Ghost world

Torn between the spiritual and the rational, William James and the Society for Psychical Research sought to document the supernatural -- and found some spooky evidence.

By Laura Miller

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Aug. 28, 2006 | The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 to answer questions that seemed terribly pressing at the time: Is there life after death? Is the human mind more than a collection of chemical and electrical reactions? Does some kind of divine intelligence inform the universe? Of course, those questions haven't gone away, despite fears on the part of SPR members that scientific materialism would soon become the ruling dogma of Western life.

The "ghost hunters" of the SPR were far from being the conglomeration of kooks you might expect. The society attracted some of the great minds of its era, including American psychologist and philosopher William James. Besides James, the SPR could claim many professors, a pioneering evolutionary theorist, several important physicists, two Nobel Prize winners, a distinguished chemist, the principal of the first women's college at Cambridge and the discoverers or developers of half a dozen essential tools for modern life, from the cathode ray tube to wireless telegraphy.

Deborah Blum's new history of the society's early days, "Ghost Hunters," professes to focus on James' involvement with the group (he's the best known of the initial members), but it's really a broader story. The society was founded by men (and one woman) who felt torn between the spiritual sustenance of religious traditions and the scientific worldview that was transforming their lives and their understanding of the universe -- especially Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. They were people, Blum writes, who "craved a refuge from the increasingly belligerent stands taken by both religious and scientific leaders" and "believed that objective and intelligent investigation could provide answers to the troubling metaphysical questions of the time."

Take Alfred Russell Wallace, whose own independently developed theory of natural selection was presented with Darwin's at a London scientific meeting in 1859. Although he continued to study and defend evolution, Wallace decided that its mechanics lacked something crucial. He believed in the soul, and possibly in a divine hand directing some of the evolutionary process (a notion that seems like an early form of intelligent design). "Evidence for such an artful planner could only be found by investigating in the supernatural realm" is how Blum describes Wallace's answer to this quandary. Spiritualism -- from séances to performing mind readers to parlor games like the Ouija board -- was all the rage in Europe and America. Most of it was bogus, but a few examples struck Wallace and other thinkers as their only leads in a quest that was of the utmost importance to humanity.

This project wasn't popular with either clergymen or other scientists. T.H. Huxley, who functioned more or less as Darwinism's attack dog in public debates about evolution, told Wallace, "The only good argument I can see in a demonstration of the truth of 'Spiritualism' is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better to live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a medium hired at a guinea a séance." Most 19th century scientists, Blum writes, "felt a personal responsibility not to investigate claims of the supernatural but to debunk them out of hand."

This sentiment was made abundantly clear to the SPR. The society's prominent members suffered professionally for advocating even the most rigorous and skeptical studies of the paranormal, no matter how distinguished they were in their other work. One was hounded out of his professorship at Columbia University, and others were roundly ridiculed and accused of incipient insanity in scientific journals. For this, and not unreasonably, Blum admires their "intellectual courage."

But one of the peculiarities of this gracefully written and always fascinating book is Blum's noncommittal stance toward the ideas driving most of the society's research. Does she believe that the handful of well-documented, genuinely mystifying phenomena the society recorded qualify as evidence of the supernatural? You won't learn that for sure from reading "Ghost Hunters." Of course, the very fact that she has written a book about the group and presents their efforts sympathetically suggests she does. Or she might simply be endorsing the idea that scientists should keep their minds open and not dismiss a subject of study "out of hand" -- some of the society's most passionate critics insisted that they'd refuse to believe in such matters even if they could be "proved."

So what about that evidence? For all the attention Blum pays to James and his intermittent seriousness about the SPR's research, "Ghost Hunters" is really a tale of two mediums. The first, a Boston shopkeeper's wife named Leonora Piper, was the essence of respectability. The researchers all found her "unguarded, basically uncomplicated, nice." Yet, in a trance state and speaking through "spirit guides" -- or "control" personalities, as the researchers viewed them -- she could deliver "breathtaking" results. She could fully and correctly name the father of a man who was presented to her nameless and with his face hooded. She could tell people where to find things they didn't even realize were lost. Handed a lock of hair by a visitor who didn't know whose head it had come from, she could supply surprisingly accurate information about its source.

The other medium was Piper's complete opposite: Eusapia Palladino, a coarse, illiterate, promiscuous Neapolitan barfly in whose presence furniture flew across the room, curtains billowed without a breeze and strange luminous forms glowed in the air. The trouble with Eusapia (or one of the troubles -- she was an outrageous character) is that, besides being "grubby and distasteful," as Blum puts it, "she always cheated when she could." But on those rare occasions when she could be thoroughly restrained physically (this usually required the efforts of three grown men) in a brightly lit room that had been meticulously searched beforehand, she could still achieve remarkable effects. The SPR's experiments with her were, Blum writes, a "frustrating mix of deliberate fraud and inexplicable event."

Although Eusapia was a law unto herself, she represented a problem that plagued the SPR and other would-be legitimate paranormal researchers: the professional medium. These hucksters charged fees to conjure up the spirits of customers' dead relatives in darkened middle-class parlors or performed astounding feats onstage. They used slates, placed under a séance table, on which supposedly spectral hands recorded messages for the living, or asked questions that were answered by mysterious knocks and bangs. They sat in closed cabinets (to concentrate the "psychic energy") while ghostly figures roamed the room, some touching or even kissing the séance participants.

All of this foofaraw was faked, and much of the SPR's work lay in debunking it. Blank "spirit slates" were swapped under the table for slates with preinscribed messages (derived from research into the visitors' backgrounds). Thumbnails and cracking toe joints supplied the mysterious knocking. Hollow boot heels contained gauze saturated in luminous paint that could be pulled on wires or strings attached to the medium's feet. Even someone whose limbs were being held down by other people, as Eusapia's often were, could devise artful ways of wriggling that would, in the dark, leave two men mistakenly hanging onto just one hand while she used the other hand to overturn the table. In a way, the ingenuity evident in these frauds may place them among the most impressive achievements described in "Ghost Hunters."

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