People From Other
Worlds?
Henry Olcott, the Eddys and Materialization Phenomena
Henry Olcott, the Eddys and Materialization Phenomena
Colonel Henry Steele Olcott is best known to
posterity as the joint founder, along with Madame Blavatsky (1831-91) of the
Theosophical Society. When the Society was established in December 1895,
Olcott became its first Chairman. It was largely due to his
administrative ability and the energy with which he devoted himself to his
work, that the Society was able to establish itself firmly enough to withstand
and survive the storm of controversy which the scandal centring around Madame
Blavatsky later unleashed against Theosophy.
It would be as well to point out at this stage, in
view of what follows, that the Blavatsky scandal in no way implicated Olcott,
who emerged from it with his honesty unscathed. This is just as well, for
he is best known today for his singular work, People From The Other Worlds, which caused something of a sensation
when it first appeared in 1875 and has provoked a good deal of controversy ever
since. Olcott’s book, a weighty tome of over four hundred pages, provides
us with a detailed record of a variety of materialisations “seen, heard and
felt”, as he puts it, at the homestead of the Eddy family in the township of
Chittenden, Vermont. Olcott was sent there in 1874 by the New York Daily Graphic to investigate
reports of unaccountable happenings in the Eddys’ home. He stayed with
the Eddys for ten weeks, during which time he witnessed a series of what must
certainly be among the most remarkable happenings in the history of psychic
research. He told his story in a series of fifteen long articles in the Daily Graphic, which were later
published as a book.
Olcott’s investigations were by no means scientific
but they were certainly thorough and he himself emerges as a shrewd,
hard-headed and competent fellow, though how far his accounts of what occurred
were coloured by an attempt to appeal to the readers of the Daily Graphic we shall never know.
But to dismiss his reports out of hand, as apparently most writers on this
subject have done, as either the ravings of a lunatic or the fables of the
biggest liar since Baron Munchausen is clearly preposterous. His story
needs serious critical investigation, for the phenomena he described do not
seem nearly so outlandish when we consider them in the context of other reports
of materialisations current both at this time and later.
The two Eddy brothers, Horatio and William, came
from a family which had displayed psychic powers for many generations.
Their mother, a girl of Scots descent, was a well-known clairvoyant as was her
mother before her. Her great-great-great grandmother had actually been
tried and sentenced to death at Salem United States
and the father hired the children out as mediums to a showman who took them
around the United States and
later to London
“Every girl and boy of them has a marked groove
between the ends of the ulna and radius and the articulation of the bones of
the hand, and every one of them is scarred by hot sealing wax. Two of the
girls showed me scars where pieces of flesh had been pinched out by handcuffs
used by ‘committees’; fools who seem to have been unable to discover suspected
fraud without resort to brutal violence on the persons of children.”
It is well to remember when we hear allegations of
the fraudulent practices and trickery of these early mediums that the tough,
Yankee audiences of the time, who had paid good money to see spiritualist
manifestations, were no fools. They did not care what brutality they
resorted to as long as they could be quite sure they were not being
tricked. Some of the quaint illustrations in Olcott’s book show devices
used on these children which would have done credit to the Inquisition.
