Chapter II HOW GHOSTS ARE MADE
The most thrilling expectation of every Spiritualist is to witness a materialization. The wild ghost, the ghost in a state of nature, the ghost which beckoned our grandmothers from their beds and waylaid our grandfathers when they passed the graveyard on dark nights, has become a mere legend. Hardly fifty years ago authentic ghost stories were as common as blackberries. But the growth of education and the establishment of exact inquiry into such matters have relegated all these stories to the realm of imagination. According to the Spiritualist, however, we have merely replaced the wild ghost by the tame ghost, the domesticated ghost of the séance room. The clever spirits of the other world, who could not when they were alive on earth detach a single particle from a living body (except with a knife), are now able to take a vast amount of material out of the medium's body and build it up in the space of quarter or half an hour into a hand, a face, or even a complete human body. This is the great feat of materialization.
Let me truthfully record that many of the better educated Spiritualists fight shy of belief in this class of phenomena. They know that in the history of the movement every single "materializing medium" has sooner or later been convicted of fraud. They have, on reflection, seen that the formation, in the course of half an hour, of even a human hand—which is a marvellously compacted structure of millions of cells—would be a feat of stupendous power and intelligence. They feel that, if all the scientific men in the world cannot make a single living cell, it is rather absurd to think that these spirit workers, whose messages do not reflect a very high degree of intelligence, can make a human face out of the slime or raw material of the medium's body in half an hour, and put all the atoms back in their places in the medium's body in another half hour.
The faith of the great majority of Spiritualists is, of course, heroic enough to overlook all these difficulties. Indeed, it is amazing to find even students of science among them indifferent to the enormous intrinsic improbability of a materialization. During the debate at the Queen's Hall Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had on the table before him a work which contained a hundred and fifty photographs of materializations. Several of these represented full-sized human busts (sometimes with the superfluous decoration of beards, spectacles, starched collars, ties, and tie-pins). One of them represented a full-sized human form, dressed in a bath robe. And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a trained medical man, assured the audience that he believed that these were real forms, moulded out of the "ectoplasm" of the medium's body, in the space of less than half an hour, by spiritual powers! Sir William Crookes believed in materializations of a still more wonderful nature, as we shall see. Dr. Russel Wallace believed implicitly in materializations. Sir W. Barrett and Sir O. Lodge believe in materializations, since they believe in the honesty of D. D. Home, who professed to materialize hands.
So we must not blame the ordinary Spiritualist if he knows nothing about the tremendous internal difficulties of this class of phenomena, and the consistent and appalling career of fraud of mediums in this respect. Materialization is the crowning triumph of the medium, the most convincing evidence of the new religion. It goes on to-day in darkened rooms in London—done by men who have already been convicted in London police-courts—and all parts of the world. Fraud follows fraud, yet the believer hopes (and pays) on. Some of the phenomena are genuine, he says; that is to say, some of the tricks were not proved to be fraudulent. Let us see how these things are done.
The incomparable Daniel was the first, apparently, to open up this great field of Spiritualist evidence. In the early fifties he began to exhibit hands which the Spiritualists present were sure were not his hands. But we shall see how, even in our own day, Spiritualists easily take a stuffed glove, a foot, or even a bit of muslin to be a hand, in the weird light of the dark room; and we will not linger over this.
The real creator of this important department of the movement was Mrs. Underhill, the eldest of the three Fox sisters who founded Spiritualism. I will tell the marvellous story of the three Foxes later, and will anticipate here only to the extent of saying that Leah, the eldest sister (Mrs. Fish, later Mrs. Underhill), was the organizing genius of the movement. She was an expert in fraud and a woman of business. Until her own sisters gave her away, forty years after the beginning of the movement, she was never exposed; and even an exposure by her sister in the public Press and on the public stage in New York made no difference to her career. She was the Mme. Blavatsky, the Mrs. Eddy, of Spiritualism.