And We Thought Henry was the Odd One

Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death - Deborah Blum

Many people, I think, have had a mysterious experience. In grad school in 1993 I lived in an apartment in which, even when alone, I had the uneasy feeling someone else were there. Though the apartment complex in a semi-suburb was on a busy high-speed road, I also had the uncanny feeling I was in a remote place, far away from other people. I saw shadows where shadows were impossible. My wife had strange dreams in which she felt she was up near the ceiling, being dragged out of the apartment.

Afraid of being thought crazy by American friends, I described these odd doings to fellow student Wen-ying from Taipei. She said matter-of-factly, “That apartment has a spirit.” After I got the job that sent me to Latvia, I had to break the lease. Expecting to pay a penalty, I told the manager of the complex I had to leave and was surprised when she said, “Oh, that apartment. No charge.”

I’m a rational guy. Show me. I don’t like mysteries in real life. I think alternatives to medicine, cryptozoology, ETs and UFOs, ESP and remote viewing, shadow people, psychic predictions, crop circles, black-eyed children and New Age woo are frauds, hoaxes, and urban legends. But a piece of the paranormal – spirits, that is – I have had an experience I can’t explain.

So I have a little sympathy with the scientists, in the late 19^th century, thought that things supernatural - mediums, hypnotists, and diviners who used wands of hazel wood to find water – could perhaps be studied scientifically to arrive at a rational explanation for baffling phenomena. After all, at that time new discoveries and theories in the fields of geology and biology had rocked the ways of understanding the world and humankind’s place in it among thinking people.

Like a rigorous scholar should, Blum and her assistants did deep research in the primary sources of correspondence and publications of the scientists who tried to collect and evaluate data in order to develop theories that could rationally explain phenomena such as spiritualism. Happily, she focusses on our hero William James, but she provides much curious information about his English colleagues, such as William Crookes, William Barrett, Edward Gurney, Richard Hodgson, Fred Myers, Henry Sidgwick, James Hyslop and others.

Blum also tells the story of mediums the American Leonora Piper and the Neapolitan Eusapia Palladino. The two women could not have been more different. Piper was modest and quiet while Palladino was, well, quite the diva. Blum details the abusive treatment - like hog-tying them -  meted out to the women to ensure they did not cheat. This reminds us that the system that protects the rights and welfare of human subjects in research we have now did not spring out of a laudable history in which researchers treated subjects with dignity and respect.

Blum is impartial when she relates not only how the researchers were troubled at not being able to develop theories to explain the phenomena they were witnessing but also the rage that the scientific community felt that the research was being conducted at all. Skeptics thought the research would lead the general public to believe there really was something to paranormal. Blum captures these various conflicts in her clear narration.

Worth reading for readers into cultural history and light intellectual history.