For proof of this, one does not need to look beyond the courtroom, where every day perfectly honest people give the most contradictory accounts of some simple occurrence. If it is thus difficult to see correctly what goes on in the broad light of day, it surely is far more difficult to be certain of exactly what is happening in a room where there is darkness rather than light. Besides which, the imaginative faculty may be excited to such an extent that the sitters at a séance may not only be misled into making inaccurate reports of what really occurred, but they may even, and with absolute sincerity, testify to phenomena which did not occur at all.
A friend of mine, now a physician in Maryland, used to amuse himself in his student days by playing medium at table-tipping séances. He would cause the table to rap out messages to various acquaintances of his, none of whom were spiritists, but several of whom became intensely interested, owing to their inability to fathom the source of the communications they received, my friend managing things so skillfully that they did not suspect him of hoaxing them.
One evening the table announced the presence of the “spirit” of a little child, the daughter of a lady well known to most of the sitters. They were not aware, however, that my friend was intimately acquainted with the little one’s life history, and when, utilizing this knowledge, he proceeded to make the table rap communications of a most personal character, there was considerable excitement. Suddenly a lady present, not a relative of the dead child, uttered a piercing scream, and fainted.
When she was revived, she declared, with emphatic assurance, that she had seen the head of a child emerge from the center of the table.
Equally indicative of the part imagination plays in constructing spiritistic phenomena is an experience of my own with a New York medium. His specialty was materialization, but at the séance in question he did not attempt to develop “spirit forms” by any of the methods in vogue among materializers. Instead, the gas having been lowered until the room was almost in total darkness, he went into a “trance,” and, seated at the séance table, with his head resting on his hands, declaimed in a singsong voice:
“The spirits are coming. I can feel them approaching. You will be able to see them soon. They are almost here. Here is one now, on my left. Can’t you see it? And here comes another, and another. They are crowding around me, so anxious to communicate with you. Can’t you see them? I can’t hold them long; they will be gone soon. Oh, can’t you see them?”
There were, perhaps, a dozen people present, including myself and a fellow investigator, who had accompanied me. Of the others, three responded to the hypnotic suggestiveness of the medium’s words and manner, and solemnly declared that they could see a “spirit” hovering about him. One lady, whose integrity I could not doubt, insisted that she saw two “spirits,” which she identified as her dead husband and brother.
Undoubtedly, therefore, it is proper to assume that when, in the instances cited at the beginning of this chapter, Professor Lombroso, sitting with Eusapia Paladino, saw a huge wardrobe advance to attack him; and when Lords Crawford and Dunraven saw the medium Home floating through the air, hallucination rather than “spirit action” is the correct explanation. At all events, in view of the known fallibility of the human senses; the manifold opportunities for fraud open to mediums; and the fact that, with the single exception of Home, every medium subjected to scientific investigation has been caught practising fraud at one time or another, it seems extremely rash to accept as genuine any of the phenomena of physical mediumship.
Still, it would be incorrect to say that the time devoted by psychical researchers to the investigation of these phenomena has been time wasted. They have performed a necessary police duty for society, and their labors, as we shall see, have been productive of psychological discoveries of great practical importance.