At Little Falls, NY, the children were tied to wooden crosses with whipcord and
kept there until the blood trickled from under their fingernails owing to the
tightness with which they were bound. In Albany , NY South
Danvers they were fired upon and assaulted. William was shot
through the ankle and Mary through the arm, while Horatio escaped with a stab
wound and Lynn
I have dwelt at some length upon the barbarities
inflicted upon the Eddy children because I think it essential to counteract the
misapprehension that the early days of spiritualism were characterised by
cunning and unscrupulous mediums defrauding a trusting and gullible
public. Far from it. Even the most cursory reading of the history
of spiritualism discloses the fact that the public, so far from being gullible,
was determined to see that it should not be imposed upon, while in the United States
During the ten weeks he spent with them, Olcott was
unable to discover any evidence of fraud or deception whatsoever, in spite of
the fact that he attended dozens of séances and inspected the house from top to
bottom, even going so far as to call a qualified architect in to make sure that
there were no hidden doors or cupboards. Olcott himself seems to have
been genuinely convinced of the Eddys’ powers. As he puts it himself:
“It will scarcely be said that children who, like
Elisha, were caught up and conveyed from one place to another, and in whose
presence weird forms were materialised as they lay in their trundle beds, were
playing pranks to tax the credulity of an observant public, which was ignorant
of their very existence. It will not be seriously urged, I fancy, against
youth, whose bodies were scored with the lash, cicatrized by burning wax, by
pinching manacles, by the knife, the bullet and by boiling water, who were
starved, driven to the woods to save their lives from parental violence; who
were forced to travel year after year and exhibit their occult powers for
others’ gain; who were mobbed and stoned, shot at and reviled; who could not
get even an ordinary country school education like other children, nor enjoy
the companionship of boys and girls of their own age; it will not be urged
against such as these that they were in conspiracy to deceive when they had everything
to gain and nothing to lose by abandoning the fraud and being like other
folk. The idea is preposterous; and we must infer that whatever may be
the source of the phenomena they are at least objective and not subjective; the
result of some external force independent of the medium’s wishes and
manifesting itself when the penalty of its manifestation was to subject the
unfortunates to bodily torture and mental anguish.” (Olcott, 1972)
Judging from what we are told of their attainments,
the Eddies would seem to represent precisely that type of universal medium
whose psychic powers had led them unerringly to the stake in earlier
periods. Not only did they excel as materialisation mediums but they were
also known for their remarkable powers of telekinesis, of prophecy, of
xenoglossy (speaking in strange tongues), of healing, of levitation, of
psychometry (the reading of a person’s character through objects belonging to
him), of clairvoyance and clairaudience and automatic writing. Olcott
remarks that although much has been made of the story of D.D. Home floating out
of one third-storey window and in through another, Home’s exploits can hardly
compare with those of the Eddys, one of whom was carried one summer night a
distance of three miles to a mountain top, while Horatio was levitated
twenty-six evenings in succession in the Lyceum Hall in Buffalo, even though
tied to a chair, and was once found hanging by the back of the chair from a
chandelier hook in the ceiling. Such reports, one may add, are not to be
taken lightly. There are several completely authenticated cases of
levitation known in Europe, among them that of Colin Evans who demonstrated
levitation at a mass séance in North London in
1938. (An infra-red photograph of this feat has been reproduced in
several publications). But an English audience of 1938 was very much more
tolerant than a group of ignorant farmers in the backwoods of America in the
middle of the last century, so it is hardly surprising that the Eddys were
often forced to flee for their lives as emissaries of the devil if only half
the stories that we hear of their levitations and other feats are true.
After the death of their parents the Eddys continued to live on their farm in Chittenden, plagued and obsessed all the time by the invisible powers and dominions that would not let them be. They were a strange, close-knit family, embittered and sullen from the treatment they had received as children, deeply suspicious of the rest of the world, turning largely to each other for comfort and consolation. Eventually, to alleviate their harsh poverty, they hit upon the idea of holding séances in their own house. Since people came from far and wide to see them they generally allowed their visitors to stay with them as paying guests for as long as they desired. Olcott attempted to get to know the Eddys during his lengthy stay, but found them so distrustful and reserved that he was never really able to make contact with them.
The séances at Chittenden were held in a
first-storey room which Olcott describes in considerable detail. He
states that he had the room thoroughly inspected, reproducing a statutory
declaration from “an inventor of many
years’ experience and a grantee of twenty-three patents by the United States
“He has thoroughly examined the walls, windows,
ceiling and floor of William H. Eddy’s ‘cabinet’ and the floor of the platform
upon which it opens and there is no possible means by which confederates could
be introduced into the said cabinet except through the open door in full face
of the audience; nor any place where costumes or apparatus could be
stowed. Furthermore, that after witnessing numerous materialisations by
alleged spirits, he is perfectly satisfied that the phenomena, whatever may be
their origin, are not produced by jugglery, the personation of characters by
William H. Eddy, or chemical or mechanical device.”
