Unlike the flying armchair, which officers of the SPR swiftly dismissed as hokum, ectoplasm was the subject of elaborate and stone-serious scientific inquiry for more than two decades. Scientific American sponsored an investigation of materializing mediums that was covered in four consecutive issues during 1924. In 1922, the elite Sorbonne University in Paris assigned a team of scientists to sit in on fifteen séances with Eva C., with the specific goal of testing the authenticity of her ectoplasm. (It flunked.) The September 1921 Popular Science Monthly observed that ectoplasm “can assume the shape of a hand or a face or even a whole figure” and is “curiously like human skin in cellular structure.” In 1922, Harvard University graduate student S. F. Damon was featured in the New York Times for his belief that ectoplasm was the elusive “first matter” of the ancient alchemists. The Times index for the years 1920 to 1925 includes more than a dozen entries under “ectoplasm,” ranging from straight-faced coverage of research to more farcical forays, such as “Man Bites a Ghost and Upsets Seance” (“Gallagher actually got a mouthful of ectoplasm….”). Yet you look at any one of the hundreds of photographs of ectoplasm “materializing” from a medium, and it’s clear it was bunk. And not even well-executed bunk. As ghost-biter Gallagher so eloquently put it: “That there stuff is just gauze!” What was going on? What happened to the minds of science that they would, even for a moment, buy into this?
The admissions office lady calls me in and asks for my ID and an “academical letter of introduction.” I hand her a printout of an e-mail from the Keeper of the SPR Archives (Dear Madam,… The Alleged Ectoplasm is not a pleasant object, I should warn you!). And that’s it. I’m in.
The reading room is on the third floor. It has ceilings all the way up in heaven and enormous multipane windows with benedictive shafts of light angling down onto the students. The woman across the table is hunched over a notebook, translating and transcribing from an ancient bundle of brittle blue airmail letters penned in Hebrew. The youth to my left is sacrificing his vision and social life to medieval land transfers. A page arrives with my requested materials: six files, a photo album, and a box containing the Alleged Ectoplasm. The box is made of decoratively patterned cardboard and tied up with a piece of string, like something brought home from a pastry shop. It is larger and showier than I expected. I set it on the floor before anyone can ask what’s inside. The plan is to open it later, when my tablemates have left for lunch.
The top file is labeled “Goligher, Kathleen.” This file goes with the photo album, which contains photographs of Miss Goligher and her visible ectoplasms, dated 1920–1921. Goligher was the inspiration for the theories and experiments of Dr. W. J. Crawford, a lecturer in mechanical engineering at Queen’s University of Belfast. The Golighers were a family of spiritualists—all four daughters worked as mediums—known for their lively séances, held in a tattily wallpapered Belfast sitting room. The sittings unfolded in the typical manner of the spiritualist séance. The medium would disappear behind a curtain or inside a medium cabinet. The lights would be put out—mediums claimed light compromised their abilities and damaged the ectoplasm—and a round of hymns and prayers begun. The medium would fall into a trance and begin producing “demonstrations,” as they are still called today by spiritualists, of the presence and power of whatever spirits he or she had drawn to the room. Most commonly, the spirits would show their stuff by making a table at the center of the séance circle tilt or rise. Since everyone was holding hands, the table appeared to be levitating[21] without the help of anyone seated in the circle.
While most spiritualists were satisfied with the explanation that it was the energy of their spirit friends that was causing the table to rock and rise, Crawford wanted to know exactly how, and by what scientific principles, the dead were accomplishing this. Following a series of experiments involving scales and pressure sensors, he came up with a theory of bendable ectoplasmic rods and cantilevers, which he set forth in embarrassing detail in the 1920 E. P. Dutton hardcovers The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle and Experiments in Psychical Science. (Such was the gullibility of the day that Dutton published five of Crawford’s books without a modicum of queasiness. A 1919 letter in the Dutton archives describes Crawford’s discoveries as being “of such enormous importance to physics that it is not too much to suppose that they may shew the way to a complete upsetting of present ideas and the building of a new theory on the constitution of matter.”[22])
Applying laws of physics and engineering, Crawford calculated that for tables up to thirty pounds, an unsupported or “true” cantilever was employed. The ectoplasmic rod issues “from the torso” (more about this euphemism to come) of the medium, travels parallel to the floor until it reaches the center point of the table, and then changes direction, rising up in a column of four-inch diameter to meet the underside of the tabletop, where it grips the surface by means of a suction-based grasping organ. (He claimed to be able to hear the suckers”—never a good word choice for W. J. Crawford—“gripping and sliding over the wood.”) If the table weighed more than thirty pounds, Crawford concluded, a supported cantilever was employed by the spirits: It angled down and met the floor, which it used for support, before bending and rising to meet the table.
Crawford attempted to prove the existence of the two types of ectoplasmic cantilevers by setting a pressure-recording apparatus under the séance table. This consisted of two pieces of wood that, when pressed together, would complete a circuit, causing a bell to ring. Crawford describes telling Goligher’s spirit helpers—or “operators”—to begin a series of levitations, first with a true ectoplasmic cantilever and then a supported ectoplasmic cantilever. As he predicted, the bell rang only when the supported cantilever was in use.
Crawford didn’t stop there. He wanted more proof. He wanted the sort of proof he could carry out of the séance room and show to his colleagues. Which brings us to Experiment 4—“Impression on modeler’s clay of bottom of cantilever column”—and to the beginning of Crawford’s tragic demise. Here is Crawford describing the experiment:
I brought a little box filled with soft clay to the séance room, and said to the operators, “You remember some time ago when we were investigating the methods by which you levitate the table, I found that if necessary you could levitate it by putting the bottom end of the columnar part of the cantilever on the floor immediately under the table, so that it forms a kind of prop?”… Answer—“Yes.” “Well, I am going to place this box of soft clay under the table and I want you to levitate the table by this method.”… In a very short time, the table levitated immediately above the clay…. At its conclusion I examined the clay. There was a large irregularly shaped impression on it, the length one way being about 3 inches and the other 2½ inches.
In the Goligher file on the table in front of me is a mounted black and white photograph of a similarly obtained “cantilever” impression. It was not made by Crawford, but by a contemporary of his, a psychic researcher named Henry Bremset, who attempted to replicate Crawford’s experiment at a different séance circle. He filled two shortbread tins with putty, placed them under the séance table, and explained to the medium what he hoped to achieve.
21
Often the medium was using her foot to manipulate the furniture. However, Spirit Table Lifting aids were available for $12 by mail-order through the likes of the Ralph E. Sylvestre Company (“our effects are being used by nearly all prominent mediums,” brags the 1901 catalogue). Other helpful items included Telescopic Reaching Rods, self-playing trumpets, and Luminous Materialistic Ghosts (“appears gradually, floats about room and disappears”).
22
They did not, however, shew the way to a new theory on royalty rates. Dutton courteously rebuffed Crawford’s request to double his royalties to 20 percent.