MESSAGES FROM THE SPIRIT-WORLD
Clairvoyance, strictly speaking, is supposed to be an abnormal power of
the medium: a range of vision, a fineness of sense, that we less gifted
beings do not possess. But the performance is very apt to resolve itself
into a claim that the medium sees invisible spirits and is communicating
with them. Of real clairvoyance--of a power to read a closed book or a
folded paper or see a distant spot--no instance has ever yet been
recorded that will pass scrutiny. Many scientific men, as I said, who do
not believe in spirits do believe in the abnormal powers of mediums.
They would like to get a proof of clairvoyance, but they are unable to
offer us one. The wonderful stories told of the gift in Spiritualist
circles vanish, like the stories about Home and Moses, the moment the
critical lamp is turned upon them.
We are therefore reduced to the Spiritualist claim that a medium really
receives information from spirits, and we have to see on what sort of
evidence this is based. Now there is an aspect of this question which
even the leading Spiritualists do not face very candidly. More than
twenty years ago it was felt, and rightly felt, by Spiritualists that at
least a long step forward would be made if they left sealed or
cipher-messages at death, and communicated the contents or the key of
these from "beyond." It is well known how Myers left with Sir Oliver
Lodge a sealed message of this description. A month after his death he
"got into touch" with Lodge through the medium Mrs. Thompson. Unhappily
he had forgotten all about the message, and even about the Society for
Psychical Research! Next the supremely gifted Mrs. Verrall got into
touch with Myers. By this time--it was the end of 1904--Myers had had
time to get adjusted, and was talking more or less rationally through
Mrs. Verrall. If there had not been a very material test in reserve, Sir
O. Lodge and his friends would have sworn that the messages were from
the spirit of Myers. As it was, they were so confident that on December
13, 1904, they solemnly opened the precious envelope. They were struck
dumb when there was not the least correspondence between Mrs. Verrall's
message from Myers and the message he had left in the envelope.
Miss Dallas tries, in her _Mors Janua Vitæ_, to soften the blow, but her
pleas are useless. The final failure utterly stultifies all the days and
months of supposed messages. And this is not the only case. Hodgson had
adopted a similar test, and it was a ghastly failure. Other
Spiritualists left sealed messages when they died, and not a syllable of
one of them has been read. Our Spiritualists _do not_ get into
communication with the dead. This is negative evidence, but it is far
more impressive than any of the rhetorical and inaccurate accounts of
experiences which they give us. It is precise and unmistakable. Every
Spiritualist who dies now knows that this is the supremely desired test,
yet we have twenty years of complete, unmitigated failure. Men like Sir
O. Lodge tell us that they recognize the personality of Hodgson beyond
mistake in the messages they get through mediums; but the one sure
test, the getting of the key to the cipher-messages which Hodgson left
behind, is an absolute failure. It would become our Spiritualists to
strike a more modest note, and not assure the ignorant public, as Sir A.
C. Doyle does, that the time for proof has gone by and it is for their
opponents now to justify themselves. The experience of the last twenty
years has been deadly to Spiritualist pretensions.
The truth is that here again Spiritualists had been led into their
belief, that messages from the spirit-world were easy and common, by a
vast amount of mediumistic trickery. The earliest method was by raps,
and we have seen that since 1848 this performance has been a matter of
trickery. The next way was to rap out messages with a leg of the table,
which was merely a variation of the table-lifting we have studied. These
forms are so often used by amateur mediums that it is necessary to
recall our warning that the distinction between paid and unpaid mediums
is not of the least use. Carrington, Maxwell, Podmore, and Flammarion
give numbers of instances of cheating by men and women of good social
position. Carrington tells of an American lawyer who deliberately--not
as a joke--made his friends believe that he could make a poker stand
upright and do similar abnormal phenomena. He did his tricks by means of
black threads. Podmore gives a similar case in England. Flammarion tells
us of a Parisian doctor's wife who cheated flagrantly in order to get
credit for abnormal powers. This sort of prestige has as much
fascination for some people as money has for others.
