for every 19,000 deaths, there should be only one such occurrence.
Out of their 17,000 respondents, 2,272 had claimed to have seen such an apparition near the time of death. The British SPR had winnowed this down to 1,300 by removing all reports in which dreams or delirium were noted. They then winnowed further to a narrow window of time. Only eighty of these sightings had occurred within twelve hours of death. They winnowed again, throwing out all cases in which there was chance of prior knowledge of when the death was expected, such as that of an elderly or ailing relative. They then removed from their list