In the light of this, Olcott concludes:
“Granted that certain forms, apparently differing
in sizes, colours, costumes, sex and age present themselves on the platform
they must be either (1) deceptive impersonations by one man or (2) the
manifestations of an occult force. There is no escape from the
syllogism. The battle must be fought out at the cabinet door. I
realised this the first day I came; I realise it ten-fold now. The weeks
I spent there, were weeks of as hard mental labour as I ever gave to any
subject in my whole life. I passed through every degree of incredulity
and distrust. I was ever on the watch lest I might miss some new
circumstance calculated to overturn my formed opinion and ever ready to confess
myself a dupe of impostors if the fact could be demonstrated to me, but I
finally reached the same point with Mr Morrill, that whatever might be thought
of the cause of the phenomena they were not due to charlatanry or
prestidigitation” (p.83).
At this juncture we are entitled to ask whether we
may trust Olcott as an observer. If what Olcott says is true, and it
would have been impossible for the Eddys to produce the phenomena he witnessed
either through the use of confederates or by conjuring tricks, then we are left
either with the possibility that Olcott and the audience were victims of mass
hallucination over a period of ten weeks or that Olcott himself was an
unmitigated liar. Neither of these alternatives seems even remotely
possible. Contrary to popular belief, hallucination – especially mass
hallucination – is a rare phenomenon and the possibility that it could occur at
the Eddy’s house night after night for years on end is too preposterous to
merit serious consideration. We are left then with the question of
Olcott’s veracity. Although he wrote these articles for a newspaper,
Olcott was not a professional journalist and may therefore be reasonably
assumed to have been free from that passion for a good story at the expense of
the literal truth which so often inspires professional journalists.
Furthermore, as I remarked earlier, his conduct in the Blavatsky scandal does
him credit and would certainly appear to have placed his moral character above
suspicion. Moreover, Olcott came late to spiritualism and spent most of
his life as a very shrewd Yankee businessman. He is hardly the sort of
person whom we would expect to have gone in for highly embroidered stories
about spiritualist marvels. It is much more likely that he would have
seized the occasion, had it presented itself, to expose any fraud he had come
across.
Olcott arrived in Chittenden in September 1874
highly sceptical of the stories he had heard and determined to expose the Eddys
if he found they were imposing upon the public. He was agreeably
surprised to discover that the first phantom to appear on the evening of his
arrival was that of an Indian woman named Honto, realising that this in itself
was evidential since there were no Indians left around Chittenden at that
period. Olcott pointed out that he saw this particular phantom about
thirty times and even measured her against a painted scale he had placed beside
the cabinet door. He was adamant that she bore not the slightest
resemblance to William Eddy, nor to any other member of the family, adding that
the length of her hair varied from very long to quite short. Apart from
her curious habit of sinking into the floor from time to time, Honto seemed
every bit as human as her audience. On one occasion, however, a Mrs
Cleveland asked if she could feel the beating of Honto’s heart, whereupon she
opened her dress and allowed the lady to put her hand upon her bare breast, which
apparently felt cold and moist and not like that of a living person.
Nevertheless, this phantom had a heartbeat which could be felt at the wrist as
well. A similar observation was made of the celebrated phantom, Katie
King, whose pulse, as taken by a medical man present at the séance, was
seventy-five compared with the medium’s ninety.
After Honto’s appearance, so Olcott informs us, two other squaws materialised, one called Bright Star and another Daybreak, both of them quite different in appearance from Honto. They were followed by an Indian called Santum who stood over six feet three inches in height, far taller than either of the Eddy brothers. He wore a hunting shirt of dressed buckskin with a powder horn slung across his shoulder. Curiously enough this horn had been presented to Santum by a visitor some time before, so it remained behind each time he dematerialised, awaiting his next appearance.
After Honto’s appearance, so Olcott informs us, two other squaws materialised, one called Bright Star and another Daybreak, both of them quite different in appearance from Honto. They were followed by an Indian called Santum who stood over six feet three inches in height, far taller than either of the Eddy brothers. He wore a hunting shirt of dressed buckskin with a powder horn slung across his shoulder. Curiously enough this horn had been presented to Santum by a visitor some time before, so it remained behind each time he dematerialised, awaiting his next appearance.