The professional mediums, however, early developed in America the trick
of receiving messages from spirits on slates, and this is fraud from
beginning to end. The supreme artist in this field was Henry Slade, whom
Sir A. C. Doyle regards as a genuine intermediary between the lofty
spirits of the other world and ourselves. As Truesdell's account of the
way in which he unmasked Slade as early as 1872 contains one of the
richest stories in the whole collection of Spiritualist anecdotes, one
would have thought that a story-teller like Sir A. C. Doyle could not
possibly have forgotten it. From it we learn that Slade was from the
outset of his career an adroit and brazen and confessed impostor.
Truesdell paid the customary five dollars, and received pretty and
edifying, but inconclusive, messages from the spirits. Incidentally he
detected that the spirit-touches on his arms were done by Slade's foot,
to distract his attention; but he could not see the method of the
slate-trick. However, as the main theme of the messages was an
exhortation to persevere in his inquiries (at five dollars a sitting to
the medium), he made another appointment. It was on this occasion that
he left a misleading letter in his overcoat in Slade's hall, and found
the spirits assuming that he was "Samuel Johnson, Rome, N.Y." But before
Slade entered the room, or while Slade was going through his
overcoat-pockets, _he_ rapidly overhauled Slade's room. He found a slate
with a pious message from the spirits already written on it, signed (as
was usual) by the spirit of Slade's dead wife, Alcinda. Beneath the
message Truesdell wrote "Henry, look out for this fellow--he is up to
snuff! Alcinda," and replaced the slate. Slade came in, and gave a most
dramatic performance. In his contortions, under the spirit-influence,
he drew the table near to the hidden slate, and "accidentally" knocked
the clean slate off the table. Of course, he picked up the _prepared_
slate. His emotions can be imagined when he read the words which
Truesdell had written on it. After a little bluster, however, he
laughingly acknowledged that he was a mere conjurer, and he told
Truesdell many tricks of his profession.[14]
This was in 1872. Four years later Slade came to London, where Sir E.
Ray Lankester and Sir Bryan Donkin again exposed him. Sir E. Ray
Lankester snatched the slate before the message was supposed to be
written on it, and the message was already there. He prosecuted Slade,
who was sentenced to three months' hard labour. He had charged a guinea
a sitter. But a few words had been omitted from the antiquated form of
the charge (which I have previously given in the case of Craddock), and
before Slade could be again prosecuted he fled to the continent. There,
we saw, he duped a group of purblind professors, and he returned to
America in higher repute than ever. In 1882 an inspector of police at
Belleville, in Canada, snatched the slate just as Sir E. Ray Lankester
had done, and exposed him again. He escaped arrest only by a maudlin
appeal for mercy; and on his return to the States he succeeded in
persuading the Spiritualists--who solemnly stated this in their organ,
the _Banner of Light_--that the man exposed at Belleville was an
impostor making use of his name! In 1884 he faced the Seybert Committee,
and its sharp-eyed members saw and exposed every step in his trickery.
Eventually, as I have said, he lived in drink and misery, developed
Bright's disease, and died in the common asylum. Such was the man whom
Sir A. C. Doyle seriously regards as the chosen instrument of his
spiritual powers.
The Seybert Committee found two different kinds of writing on Slade's
slates. Some messages were short and badly written, and they concluded
that these were written by him with one finger while he held the slate
under the table (as the custom was) to receive a spirit-message. Other
messages were relatively long, well written, and dignified; and they
regarded these as prepared in advance. Both points were fully verified.
At one sitting they noticed two slates resting suspiciously against the
leg of the table. These doubtless had messages written on them, and were
to be substituted for the blank slate when this was supposed to be put
under the table. Slade would then produce the sound of the spirits
writing by scraping with his nail on the edge of the slate. On this
occasion, however, Slade saw that they had their eyes on the slates and
he dare not use them. But one of the members of the committee,
determined to do his work thoroughly, carelessly knocked the two slates
over with his foot, and the messages were exposed.
