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GHOST HUNTERS OF YESTERDAY AND TO-
DAY
By Scaife, Hazel Lewis, 1872-1939
PSYCHICAL research, of which so much
mention has been made in the preceding
pages, may be roughly yet sufficiently de-
scribed as an effort to determine by strictly
scientific methods the nature and significance
of apparitions, hauntings, spiritistic phenom-
ena, and those other weird occurrences that
would seem to confirm the idea that the
spirits of the dead can and do communicate
with the living. It is something compara-
tively new and like all scientific endeavor
is the outgrowth of many minds. But so far
as its origin may be attributed to any one
man, credit must chiefly be given to a Cam-
bridge University professor named Henry
Sidgwick.
At the time, Sidgwick was merely a lecturer
in the university, a post given him as a reward
for his brilliant career as an undergraduate.
He was a born student and investigator, a
restless seeker after knowledge. Philosophy,
sociology, ethics, economics, mathematics, the
classics, he made almost the whole wide
field of thought his sphere of inquiry. And
after awhile, as is so often the case, his learn-
ing became too profound for his peace of
mind. He had been born and brought up in
the faith of the English Church, and had
unhesitatingly made the religious declaration
required of all members of the university
faculty. But little by little he felt himself
drifting from the moorings of his youth, and
doubting the truth of the ancient doctrines and
traditions. Honestly skeptical, but still un-
willing to lose his hold on religion, he turned
feverishly to the study of oriental languages,
of ancient philosophies, of history, of science,
in the hope of finding evidence that would re-
move his doubts. But the more he read the
greater grew his uncertainty, especially with
respect to the vital question of the existence
of a spiritual world and its relation to man-
kind.
While he was still laboring in this valley of
indecision, Sidgwick was visited by a young
man, Frederic W. H. Myers, who had studied
under him a few years earlier and for whom
he had formed a warm friendship. Myers, it
seemed, was tormented by the same scruples
that were harassing him. It was his belief,
he told Sidgwick, that if the teachings of the
Bible were true if there existed a spiritual
world which in days of old had been manifest
to mankind then such a world should be
manifest now. And one beautiful, starlit
evening, when they were strolling together
through the university grounds, he put to his
old master the pointed question :
"Do you think that, although tradition,
intuition, metaphysics, have failed to solve the
riddle of the universe, there is still a chance
of solving it by drawing from actual observable
phenomena ghosts, spirits, whatsoever it
may be valid knowledge as to a world un-
seen?"
Gazing gravely into the eager face of his
companion, and weighing his words with the
caution that was characteristic of him, Sidg-
wick replied that he had indeed entertained
this thought; that, although not over hopeful
of the result, he believed such an inquiry should
be undertaken, notwithstanding the unpleas-
ant notoriety it would entail on those embark-
ing in it. Would he, then, make the quest,
and would he permit Myers to pursue it by
his side ? Long and earnestly the two friends
talked together, and when tb *r walk ended,
that December night in Ko9, psychical re-
search had at last come definitely into being.
In the beginning, however, progress was
painfully slow and uncertain. "Our meth-
ods," as Myers afterward explained, "were
all to make. In those early days we were more
devoid of precedents, of guidance, even of
criticism that went beyond mere expressions
of contempt, than is now readily conceived."
It was realized that no mere analysis of
alleged experiences in the past would do; that
what was needed was a rigid scrutiny of pres-
ent-day manifestations of a seemingly super-
normal character, and the collection of a mass
of well authenticated evidence sufficient to
justify inferences and conclusions. Earnestly
and bravely the friends went to work, and
before long had the satisfaction of finding an
invaluable assistant in the person of Edmund
Gurney, another Cambridge man and an en-
thusiast in all matters metaphysical.
At first, to be sure, Gurney entered into
psychical research in a half-hearted, quizzi-
cal way, expecting to be amused rather than
instructed. And he derived little encourage-
ment from the investigations carried on by
Sidgwick, Myt s, and himself in the field of
spiritistic medium hip. Fraud seemed always
to be at the botto of the phenomena pro-
duced in the sea* c ;e room. But his interest
was suddenly and permanently awakened by
the discovery, following several years spent in
patiently collecting evidence, of facts pointing
to the possibility of thought being communi-
cated from mind to mind by some agency
other than the recognized organs of sense.
At once he made it his special business to
accumulate data bearing on this point, his
labors ultimately leading him into an ex-
haustive examination of hypnotism, as he
found that the hypnotic trance seemed pe-
culiarly favorable to " thought transference,"
or "telepathy."
