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.