The reception of messages from the spirits on slates may linger in rural
or suburban districts, but it has lent itself to such trickery, and been
exposed so thoroughly, that mediums have generally abandoned it. For
whole decades it was the chief way of communicating with the spirits,
and weird and wonderful were the artifices by which the medium defeated
the growing sense of caution of the sitters. In spite of the exposures
of Slade, the English medium Eglinton adopted and improved his methods,
and he was one of the bright stars of the Spiritualist world for twenty
years. He was detected in fraud as early as 1876. At that time he gave
materialization-séances, at which the ghostly form of "Abdullah"
appeared. Archdeacon Colley found the beard and draperies of Abdullah in
his trunk. But exposure never ruins a medium in the Spiritualist world,
and ten years later Eglinton was the most successful and respected
medium in England, especially for slate-messages.
Hodgson more than suspected him, and he at last found a man, Mr. S. J.
Davey, who was able to reproduce all his tricks. He wrote messages while
he held the slates under the table, and he substituted prepared slates
for clean slates under the noses of his sitters. Perhaps the most
valuable part of his experience was this substitution, which is one of
the fundamental elements of mediumistic trickery. Spiritualists--indeed,
inquirers generally--honestly flatter themselves that they have taken
care that there was no deception of this kind. Such confidence is
foolish, as the professional conjurer does this kind of substitution
under our eyes habitually, and we never see him do it. In order to make
people more cautious Davey, with Dr. Hodgson's connivance, set up as a
medium and gave sittings to Spiritualists. They afterwards sent accounts
of their experiences to the Society for Psychical Research. They were,
as usual, certain that there was no trickery, and that the messages were
genuine. Davey then wrote correct accounts of what he had done, and it
was seen that the accounts of the sitters were inaccurate and their
observation faulty. Some of them indignantly retorted that Davey was a
genuine medium, but found it more profitable to pose as a conjurer and
exposer of mediums!
In a work specially devoted to this subject (_Spirit Slate Writing and
Kindred Phenomena_, 1899) Mr. W. E. Robinson gives about thirty
different fraudulent ways of getting spirit-messages. Indeed, many of
these may be sub-divided, and you get scores of methods. One method, for
instance, is to write a message with invisible fluid on paper, seal the
apparently blank paper in an envelope, and then let the message appear
and pretend that the spirits wrote it. Mr. Robinson gives thirty-seven
different recipes for the "invisible ink," and sixteen of these require
only heat, which is easily applied, to develop them. In other cases the
inside of the envelope has been moistened with a chemical solution which
develops the hidden writing. One medium used to put an apparently blank
sheet of paper in a clear bottle and seal it. Here trickery seemed
impossible, and the sitter was greatly impressed at receiving a pious
message on the paper. But the message had been written in advance with a
weak solution of copper sulphate, and the bottle had been washed out
with ammonia, which develops it.
In slate-messages much use is made of a false flap, or a loose sheet of
slate which fits imperceptibly on one side of the framed slate. It
conceals the message written on the slate, and is removed under the
table or under cover of a newspaper. A sheet of slate-coloured silk or
cloth is sometimes fitted on the slate, and it is drawn up the medium's
sleeve or rolled into the frame of the slate. Invisible messages may be
written on the slate with onion or lemon juice, and developed by lightly
passing over them a cloth containing powdered chalk. Double-frame slates
lend themselves to infinite trickery. Slates are provided by "the trade"
with false hinges and all kinds of mechanism. But even when the sitter
brings his own slates, as Zöllner did, and ties them up and seals them,
the medium is not baffled. They are laid aside, for the spirits to write
on at their leisure. At the first convenient opportunity the medium
removes the wax, without spoiling the seal, by passing a heated
knife-blade or fine wire beneath it, and, after untying the strings,
heats the under-surface of the wax and sticks it on again.
Mediums found that sitters were greatly impressed if they heard the
sound of the spirits writing on the slate. This was easily done by
scraping with the finger nail, and cautious people wanted to have a
security against fraud. One medium gave them adequate security. He held
both hands above the table, yet writing was distinctly heard underneath
it. The man had attached to the table a clamp holding a bit of
slate-pencil, and against this he rubbed a pencil which was fastened to
his trousers by loops of black silk. Others can use a pencil with their
toes--I have seen an armless Bulgar girl use a pen with her toes as
neatly as a good writer uses his fingers--and hold both hands above the
table.
