'Ghost Hunters': Seeking Science in Séance
By PATRICIA COHEN

In the late 1880's, shortly after he helped found an organization to
research the supernatural, William James confidently predicted that
within 25 years science would resolve once and for all whether the dead
could speak to the living.

GHOST HUNTERS
William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death.
By Deborah Blum
370 pages. Penguin Press. $25.95.
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He — and a handful of other brilliant 19th-century intellectuals —
was also fairly confident that the answer would be yes.
And why not? Science had begun to pull back the veil on some of the
cosmos's deepest mysteries. If there were invisible radio and
electromagnetic waves, perhaps there was an undetected link between a
spirit world and this one.

In "Ghost Hunters," Deborah Blum's sympathetic account, these "psychical
researchers" are not simply a bunch of smart men (and a couple of women)
obsessed with a dumb idea, but rather courageous freethinkers willing to
endure the establishment's scorn. This quirky band, she argues, was more
scientific than the scientists and more spiritual than the theologians
who ridiculed them.
People like Henry Sidgwick, a classics don at Cambridge who co-founded
the British Society for Psychical Research, worried about "humankind
stripped of faith." As Ms. Blum writes, "He shuddered at the empty
silence of what he called 'the non-moral universe.' " Didn't the church
understand, Sidgwick wrote in his diary, that "if the results of our
investigation are rejected, they must inevitably carry your miracles
along with them"?

Nor could Sidgwick and his associates understand how scientists could
reject their claims without even bothering to investigate.
Ms. Blum details the supernatural studies of James; Sidgwick and his
wife, Nora; his student Fred Myers; and other British and American
scholars, including the co-founder of evolutionary theory, Alfred Russel
Wallace, and the Nobel-winning scientist Charles Richet. Despite their
differences, what nearly all of them shared was the death of a loved
one; behind their lofty scientific and moral motives was also the very
human desire to reconnect with a lost love.

Ms. Blum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, can tell a good ghost
story, and there were many during this unsettled period of
industrialization and urbanization when belief in the occult swept
through America. All that's missing in the tales of dead apparitions,
moving furniture and sudden revelations of tightly held secrets is the
"Twilight Zone" theme song.
Yet after traipsing from Bombay to Boston, through hundreds of
candle-lit séance rooms with their elaborate "spirit cabinets," where
glowing apparitions would appear and objects fly, what the ghost hunters
mostly found was fraud.

That is, until William James met Lenora Piper, a tall, respectable
Beacon Hill housewife who would settle into her favorite armchair
surrounded by puffed pillows and contact dead souls without charging a
fee. James met her shortly after the death of his year-old son, Herman.
For years Piper was the pet project of the American and British
psychical research associations, which paid her a wage to make her less
susceptible to fakery (though that strategy would seem to carry its own
risks).
They shadowed her movements, interrogated her contacts and shipped her
off to Britain, where she would be less likely to have confederates
helping her. To test her trances they stuck her with pins, held ammonia
under her nose, even put a match to her skin.

Hundreds of times she was wrong. But then there were those frequent
occasions when she seemed endowed with otherworldly power. One London
test devised by the physicist Oliver Lodge was to ask a distant uncle,
Robert, to mail an object belonging to Robert's long-dead twin brother.
Piper, fingering the ornate gold watch Robert sent, was able to name the
brothers and told a story from their childhood about a near drowning and
the killing of a cat that only the twins would have known.
About 10 years ago the popular science writer Martin Gardner wrote an
essay titled "How Mrs. Piper Bamboozled William James." He discussed the
way cunning mediums subtly fish for information and the network of
professional spiritualists who shared information.
But "Ghost Hunters" is less interested in the sociology of bamboozlement
than in giving a respectful accounting of what the participants saw and
felt. This approach has benefits, but among its drawbacks are the
sometimes credulous reports of telepathy, telekinesis or contacts with
the dead.

That is not the book's only weakness. Shifting the spotlight among the
large cast and larger number of supernatural tales often gives the book
a jumpy, episodic feel. And it doesn't leave much room for wider
discussion of the links between the psychological and philosophical work
that James and others were engaged in, or of the often erotically
charged atmosphere of séances presided over mostly by women with few
career options in that high-buttoned era.

Ultimately what distinguished James and his colleagues from many of
their scientific peers was their humbleness. To think one can divine
everything in an infinite universe is an act of extreme hubris. As it
turned out, when the 25 years that James thought would settle the issue
had passed, he had to conclude that hardly any progress had been made.
"I confess that at times I have been tempted to believe that the Creator
has eternally intended this department of nature to remain baffling," he
said.
Ms. Blum relates that she too has been humbled by her efforts.

In the acknowledgments, she writes, "When I started this book, I saw
myself as the perfect author to explore the supernatural, a career
science writer anchored in place with the sturdy shoes of common sense."
But now, after her historical research and contemporary encounters with
people who had ghost stories to tell, she says, though still grounded in
reality, "I'm just less smug than I was when I started, less positive of
my rightness."

And a little humility, particularly in a writer, is never a bad thing.