Books: Ghost Stories

THE SPIRITUALISTS by Ruth Brandon Knopf; 315 pages; $16.95

Mrs. Guppy, Leah Fish, the Fox sisters, Malcolm Bird—the cast seems to have tumbled from Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck. But the people were real, and their adventures are far more peculiar than any mere fable of talking animals and irate farmers.

In The Spiritualists, British Journalist Ruth Brandon takes a narrow-eyed view of an obsession that haunted 19th and early 20th century life. As she cannily observes, Darwin's legacy of doubt had weakened the moral underpinnings of Victorian and American society. But it had merely replaced religious faith with another dogma: the authority of Science. New believers turned to evidence of the world beyond the senses, "proof given by mediums who could communicate with the dead, make ectoplasm appear in darkened chambers and order inanimate objects to move at will. Katherine and Margaretta Fox of Arcadia, N.Y., were the superstars of the new movement, adolescents who could engender a rapping sound that issued, they said, from the beyond.

"Credulity," noted Charles Lamb, "is the man's weakness, but the child's strength." The sisters had no trouble convincing elders that they could converse with the spirits of Benjamin Franklin and John C. Calhoun. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, endorsed their honesty; Leah Fish, an enterprising promoter, moved them from parlors to crowded lecture halls. By 1860, twelve years after the first triumph of the little Foxes, Humorist Artemus Ward wrote in his patented regional dialect, "My naburs is mourn harf crazy on the new fangled idear about Sperrets."

The lunacy manifested itself on both sides of the Atlantic. In London, an obese Mrs. Guppy became celebrated for making specters tangible, including one Abdullah, who, the malicious said, was a small man hidden from the audience in her voluminous petticoats. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, became a drum beater for spiritualism. He too pronounced the Fox sisters genuine; when shown photographs of young girls playing with tiny winged creatures, he concluded that the pictures were incontrovertible evidence that fairies did indeed exist.

In England and the U.S., a small army of mediums appeared to read the future, speak with deceased relatives and pocket very material fees. With a detached, only faintly ironic tone, Brandon notes some of the more bizarre assurances offered by these experts in the occult: one seer reported that alcohol and cigars were present in paradise; Doyle, after consultation with psychics, wrote that in heaven, "nutrition is of a very light and delicate order." Golf, he thought, was likely to be played.

Investigators soon moved in; among them were Malcolm Bird, an editor of Scientific American, and Philosopher William James. "If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black," James declared, "you must not seek to show that no crows are: it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white."