Ghost Stories

By Stefan Kanfer

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."

That ram avis never appeared. Early on Charles Dickens had expressed his skepticism about spirits: "I have never yet observed them to talk anything but nonsense." Not long afterward, Novelist Samuel Butler decided that "if ever a spirit-form takes to coming near me, I shall not be content with trying to grasp it, but. in the interest of science, I will shoot it." Exposes began to play the vaudeville circuit: Magician Harry Houdini showed audiences that the mysteries of spontaneously moving objects were no more than sleight of hand and, sometimes, foot. The Fox sisters, one of them by now a hopeless alcoholic, finally confessed that the strange rapping had been done by manipulating their big toes.

Such exposures eventually cooled the public passion for made-to-order miracles. But, as the author acutely notes, it will not do to dismiss the Victorian period as a simpler time, when the naive were easily swayed by con men and shadowy ladies. Today every paperback emporium offers tiers of books claiming intimate acquaintance with the text of the future and the leaders of the past. Thanatologist Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross tells followers she speaks with the dead. A new edition of the prophecies of Nostradamus, "receded by computer" to give the requisite scientific gloss, has recently sold more than 100,000 copies in Europe. In every epoch of social confusion, concludes this entertaining history of folly, "the show goes on. The spirits are willing, and the flesh is weak.'' --By Stefan Kanfer This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.