This trick is often used when a message is wanted in answer to a
question and cannot be written in advance. The usual method is, however,
to hold the slate under the table-top and write on it while it is held
there. At first this was done by means of a tiny bit of slate-pencil
slipped under the nail of the big finger. Slade soon found that this
was suspected, and he made a point of keeping his nails short. The trade
which is at the back of mediums then supplied thimbles with bits of
pencil attached, which the medium could slip on to his finger as he put
the slate under the table. Even thimbles with three differently coloured
chalks were made, and the innocent sitter would be invited to select his
own colour for the spirits to write in. The most amazing tricks were
developed. Robinson tells of a man who would let you bring your own
slate and hold it against your own breast, and the message then appeared
on it. He "tried" your slate when you brought it by writing on it with
his pencil. But, of course, he sponged out all his writing before he
handed the slate back to you, as you could see. He had a double
pencil--slate at one end and silver nitrate at the other--and what he
wrote with the latter was invisible until it was damped with salt-water.
Well, the sponging (or damping) had been done with salt-water, and so
the message (in silver nitrate) appeared as the slate dried against your
breast.
When you thus allow the medium to use his own apparatus in his own room
you need not be surprised at any result whatever. The sensible man will
remember that behind the mediums is the same ingenious industry which
supplies conjuring outfits. Mr. Selbit showed Mr. Moseley a typewriter,
on an ordinary-looking table, which spelt out, by invisible fingers, a
message in reply to your question. There was an electrical mechanism in
the table, and an electrician in the next room controlling it by a wire
through the hollow table-leg. But even without such elaborate mechanism
mediums can baffle quite vigilant sitters. There was one who would
allow you to examine his nails, yet he got slate-messages without
putting the slate under the table. He had ground slate-pencil to dust,
mixed it with gum, and then cut the mixture into little cubes or
pellets. He simply stuck these on his trousers, and, _after_ you had
examined his nails, helped himself to one.
When the answers are given on paper a hundred other tricks are employed.
First the medium must learn the question you are putting to the spirits.
If you put it mentally, you will never get more than a lucky or unlucky
guess, unless you happen to be one of those sitters for whom the medium
was prepared. You need not fear telepathy. It must be admitted to-day
that the evidence for telepathy or thought-transference is in as parlous
a condition as the evidence for Spiritualism. After all the challenges
and discussions not a single serious claim lies before us. Sir A. C.
Doyle, it is true, tells (_Debate_, p. 28) quite confidently of Mr.
Lethem getting an answer to his unspoken questions. But Sir Arthur, as
usual, does not tell all the facts. The unspoken questions to which Mrs.
Lethem, as a medium, gave "correct answers" were precisely the two test
questions which Mr. Lethem had put to a medium some time before! We may
surely presume that he had confided that wonderful experience to the
wife of his bosom.
No, there is no clear case of telepathy, or answers to unspoken
questions, on record. The medium gets you to write your questions.
Spirits are supposed to be more at home in reading such spiritual things
as thoughts than in reading material scribbles; but your medium is not a
spirit, and you will get no answer unless he knows the question. If you
write your question on the pad which he kindly offers, it is easy.
There is a carbon paper underneath, which gives him a duplicate. In one
very elaborate case the carbon and duplicate were under the cloth, and
were drawn off, when you had finished writing, through a hollow leg of
the table into the next room. One medium developed the art of reading
what you wrote from the movements of the top of your pencil. Others,
like Foster, artfully stole your bit of paper and substituted dummies.
But I will quote from Mr. Carrington a last trick which will give the
reader a sufficiently large idea of the wonderful ingenuity which
mediums use in these spirit messages.
He tells in his _Personal Experiences of Spiritualism_ of a pair of
Chicago mediums--the same Misses Bangs who painted spirit pictures
before your eyes, as I have previously described--whose method was
extraordinarily difficult to detect. You wrote a letter to a deceased
person. You folded a blank sheet with this letter, and sealed them
yourself in an envelope. This letter you handed to Miss Bangs as she sat
at the table opposite you. After a long delay, but without her leaving
the room, she restored the envelope (which had lain on the table under a
blotter) to you intact, and you found a letter to you from your spirit
friend written on the blank sheet you had enclosed.
