William James and the Art of Popular Statement

Chapter Four. Speaking Up for Spirits

111 chapter four Speaking Up for Spirits x O n July 9, 1885, Herman James, the eighteen-month-old son of William James, died as a result of complications from whooping cough. Two days later, James and his wife buried the child, whom they had affectionately called “Humster” during his short time on earth. His death was devastating to the entire James family, and William lamented that he “had hardly known or seen” the boy “at all.”1 Although the child was dead, a peculiar turn of events raised the possibility that little Humster was not so far away after all. In September 1885, William James’s mother-in-law, Elizabeth Gibbens, visited a Boston psychic named Leonora Piper, whose abilities to channel the departed seemed remarkable. While deep in a trance, Piper provided Mrs. Gibbens with “a long string of names of members of the family, mostly Christian names, together with facts about the persons mentioned and their relations to each other, the knowledge of which, on her part, 112 Chapter Four was incomprehensible without supernormal powers.”2 Mrs. Gibbens was overcome with enthusiasm at the medium’s abilities, and she reported the events to her son-in-law. Upon hearing the news, James could not hide his skepticism, as this was not his first time listening to exciting tales of supernormal powers. For the past three years, he had been a member of the Society for Psychical Research, an organization that undertook scientific investigations of mediums, psychics, ghosts, haunted houses, telepathy, automatic writing, life after death, and more. Thus far, the Society for Psychical Research had uncovered nothing impressive; the vast majority of paranormal reports were rubbish. So when Mrs. Gibbens came to James with stories of Piper’s abilities, he thought it another trick being played by a money-hungry peddler of the occult.3 Skepticism, however, did not stop James from paying Piper a visit. Settling into chairs in the parlor of Piper’s house on Beacon Hill, James and his wife watched as the medium entered a trance, her eyes drifting shut, her head turning from side to side, her skin covered with goose bumps, her voice much deeper than normal. Though James and his wife had given the medium no personal information—they were trying to be as objective and scientific as possible4 —Piper pursued Alice James’s maiden name through the fog of the trance. “Niblin,” she said first, then “Giblin.” Eventually she got it right: Gibbens. After that, Piper repeated the same list of names she had given to James’s mother-in-law. Then the meeting took a much stranger turn: Piper asked about a dead child. Many couples at the time lost children to illness, so it was a fairly safe guess, but the medium became eerily specific. The dead child was a small boy, and his name sounded something like “Herrin.” “Herrin” was not exactly “Herman,” but it was close enough to pique James’s interest. In fact, the names and details Piper provided on that first visit made it “impossible,” James later recalled, “not to recognize the particular individuals who were talked about.”5 Confronted with the possibility of legitimate paranormal activity, he visited the medium at least a dozen times over the next several months. The more he studied her, the more she impressed him, as she seemed to know information that she should not know, at least by any conventional means. After repeated investigation, James found two explanations before him: either Piper’s abilities amounted to “some lucky coincidence,” or she possessed “supernormal powers.”6 Eventually, Leonora Piper became William James’s “white crow”— the proof that he and other psychical researchers needed to put their Speaking Up for Spirits 113 paranormal investigations on more solid ground. Explaining her status as a “white crow” with the language of the “professional logic-shop,” James stated: “A universal proposition can be made untrue by a particular instance. 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. My own white-crow is Mrs. Piper. In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits.”7 Piper was the key to advancing...