Several phantoms of white men then made their
appearance, all of whom were positively identified by members of the
audience. The first of these was a certain William H. Reynolds, a colonel
of the Fourteenth New York Artillery who had died some months before of
fever. He was followed by his brother, John E. Reynolds, a Harvard
graduate who had died fourteen years before. Neither of these phantoms
bore the slightest resemblance either in dress, physique or features to any of
the Eddy family. The next phantom to appear was apparently a habitual
visitor. He was the deceased father-in-law of Delia Eddy, who spoke “like a living man”, much to Olcott’s
amazement, for most of the other phantoms were mute. The evening closed
with the appearance of an old woman, accompanied by a child of twelve or
thirteen and a baby of about a year old (Olcott, p.140).
William Eddy, the medium, did not work in complete
darkness, but in subdued light. This meant that Olcott could actually see
the phantoms and was not reduced simply to hearing them. In order to help
him judge their heights, he had two strips of white muslin painted out in feet
and inches tacked on either side of the cabinet door. By this means he
was able to judge that the tallest phantom, Santum, “was almost six foot three inches in height and the smallest just over
two feet tall” (Olcott, p.191). This discrepancy in the heights is
one of the surest indications that neither William Eddy nor any of his family
could possibly have been responsible for these manifestations, since nobody in
the family was that tall or that small.
On another occasion, shortly after his arrival,
Olcott saw no fewer than seventeen spirits, none of them Indians this time,
manifest themselves in the course of a single evening. There were, he
asserts, seven males, five women, three children and two babies. Certain
sceptics insisted that the babies were but an optical illusion caused by the
medium wrapping white bandages around his legs and waving them out of the
cabinet. Olcott was properly scornful of this. He pointed out that
the smallest child he saw that evening bowed and curtsied to its mother in the
audience when she asked it if it were really her own. Furthermore, many
of these phantoms, if not most of them, were recognised by the sitters present
and since the light was dim, though not good, it was possible to make out the
features of these apparitions without too much trouble. Certain
apparitions appeared again and again. Honto and Mr Brown, the “talking spirit” as Olcott calls him,
appeared at every séance. Another frequent visitor was the phantom-mother
of a certain Mr Pritchard, a lady who was identified many times not only by her
son but by his sister and her many grandchildren, who were cordially invited to
come up to the platform and be hugged and kissed by the old lady, though Olcott
does not tell us whether or not they accepted this eerie invitation.
In Olcott’s opinion, Mrs Pritchard was the most
satisfactory materialisation he had ever witnessed, since she not only appeared
very frequently but was seen and recognised by so many of her relations.
On the evening of September 27, this domesticated phantom seated herself cosily
in a chair by her son’s side and held a long, intimate conversation with him
about the projected visit of her daughter to Chittenden. Olcott noticed
that as they talked the old lady was fingering her white muslin apron in a
peculiar manner, pinching it up into folds until she reached the bottom hem and
then smoothing it out again. He mentioned this to Pritchard after the séance
and was told that it had been his mother’s habit to do this when she was alive
and that any of her acquaintances could have identified her by this nervous
tick alone (Olcott, p.267).
After he had stayed at the Eddys’ for a week or so,
Olcott decided that he would only be satisfied as to the genuineness of the
phenomena if William Eddy would agree to hold a sitting in the family
living-room and not in the hall where the séances generally took place, since
this would eliminate once and for all the possibility of deception.
William not only readily agreed to this but managed
that evening to produce a greater variety of phantoms than Olcott had seen
during his entire stay at the house. The first one to appear was the
indefatigable Honto who, as Olcott puts it:
“…stepped to the dining-room door, lifted the latch
and threw it open; then began capering about in her usual way, as if she were
in fine spirits.… Then she stepped to the right of the cabinet door and stood
just opposite me looking intently upon the floor, by the mop-board. There
was nothing to be seen at first but the bare planks, but presto! as I watched,
I suddenly saw a heap of something black, as it might be a piece of a woman’s
dress or a quantity of black netting. She stretched out her hand, and
daintily picked it up with thumb and forefinger, held it open and it was one of
her shawls! Thus within a few feet of my nose she exhibited the whole
process of materialising fabrics, and left me in a very pleased mood, as may be
imagined” (p.277).
