The Society for Psychical Research hired skeptics and professional conjurers to investigate popular mediums, including a superhumanly dogged Australian named Richard Hodgson. Hodgson was the bane of the professional medium world. His exposé of the famous occult seer Madame Blavatsky (founder of the Theosophical Society) caused a sensation and infuriated some of the more credulous members of the SPR itself. Hodgson spent a few years chewing up and spitting out every professional psychic he looked into, until the society decided that it would automatically disqualify as a subject of serious study any medium who took money for his or her services. The SPR still kept its hand in, though, polishing its image as a tough critic by occasionally sending its investigators out to debunk a celebrated psychic.
Hodgson met his match, however, in Leonora Piper, and the SPR generally came to see her as their best hope for proving that something that defied conventional scientific understanding was going on. As James put it, in defending himself against a critic, "If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are: it is enough if you can prove one single crow to be white." Piper, he explained, was "my own white crow." Hodgson policed Piper's sittings and presided over them like a glowering totem, causing James and others to worry that he kept their "white crow" in a perpetual and damaging "stress state," but even Hodgson grew to believe that she had extraordinary powers.
The society could never quite settle on the source of those powers, though. Even the SPR's most hardheaded member, Nora Sidgwick, felt that their data supported the existence of some kind of telepathy. Nora was remarkable. The wife of SPR's founder and first principal of Newnham, the first women's college at Cambridge, she was also an amateur mathematician whose idea of fun was helping her brother-in-law, physics Nobelist Lord Rayleigh, with astronomical calculations. Her husband, Henry Sidgwick, Blum relates, "considered her the brightest of his circle." At the thought that her job at Newnham might take her away from her SPR duties, he fretted about doing the work himself: "My intellect will be an inferior substitute."
Nora worked on the "Census of Hallucinations," a project that attempted to survey as many Britons as possible with the following question: "Have you -- when in good health, free from anxiety and completely awake -- had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a human being, or of hearing a voice or sound which suggested a human presence, when no one was there?" In the more credible accounts of such experiences, it was found that "all of the visual hallucinations occurred within 12 hours of the death of the person seen." These hallucinations were dubbed "crisis apparitions."
In the end, 17,000 Britons and 7,100 Americans (as well as people in other countries) were surveyed for the census. The positive responses were strenuously winnowed down to people who could have had no prior knowledge or suspicion of the death, who showed no trace of "dreams or delirium" and whose accounts could be verified by at least one other person. The usual response to premonitions of a loved one's death is that people often think of friends and relatives and simply forget about all the times when the person doesn't turn out to be dead later on. The SPR tried to zero in on actual hallucinations reported by people who had no other history of uncanny experiences. When Nora ran her statistical calculations on the results, she found that crisis apparitions occur more often than could be attributed to mere coincidence.
Of course, the survey wouldn't hold up to the statistical standards of today's pollsters, but it was a heroic effort to bring some quantifiable order to the mysteries of these surprisingly common ghostly tales. But what did it mean? Nora Sidgwick and some other members thought that all of the phenomena the SPR investigated were telepathic in nature. The crisis apparitions, for example, might result from some wild burst of telepathic force triggered by the trauma of death. Even mediums who seemed to be channeling secrets from the dead were probably picking up the information from other people in the room who knew the deceased.
Other SPR members believed that the spirits of the dead really could speak through mediums like Leonora Piper. This faction was most excited by a complicated three-way psychic relay between Piper in London, a classics lecturer who practiced "automatic" (spirit-directed) writing in Cambridge and (strangely enough) a sister of writer Rudyard Kipling who also did automatic writing in Calcutta, India. Instructions communicated via Piper in Greek and Latin (she knew neither language) seemed to have been understood by the entities communicating via the classics lecturer and the lady in India. This led some researchers to conclude that the disembodied spirits -- deceased SPR leaders, no less -- were using the women as conduits.
Some, like James and Sidgwick, were never quite persuaded that the society's research pointed toward an afterlife. All James was sure of was that the scientists who condemned him and his colleagues for their efforts were prejudiced in their refusal to even consider investigating the matter. It's true that, as depicted by Blum, the SPR's foes seem extraordinarily vehement, obsessive and vindictive. But it's also true that few people in this account come across as sufficiently "objective," which is what James promised the SPR would be.
Henry Sidgwick, Nora's husband, pursued his studies of the supernatural in part because he feared living in a "non-moral universe." "Without religion," as Blum puts it, "without a Deity promising punishment and reward -- Sidgwick wondered what would bind people to principles of honor and decency." His co-founder, Frederic Myers, harbored a desperate, lifelong love for a woman who had committed suicide, and much of the "evidence" he recorded later on involved communications with her from beyond the grave. (His wife, who only learned of this after his death, refused to allow anything about it to be published.) When the fate of the human race or your own poor broken heart hangs in the balance, it's hard to be objective about anything.
It's also hard to puzzle through the evidence for yourself when by necessity so much is left out of "Ghost Hunters." As a rule, uncanny true stories become less and less astonishing the more you learn about them. Even the SPR is a little whitewashed here. Blum makes no mention of the notorious Ballechin House affair, which occurred during the period she covers in her book. In that fiasco, some society members rented what was reputedly "the most haunted house in Scotland." During the course of their stay, one excitable lady claimed to see apparitions of nuns on the property (not usually part of the house's reputed hauntings, but spectral nuns are a common fixture in British ghost stories). Doubt was cast on her reports and later the whole expedition was ridiculed by one of the participants in the London Times.
The Society for Psychical Research wasn't fatally damaged by these and other scandals. In fact, it continues to this day, and counts luminaries such as philosopher Henri Bergson and British Prime Minister A.J. Balfour among its former presidents. Yet somehow, it hasn't gotten any closer to its goal or to achieving scientific respect. (The problem that the phenomena it studies can't be reliably replicated is, as Blum notes, the chief stumbling block.) James believed this was because "nature is everywhere gothic, not classic. She forms a real jungle, where all things are provisional, half-fitted to each other and untidy." Later, he declared, "I may be dooming myself to the pit in the eyes of better-judging posterity; I may be raising myself to honor. I am willing to take the risk, for what I shall write is my truth, as I now see it."
It's easy to see this bravura stance as courageous when we know the defiant scientist is right -- and especially when he writes as well as William James, using rhetoric that calls up echoes of Galileo and Darwin. To my mind, the more appropriate coda is Leonora Piper's plain-spoken statement on the bizarre trances and cryptic utterances whose repercussions dominated her adult life: "My opinion is today as it was 18 years ago. Spirits may have controlled me and they may not. I confess that I do not know."
About the writer
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon.
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