Meantime, the example of this little Cam-
bridge group had been followed by other inves-
tigators; and in 1876, before no less dignified
and conservative a body than the British
Association for the Advancement of Science,
the proposal was made that a special com-
mittee be appointed for the systematic exam-
ination of spiritistic and kindred phenomena.
The idea was broached by Dr. W. F. Barrett,
professor of physics at the Royal College of
Science, Dublin, and was warmly seconded
by Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace and Sir William
Crookes, two distinguished scientists who had
already made adventures in psychical research
and were destined to wide renown as ghost
hunters.
For some reason nothing was done at the
time ; but five years later Professor Barrett re-
newed his suggestion, asking Myers and
Gurney if they would join him in the forma-
tion of such a society. That, they replied,
they would gladly do, provided Sidgwick
could be induced to accept its presidency.
Having long before realized that the field was
too extensive for thorough exploration by any
individual, however gifted, Sidgwick willingly
gave his consent. And accordingly, in Janu-
ary, 1882, the now celebrated Society for
Psychical Research was formally organized,
its first council including, besides Sidgwick,
Myers, Gurney, and Barrett, such men as
Arthur J. Balfour, afterward Prime Minis-
ter of Great Britain; the brilliant Richard
Hutton; Prof. Balfour Stewart; and Frank
Podmore, than whom no more merciless exe-
cutioner of bogus ghosts is wielding the ax
to-day.
Unfortunately, the first council also num-
bered several avowed spiritists, notably the
medium Stainton Moses; and the society's
birthplace was in the rooms of the British
National Association of Spiritualists. These
two facts created a wide-spread suspicion that
the society was actually nothing more than an
adjunct to the spiritistic movement. Nor was
confidence wholly restored by the hasty with-
drawal of the spiritistic representatives as soon
as they learned that strictly scientific method
of inquiry were to prevail ; or by the accession,
as honorary members, of national figures like
W. E. Gladstone, John Ruskin, Lord Tenny-
son, A. R. Wallace, Sir William Crookes, and
G. F. Watts.
To the scientific as well as the popular con-
sciousness, the society was little better than
an assemblage of cranks, with strangely fan-
tastic notions, and only too likely to lose its
mental balance and help ignorant and super-
stitious people to lose theirs. Conscious,
however, of the really serious and important
nature of their enterprise, and cheered by
Gladstone's comforting assurance that no in-
vestigation of greater moment to mankind
could be made,* the members of the society
applied themselves zealously to the business
that had brought them together.
Sensibly enough, they adopted the princi-
ple of specialization and division of labor.
While one group carried on experiments de-
signed to prove or disprove the telepathic
hypothesis, another engaged in a systematic
examination of the alleged facts of clairvoy-
ance. A third, in its turn, under the skilful
guidance of Gurney, investigated the phe-
nomena of the hypnotic trance, with results
unexpectedly beneficial to medical science. A
special committee was also appointed to col-
lect and sift evidence as to the reality of
apparitions and hauntings, making whenever
possible personal examinations of the seers of
the visions and the places of their occurrence.
Finally, there were various subcommittees of
inquiry into the physical phenomena of spirit-
ism, the knockings, table turnings, pro-
duction of spirit forms, and similar marvels of
the Dunglas Home type of "medium."
From the outset, these subcommittees demon-
strated the value of psychical research, as a
protection to the interests of society, by ex-
posing, one after another, the fraudulent char-
acter of the pretended intermediaries between
the seen and the unseen world.
In this' region of inquiry no one was more
successful than a recruit from distant Aus-
tralia, by name Richard Hodgson. Hodgson,
unlike Sidgwick and Myers and many others
of his associates, had not engaged in psychical
research from the hope that the truths of the
Bible might thereby be demonstrated. His
motive was that of the detective eager to un-
ravel mysteries. From his boyhood he had
had a singular fondness for solving tricks and
puzzles of all sorts; and when, in 1878, he
came to England to complete his education at
Cambridge, he naturally gravitated into the
company of Sidgwick, Myers, and Gurney, as
men busied in an undertaking that appealed
to his detective instinct. He was radically
different from them in temperament and point
of view not at all mystical, full of animal
spirits, fond of all manner of sports, and in-
terested in occult subjects only so far as they
furnished working material for his nimble and
inquiring mind. The Cambridge trio, how-
ever, took kindly to him, invited him to join
the Society for Psychical Research, and two
years after its formation were instrumental
in sending him to India to investigate the
methods of Madam Blavatsky, the high
priestess of the theosophic movement which
was then winning adherents throughout the
civilized world.
