'Ghost Hunters' explores scientists' interest in the supernatural
In the fall of 1889, the philosopher William James, prominent Harvard professor and brother of the distinguished novelist Henry James, invited an unusual guest to his family's vacation home in New Hampshire.
The guest was Leonora Piper, the 29-year-old wife of a Boston shopkeeper, slightly chubby and walking with a limp from a sledding accident -- but who, from her childhood, seemed to have inexplicable psychic gifts.
James and a small group of researchers began studying and testing Piper's ability to establish communication with the spirit world. At Lake Chocorua, the days were spent hiking and fishing, saving the evenings for serious discussions.
It was Piper to whom James was referring when he said famously that ``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 prove one single crow to be white." In the matter of supernatural communication, James said, ``my own white crow is Mrs. Piper."
The late years of the 19th century were a time of extraordinary scientific advancement, shadowed by seekings for an unknowable world. Ralph Waldo Emerson listed spiritualists as among the rising occupations in the 1850s, and a lively summer colony was growing up around the town of Lily Dale, in upstate New York, that advertised ``daily free message sessions."
It is a world that Deborah Blum conjures up in ``Ghost Hunters," capturing the clubby world of ``a surprisingly elite group of scientists and philosophers," too often deflated by uncovering the fraud of ``spirit cabinets" with hidden entries but elated by the ``transcendental eeriness" of Piper -- ``on her good days."
As Blum, a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin, explains, James and his colleagues were engaged in ``an ambitious -- and professionally risky -- scientific endeavor to prove the existence of life after death." And they had concerns that if ``they could find no evidence of an afterlife, no proof of otherworldly powers, they might further undermine the church's promises of immortality" and ``confirm the existence of nothing, no promise beyond that of a quiet grave."
James was a secondary figure among the group, concerned about his standing in the academic world and leaving the actual research -- the compiling of collections of inexplicable ``ghost" stories, scientific testing of the reality of Piper's trances -- to his colleagues.
But it is James whose Harvard position and public reputation gave standing to the endeavors of his colleagues. And on several occasions he was touched personally.
In March 1889, James's wife, Alice, and younger brother, Robertson James, had a sitting with Piper. The James brothers' aunt Kate had been ill, and Alice James asked about her health.
Responding in the voice of her spirit control, Piper said, ``Why Aunt Kate's here. All around me I hear voices saying, `Aunt Kate has come.' "
Continuing, she said that the aunt had died early that morning. Robertson James went immediately to the researchers' office in downtown Boston to relate the event to his brother. A few hours later, after returning to his Cambridge house, James received a telegram informing him that Aunt Kate had indeed died, shortly after midnight.
Blum, a Pulitzer Prize winner for articles about primate research, writes that she began her exploration of psychic research as ``a career science writer anchored in place with the sturdy shoes of common sense." But after ``a slightly unnerving ESP experiment" and studying research that she ``couldn't explain away," Blum found herself ``less smug than I was when I started, less positive of my rightness." Her compelling account of this eerie subject may prompt her readers to similar feelings.
Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, By Deborah Blum, Penguin, 370 pp., $25.95