Mr. Carrington admits that he can only guess the way in which this
striking performance was done, but the reader who cares to read his full
and interesting account will feel that his conjecture is right. The
letter did not remain on the table. Under cover of the blotting pad and
various nervous movements it was conveyed to the medium's lap, and from
there to a shallow tray on the floor under the table. The medium, he
noticed, sat close to a door which led into an adjoining room, and he
believes that the tray was pulled by a string from under the table into
the next room. An expert whom he afterwards sent to examine the house,
under cover of a sitting, verified his conjecture that there was space
enough at the bottom of the door to pull a shallow tray through. In the
next room it was easy for Miss Bangs No. 2 to open the letter, write the
reply, and seal the envelope again. Even wax seals offer no difficulty
to mediums. The letter was re-conducted to the table in the same furtive
way. A desperate Spiritualist may say that his hypothesis is simpler
than this. But there is one little difficulty. No such person had ever
existed as the supposed dead relative to whom Mr. Carrington addressed
his letter! He had hoaxed the hoaxer.
Here were two quiet and inoffensive-looking spinsters earning a good
living by deceptive practices (this and the spirit-painting trick) which
they had themselves, apparently, originated, and which taxed the
ingenuity of an expert conjurer to discover. What chance has the
ordinary inquirer, much less the eager Spiritualist, against guile of
this description? A boy of sixteen can buy a box of conjuring apparatus
for a guinea. It contains only tricks which have been scattered over the
country for years. Yet in your own drawing-room he can, after a little
practice, cheat your eyes every time, although you know that there is
trickery, and are keenly on the look-out for it. What chance have you,
then, against a man or woman who has been conjuring for twenty years?
What chance have you in a poor light? What earthly chance have you in
the dark? It is amazing how inquirers and Spiritualists forget this
elementary truism. They tell you repeatedly, with the air of supreme
experts in conjuring, that "there was no possibility of fraud." That is
sheer self-deception. Even expert conjurers have been completely
deceived by mediums, as Bellachini was with Slade (a confessed impostor)
and Carrington was with Eusapia Palladino. The man who tells you that
there was no fraud because he saw none is as foolish as the man who
expects _you_ either to explain where the fraud was or else embrace
Spiritualism.
There is one other method of receiving messages which we must briefly
notice. It is, to Spiritualists, the most impressive of all. The ghost
of the dead _talks directly to you_. A "direct voice" medium is, of
course, required, and some kind of trumpet is provided by the medium
through which the spirit speaks to you. If you are known to the medium,
or if you have a good imagination and are very eager, you can recognize
the very accents of your dead wife or mother-in-law. But there is one
disadvantage of this impressive phenomenon. It must take place in
complete darkness; and we remember the warning of that high and
experienced psychic authority, Dr. Maxwell, that the man who seeks any
kind of phenomena in complete darkness is wasting his time.
Spiritualist writers are amusing when they try to reconcile us to the
conditions which their mediums have imposed on them. Are there not
certain conditions for the appearance of all scientific phenomena, they
ask us? Most assuredly. You cannot grow carrots without soil, and so on.
Is not darkness a condition of certain scientific processes? Again,
most certainly. The photographic plate must be prepared in the dark, or
in a dull red light. Therefore.... That is just where the Spiritualist
fails. If the darkness under cover of which the photographic chemist
prepares his plates lent itself equally to cover fraud or to protect his
operations, there would be a parallel. As it is, there is no parallel.
The red light of the photographer can serve only one purpose. When the
medium uses it, there are two purposes conceivable. One is, on the
Spiritualist theory, that white light may interfere with the
"magnetism," or the "psychic force," or whatever the latest jargon is.