From this inquiry he returned to England
with an international reputation as a detec-
tive of the supernatural. With the aid of two
disgruntled confederates of the theosophist
leader, he had demonstrated the falsity of the
foundations on which her claims rested, and
had shown that downright swindling consti-
tuted a large part of her stock in trade. With
redoubled ardor he now plunged into the
task of exposing the spiritistic mediums plying
their vocation in England, and for this pur-
pose enlisted the assistance of a professional
conjurer, S. J. Davey, who was also a mem-
ber of the Society for Psychical Research.
Davey, after a little practice, succeeded in
duplicating by mere sleight of hand many of
the most impressive feats of the mediums; do-
ing this, indeed, so well that some spiritists
alleged that he was in reality a medium him-
self. Hodgson, for his part, by clever analysis
of the Davey performances and of the feats of
Davey's mediumistic competitors, brought
home to his colleagues in the Society for
Psychical Research a lively sense of the folly
of depending on the human eye as a detector
of fraudulent spiritistic phenomena. His
crowning triumph came with his exposure of
Eusapia Paladino, the Italian medium who is
still enjoying an undeserved popularity on the
European continent.
But in time even Hodgson met his Waterloo.
Sent to the United States to investigate the
trance phenomena of Mrs. Leonora Piper,
he was forced to confess that in her case the
theory of fraud fell to the ground, and as is
well known he ended by developing into an
out and out spiritist. A few days before
Christmas, 1905, he suddenly died in Boston;
and, if reports from the spirit world may be
accepted, the once-renowned ghost hunter has
himself become a ghost, visiting in especial
two of his American colleagues, Prof. William
James and Prof. James H. Hyslop.
To return, however, to the early days of the
Society for Psychical Research. Valuable as
were the results obtained by Hodgson and his
associates on what may be called the anti-
swindle committees, they had a distinctly
negative bearing on the supreme object of
inquiry proof of the existence of a spiritual
world in which human personality exists
after the death of the body. Some enthu-
siasts did not hesitate to proclaim at an early
date that such proof had actually been se-
cured, basing this assertion on the seemingly
supernatural facts brought to light by the
committees on telepathy, clairvoyance, and
apparitions. But the society, under the leader-
ship of the cautious Sidgwick, who was its
president for many years, steadily refused to
countenance this view, and insisted that before
any definite conclusions could be reached far
more evidence would have to be assembled.
Thus the first ten years of the society's exist-
ence were marked by few positive results,
the most important being the statement of the
case for telepathy and of its possible relation-
ships to apparitions and hauntings, as well as
to the purely psychical phenomena of spirit-
ualism.
228 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters
Indeed, the society formally expressed its ac-
quiescence in the telepathic hypothesis as early
as 1884, in the words, "Our society claims
to have proved the reality of thought trans-
ference of the transmission of thoughts,
feelings, and images from one mind to an-
other by no recognized channel of sense."
But to no other dictum did it commit itself
until ten years more had passed when, fol-
lowing the so-called census of hallucinations,
it gave voice to its belief that between deaths
and apparitions of the dying person a con-
nection existed that was not due to chance.
And since then the society has contented itself
with steadily accumulating evidence designed
to throw light on the causal connection between
deaths and ghosts, and to illumine the central
problem of demonstrating scientifically the
existence of an unseen world and the immor-
tality of the soul.
Individuals, of course, have been free to
express their views, and from the pens of
several have come striking and suggestive
analyses of the evidence assembled in the
course of the society's twenty-five years. In
this respect, beyond any question, primacy
must be given the writings of Myers. Even
Ghost Hunters of To-day 229
before the organization of the society, his per-
sonal researches had led him to suspect that,
whatever the truth about the life beyond the
grave, there was reason for radical changes
of belief regarding the nature of human per-
sonality itself. In the light of the phenomena
of the hypnotic trance, clairvoyance, halluci-
nations, and even of natural sleep, it seemed
to him that, instead of being a stable, indi-
visible unity, human personality was essen-
tially unstable and divisible.
And as the years passed and he was enabled
to coordinate the results of the investigations
carried on by the different committees, he
gradually became convinced that over and
beyond the self of which man is normally con-
scious there existed in every man a secondary
self endowed with faculties transcending those
of the normal wake-a-day self. To this he
gave the name of the " subliminal self," and,
in the words of Professor James, "endowed
psychology with a new problem, the explo-
ration of the subliminal region being destined
to figure thereafter in that branch of learning
as Myers's problem."
Not content with this, he gave himself, with
all the earnestness that had originally drawn
230 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters
him into activity with Sidgwick, to the formula-
tion of a cosmic philosophy based on the
hypothesis of the subliminal self and its opera-
tions in that unseen world of whose existence
he no longer doubted. Here he laid himself
open to the charge of extravagance and trans-
cendentalism, and undoubtedly exceeded the
logical limit. But for all of that his labors
cut short by death six years ago, and only a
few months after the death of his beloved
master, Sidgwick have been little short of
epoch marking, and amply suffice to vindicate
the existence of the once despised, and still
by no means venerated, Society for Psychical
Research.
Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and
Mr. Frank Podmore are other members of the
society who have granted the outside world
informative glimpses of its workings and dis-
coveries. Sir William Crookes, of course, is
best known as a great chemist, discoverer of
the element thallium, and inventor of numer-
ous scientific instruments; while Sir Oliver
Lodge's most striking work has been in elec-
tricity, and more particularly in the direction
of improving wireless telegraphy. But both
have long been actively interested in psychical
Ghost Hunters of To-day 231
research, and perhaps most of all in those
phases of it bearing on the telepathic hypothe-
sis, their great aim being to discover just what
the technique of telepathic communication
from mind to mind may be.
Mr. Podmore, on the other hand, like
Richard Hodgson, has chiefly concerned him-
self with psychical research from the detective,
or critical, standpoint. He began his labors
late in the '70's, associating himself with
the Cambridge group, and has consistently
maintained the attitude of a skeptical, though
open minded, investigator. To-day, to a cer-
tain extent, he may be said to occupy the
place so long filled by Henry Sidgwick as a
sane, restraining influence on the less judicial
members of the society, who would unhesi-
tatingly brush aside all objections and em-
brace the spiritistic hypothesis with all its
supernatural implications.*
Of course, psychical research has by no
means been confined to the English organiza-
tion. All over the world investigators are
now probing into the mysteries of the seem-
* A new work by Mr. Podmore is announced for immediate pub-
lication, with the characteristic title of "The Naturalization of the
Supernatural." It is said to contain a detailed analysis of the work
of various well-known mediums.
232 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters
ingly supernormal. But, as a general thing,
their methods scarcely reach the strict stand-
ards set by the organized inquirers of England,
and as a natural consequence they are more
easily deceived by tricksters.
This is particularly true of the European
ghost hunters, whose laxity of procedure, not
to say gullibility, was clearly shown by the ease
with which Hodgson exposed the pretensions
of Eusapia Paladino after Continental savants
had pronounced her feats genuine. And it is
even more strikingly exhibited by the pathetic
fidelity with which they still trust in her, not-
withstanding the Hodgson exposure, and the
fact that they themselves have on more than
one occasion caught her committing fraud.
In the United States, however, psychical re-
search worthy of the name took root early,
owing to the establishment of an American
branch of the English society under the ca-
pable direction of Dr. Hodgson. A year or so
ago, after his death, this branch was aban-
doned. But in its place, and organized along
similar lines, there has arisen the American
Institute for Scientific Research, the creation
of Prof. James H. Hyslop.
Until a few years ago occupant of the chair
Ghost Hunters of To-day 233
of logic at Columbia University, Professor
Hyslop is unquestionably one of the most
conspicuous figures in psychical research in
this or any other country. Like Professor
Sidgwick, he first became interested in the
subject through religious doubt, and forthwith
attacked its problems with the zeal of a man
whose principal characteristics are intense
enthusiasm, resourcefulness of wit, and intel-
lectual fearlessness. As everybody knows,
his experiences with Mrs. Piper led him to
unite with Hodgson and Myers in regarding
the spiritistic hypothesis as the only one ca-
pable of explaining all the phenomena en-
countered. But he is none the less able and
eager to expose fraud wherever found, and if
only from the police view-point his society will
undoubtedly do good work. Associated with
him are many of the American investigators
formerly identified with the English society;
some of whom, notably Prof. William James
of Harvard, the dean of psychical research in
the United States, also keep up their connec-
tion with the parent organization.
Summing up the results of the really scien-
tific ghost hunting of the last twenty-five years,
it may be safely said that if the hunters have
234 Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters
not accomplished their main object of defi-
nitely proving the existence of a spiritual
world, their labors have nevertheless been of
high value in several important directions.
They have exposed the fraudulent preten-
sions of innumerable charlatans, and have thus
acted as a protection for the credulous. They
( have shown that, making all possible allow-
ance for error of whatever kind, there still
remains in the phenomena of apparitions,
clairvoyance, etc., a residuum not explainable
on the hypothesis of fraud or chance coinci-
dence. They have aided in giving validity to
the idea of the influence of suggestion as a
factor both in the cause and the cure of disease.
They have given a needed stimulus to the study
of abnormal mental conditions. And, finally,
by the discovery of the impressive facts that
led Myers to formulate his hypothesis of the
subliminal self, they have opened the door to
far-reaching reforms in the whole sociological
domain, in education, in the treatment of
vice and crime, in all else that makes for the
uplifting of the human race.
Finish