“I am standing on the bridge near the captain… we are going down… the water is rising… it’s up to my knees… to my waist… to my shoulders… this is the end. The engines are coming up!”
Now what could that have been intended to mean? Wood wondered. The widow too had puzzled over it. Perhaps a rush of steam as the water reached the furnaces? Not likely. It stuck in Wood’s memory like a cocklebur, because it was peculiar. The lady was on her way to London, where she was to meet Professor Hyslop again. He was going to take her to a celebrated English medium from whom they hoped to get what the psychical researchers call “cross references”. Wood, arriving in England, was the house guest for a few days of Sir Oliver and Lady Lodge.
After dinner on the second day (Wood tells me) Sir Oliver said, “Oh, by the way, we have another guest arriving tomorrow who is your countryman”. “Who is it?” I asked. “Professor Hyslop of Columbia”, replied Sir Oliver.
Hyslop arrived in due course, and after dinner I got them going on psychic phenomena. Presently I invented an imaginary instance in which a man’s wife had drowned in her cabin when a yacht was sunk in a collision. Her husband had received “messages” from her describing her last thoughts as the water rushed in through the rent in the hull. Hyslop sat up and said, “That’s very remarkable. I have a similar case now”. “Tell it”, we said. “Unfortunately I cannot, I’ve been sworn to secrecy. Nobody but the medium and a lady and I know the story”. “Oh, but you can tell it impersonally, mentioning no names, can’t you?” I asked. “Yes, why not?” said Sir Oliver. “There’s no breach of trust in that”.
Well, he finally consented and spun a rather long story, to which I pretended to be listening dreamily. Finally he got to the point, “And then very remarkably he told us his last thoughts, ‘I’m on the bridge, the water is rising, it’s up to my neck, the — ’ The — let’s see — what was it? Oh, yes, ‘The machinery is rising!’ Now what could he have meant by that? I’ve asked naval architects and sea captains, and they can’t imagine”.
I sat with bowed head, my eyes covered with one hand. “No”, I said, “not the machinery is rising — the engines are coming up!”
Hyslop jumped like a jack-in-the-box. “What made you say that?” he asked. “Say what?” I asked, waking up. He repeated it. “Did I say that?” I asked. “You certainly did, didn’t he, Sir Oliver?” “Yes, he certainly did”. “Well”, I said, “if I said that I suppose it was because it came into my mind”.
“The most extraordinary thing I’ve ever heard!” said Hyslop. “Telepathy with the subconscious mind! That was the communication, but I’d forgotten it”.
I never confessed to either of them. Several years later, I again met the charming widow. She had ceased to be interested in mediums, and I told her the story.
Perhaps the most amusing comment on Sir Oliver was made by the Woods’ maid, when Sir Oliver and Lady Lodge were house guests of the Woods in Baltimore. Sir Oliver was to deliver a series of lectures in The Lyric, which is Baltimore’s “opera house”. On the first night the hall was jammed. The public expected him to talk of spooks, ghosts, and the dear departed. His talk was pure science — abstruse and dry. On the next night his audience had dwindled to a tiny group of fellow-scientists. It seems, however, he’d talked earnestly enough of life beyond the grave at the Woods’ table, for when he’d gone the colored maid, long familiar with Wood’s Luciferian raillery, ventured to say:
“Miss Gertrude, it sure made a difference, having dat nice Evangelist in de house”.
I asked Dr. Wood to venture a guess as to why such able scientific men as Flammarion, Crookes, Hyslop, Lodge, and others had been credulous and at times so easily duped — as they had been — by fraudulent spiritualists and mediums. He made a reply which I think throws a lot of light on it.
“The pure scientist”, said he, “is trained to investigate nature’s immutable laws, subtle and complex though they may be. He can perform controlled, quantitative investigations. When it comes to outwitting the guile of the human mind, where the laws are no longer immutable and the scene can be shifted to suit the circumstances, the scientist, despite his skepticism, who has not been indoctrinated in the art of tracking down the fraud, will in his ingenuousness be an easy dupe. The old adage, ‘It takes a thief to catch a thief,’ is only too well demonstrated”.
I suspect that most of the scientific gentlemen, both among the public committees and the privately credulous, who have investigated or held traffic with the spiritualists and mediums, have been on the whole too soft and polite to apply in a literal and ruthless way Wood’s quoted adage. This is partially understandable, particularly in the light of the fact that so many mediums are of the so-called tender sex.
I doubt, for instance, whether there is one among them save this ruthless devil himself, who would have dared to do what he did in the case of the Harvard-investigated Margery…
The Harvard committee, after elaborate investigation, had pronounced the celebrated Boston medium fraudulent, but Dr. William McDougall of Oxford and Duke universities had hedged on it, and the Society for Psychical Research was wanting a further investigation. They induced Professors Knight Dunlap, H. C. McComas, and Wood to form a new committee of three and go up to Boston. Here is the account which Wood has given me of his own sardonic “meddlesomeness” — from the repercussion of which Margery was carried out screeching and fainting. It begins scientifically enough, but soon goes into clinches.
At one of the sittings (Wood says) I brought in an ultraviolet lamp of the type I developed during the war for secret signaling. It emitted a flood of invisible light, though to the eye it appeared only as a very dark red photographer’s darkroom lantern. I asked permission to use this, representing that it was an especially dark light, which was true, and might be favorable to the manifestations. I had with me secretly a small camera with a lens of large aperture with which I felt sure photographs could be made. I showed the lamp to Dr. Crandon, Margery’s husband, while the room was lighted, turned on the lamp, and asked him if it would be all right to use it. He said he would have to consult with the control, “Walter”, a brother of Margery who’d died many years ago. “Walter” said it was O.K. As soon as Margery had gone into a trance, as signified by heavy breathing, the lights were turned down and the “phenomena” commenced. I turned on the ultraviolet light and got out my camera. But looking up I saw that all the bouquets of artificial flowers on the mantelpiece and various other objects in the room had been painted with phosphorescent paint and were glowing in vivid colors, in fact the whole place was lit up like a cathedral. I turned off the light immediately and made no further effort to use it, for the cat was out of the bag. After the sitting was over, Margery came up to me and said in a low voice, “Say, Professor, what kind of light was that you turned on there?”