The other conceivable purpose is that it may cover fraud. Everybody
admits that the darkening of the planet since 1848 has covered "a vast
amount of fraud," to use the words of Baron Schrenck. Few people admit
that it has favoured real phenomena. It is therefore quite absurd to
attempt to reconcile us to the darkness by the analogy of photographic
operations. There is no analogy at all. In the one case the poor light
certainly favours fraud, and does not certainly do anything else. In the
other case the red light never covers fraud, but has a single clear
purpose.
Red light, as I have said, is the most tiring for the eye of all kinds
of light. The man who thinks that he can control the hands and feet of
seven mediums in such a light cannot expect to be taken seriously. He
can expect only to be taken in. But the man who pays any attention to
phenomena for which the medium requires pitch darkness is even worse.
Why not simply _imagine_ that the dead still live, and save the guinea?
You have not the slightest guarantee of the genuineness of the
phenomena. Imagining that you can recognize the voice or the features
is one of the oldest of illusions.
In the summer of 1912 our Spiritualists were elated by the discovery of
a new medium of the most powerful type. Mrs. Ebba Wriedt came from that
perennial breeding-ground of great mediums, the United States, where she
had long been known. In 1912 she illumined London. Through her W. T.
Stead was able once more to address Spiritualists _viva voce_. One
recognized the familiar voice unmistakably. Scepticism was ludicrous.
Did not a Serbian diplomatist talk to the spirit in Serb, which Mrs.
Wriedt did not know, and answer for the genuineness of the phenomena?
_Light_ had wonderful columns on Mrs. Wriedt's marvels. She was, the
editor of a psychic journal said, "the pride and the most convincing
argument of the whole Spiritualist and Theosophical world." In admiring
her powers, even the mutual hostility of Spiritualist and Theosophist
was laid aside, it seems.
Norwegian Spiritualists were eager to avail themselves of this rare
gift, and they asked if Norwegian spirits could speak through the great
medium. After consulting the spirits--a cynic would say, after
practising a word or two of Norwegian--Mrs. Wriedt replied in the
affirmative, and boldly crossed the sea.
There is, of course, no intrinsic reason, on the Spiritualist theory,
why spirits should be confined to the language of the medium. In "direct
voice" they do not even have to use her vocal organs. A trumpet lies on
the ground or the table, and the spirits lift it up and megaphone (very
softly) through it. It is quite inexplicable to those of us who are mere
inquirers why the spirits must always talk English in England, American
in America, and so on. Even when they try, as in the case of the Thomas
brothers, to talk their native American to us in England, the result is
half bad American and half Welsh-English. It would be much more
impressive to our hesitating generation if a half-dozen foreigners were
brought to the sitting, and each had a real conversation--not a word or
two--with a ghost of his own nationality. Somehow the spirits insist on
speaking the language, and even the dialect, of the medium. We shall
consider in the next chapter a few supposed variations from this
unfortunate rule of spirit-intercourse.
Well, Mrs. Wriedt went to Norway, and confronted her new inquirers with
all the solidity and confidence of the well-built American matron.
Somehow, the vocabulary of the Norwegian dead, who came along, was very
limited. They could say only "Yes" or "No" in Norwegian. Otherwise the
first séance was very good. To make up for their culpable ignorance of
their native tongue the Norwegian ghosts scattered flowers about the
dark room, gave ghostly music, and did other marvellous things. But
there were two ladies and a professor--Frau Nielsen and Frau Anker and
Professor Birkeland--who did not like this "Yes" and "No" business. It
was scriptural, but not ladylike. So the professor held Mrs. Wriedt's
hands very firmly at the second séance, and for twenty minutes the
spirits were dumb. They always resent such things, as every Spiritualist
knows. The trumpets lay on the floor, neglected and silent.
At length Professor Birkeland heard some very faint explosive sounds
which his ears located in the trumpets or horns (in shape something like
the old coach-horn). He looked steadily and saw them move slightly, a
phosphorescent light in them making the movements clear. A good
Spiritualist would have seen that this was the beginning of
manifestations, and he would have paid close attention to the trumpets
and relaxed his hard control of Mrs. Wriedt. The professor was, however,
of the type which mediums call "brutal." He jumped up, switched on the
electric light, and, before the Spiritualists could interfere, had
snatched the two trumpets from the floor and bolted to the nearest
analytic chemist. So the curtain fell on one more glorious act in the
Spiritualist drama. Mrs. Wriedt had put in the trumpet particles of
metallic potassium which, meeting the moisture she had also thoughtfully
provided, explained the "psychic movements." Close examination disclosed
that on other occasions she had used Lycopodium seeds to produce the
same effect.
