Doctor Wood. Modern Wizard of the Laboratory: The Story of an American Small Boy Who Became the Most Daring and Original Experimental Physicist of Our Day-but Never Grew Up

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.