Professor Birkeland did not discover how the voices were produced, but
they offer no difficulty. The trumpets were, he found, telescopic. Each
consisted of three parts, and could stretch to nearly three feet. When
some guileless lady, who is controlling the medium, allows a hand to
stray in the usual way, the trumpet is seized, and it will give a
"direct voice" over the heads of the sitters or close to any one of
them. When the trumpet remains on the ground during the ghostly message,
the medium has a rubber speaking-tube fitted to it. When no trumpet is
provided at all, it makes no difference. The medium has thoughtfully
brought one of these telescopic aluminium tubes in his trousers. It
folds up to less than a foot. In some of the earlier cases, possibly
still in some cases, the medium's little daughter, who sits demure and
mildly interested on the couch before the light is switched off, mounts
the furniture in the dark, and obligingly impersonates the ghost.
No one would accuse Mr. Crawford, of Belfast, of being ultra-critical,
yet his experience confirms my conclusions. His marvellous experiences
with the pious Kathleen drew the attention of the Spiritualist world,
and all sorts of mediums came to help. First he tried the clairvoyants.
But they saw such weird and contradictory things that he was worried.
None of them saw the wonderful "psychic cantilever" which he thought the
spirits made to lift the table, but they all saw ghostly hands where he
did not want them; and the worst of it was that the same spirits which
had confirmed his theory of a cantilever, and even allowed him to take a
photograph (which he has meanly refused to publish) of it, now joyously
confirmed the quite different theory of the Spiritualist clairvoyants.
So he gave it up, and next tried a "direct voice" medium. He is fairly
polite about the result. He got plenty of voices from all quarters--in
total darkness. Not only did a voice come from the ceiling, but a mark
was made on it. The medium's silk coat was frivolously taken off her by
the ghosts, and flung on the lap of one of the sitters. Strangely, these
things do not impress him as much as the raising of a two-pound stool to
a height of four feet does. He drops dark hints that things were said
about this "direct voice" medium. She was a big woman, and she was not
searched; and telescopic aluminium tubes take up little room. Mr.
Crawford put his little electrical register near her feet, and she was
"annoyed and nervous." In short, Mr. Crawford seems to have formed the
same opinion as any sensible person would in the circumstances.[15]
We have still to examine the claims of the automatic writers; but, after
all this, the reader will not expect much. Never yet was a message
received which could not have been learned by the medium in a normal
way. The overwhelming mass of the messages which are delivered daily in
every country are fraudulent. In an amusing recent work (_The Road to
En-Dor_) two officers have shown us how easy it was to dupe even
educated men by these professions of marvellous powers. The advantage is
on the side of the conjurer every time, and the sitter has little
chance. Let the mediums come before a competent tribunal. All sorts of
inducements have been offered to them to do so, but they are very shy of
competent investigators. In 1911 an advertisement in the _Times_ offered
£1,000 to any medium who would merely give proof of possessing
telepathic power, and there was not a single offer. This year Mr. Joseph
Rinn, a former member of the American Society for Psychical Research and
a life-long inquirer, has deposited with that Society a sum of £1,000
for any evidence of communication with the dead under proper conditions.
There will again be no application. Mediums prefer a simpler and more
reverent audience, even if the fees be smaller. But those who consult
them under their own conditions, knowing that fraud has been practised
under those conditions from San Francisco to Petrograd ever since 1848,
must not talk to us about "evidence."
FOOTNOTES:
[14] The chapter should be read in Truesdell's racy book, which is now
unfortunately rare, _Bottom Facts Concerning the Science of
Spiritualism_ (1883), pp. 276-307.
[15] These experiments are recorded in his _Experiments in Psychical
Science_ (1919), pp. 134-35 and 170-89.