Honto was followed by a young woman carrying a
child who was recognised by her sister as Mrs Josephine Dow, who had died
twenty-four years before at the age of nineteen. She stood there for some
time to enable an artist by the name of Kappes to sketch her, much to Olcott’s
astonishment. It is, incidentally, a pity that Olcott did not bring a
photographer along with him rather than an artist. Photography was
certainly advanced enough at that time to have given us quite adequate pictures
of the phenomena that appeared at the Eddys’ house. However, newspapers
could not as yet reproduce photographs and it was for this reason that Kapps
was sent along by the Daily Graphic, for his sketches could be reproduced as
illustrations to Olcott’s articles.
Mrs Dow was followed by the phantom of William
Packard, who moved along the wall to a position where his figure was thrown
into relief by the light-coloured wallpaper so that the artist could sketch him
the more easily. He was wearing a dark suit, a single-breasted waistcoat
and a white shirt with a collar, quite different attire from the medium, who
was dressed in an ordinary gingham shirt. Other phantoms then appeared,
among them a Mrs Eaton, whom Olcott describes as “a little old wrinkled woman in an old-fashioned mob-cap, a greyish
dress and a check, woollen shoulder shawl” (p.282). She was followed
by an old man who, in answer to a question from one of his relatives, replied
that he had died thirty-nine years before at the age of eighty-two. Then
Augusta, a fourteen-year-old, appeared and smiled at her mother who was sitting
next to Olcott. Finally, the evening was brought to a close by the
materialisation of a certain Jeremiah McCready of Cayuga County , New York
Olcott was especially impressed by both the appearance
and the subsequent disappearance of the baby. He was adamant that he had
seen a child and not an impersonation put forth by the medium:
“The figure stood too near me and in too good a
light to admit of such deceptions being practised. It was a living,
moving child which, with its right thumb in its mouth, nestled its little head
in the neck of its bearer and passed its chubby left arm around her neck....
Made from the imponderable atoms floating in the foul air of that chamber, it
was resolved into nothing in an instant of time, leaving no trace of its
evanescent existence behind”
(p.288).
Olcott’s testimony borders on the incredible.
Nevertheless, unless we assume that he was an arrant liar we must be prepared
to give it serious consideration. For one thing, although he was not
working under laboratory conditions nevertheless he did his best to give
scientific accuracy to his investigations. He thoroughly examined the
house and its surroundings, even going to the extent of bringing in an expert
from outside to make quite sure he had missed nothing. He brought a
weighing scale from New York
Olcott also brought in two spring balances in order
to test the power of the hands which had materialised one evening. A left
hand exerted a force of forty pounds on the balance and a right hand of fifty
pounds, in a light which was so good that Olcott was able to see that the
little finger was missing from the right hand (Olcott, p.257). Under the
circumstances one feels Olcott did his best even though he was not working in a
laboratory. He certainly cannot be accused of going about his
investigations in a credulous or unmethodical manner.
This leaves us with only one burning question: Was
Olcott a liar? I have already pointed out that before his experiences at
Chittenden Olcott had had no contact with spiritualism whatsoever and was, if
anything, something of a sceptic. Certainly, there is no indication that
he went to Chittenden with any intention except to investigate the reports of
strange occurrences there. Even so, if we had no testimony other than
that of Olcott we would, I think, find it hard to believe him. What makes
his story credible is the number of testimonies signed by well-known
professional men which bear out his reports. One testimonial signed by a
Dr R. Hodgson and four other reputable witnesses certified that:
“Santum was out on the platform and another Indian
of almost as great stature came out and the two passed and repassed each other
as they walked up and down.... At the same time a conversation was being
carried on between George Dix, Mayflower, Mr Morse and Mrs Eaton. We
recognised the voice of each. We had examined the cabinet that evening
and helped clear it of some plaster and other rubbish. There was no
window in it then” (Olcott,
p.198).
Another certificate, signed by a businessman,
Edward B. Pritchard, of Albany ,
New York
“…certain mysterious phenomena known as ‘spirit
materialisations’ occurred; that among other forms presenting themselves and
identified by persons in the audience as the shapes of deceased friends and
relatives, there appeared the figure of an Indian woman known as Honto who
approached so close to deponent that he distinctly saw every feature of her
countenance, and her entire body; that he is well-acquainted with William H.
Eddy and avows that the said Honto bore no resemblance whatever to him in any
particular. A deponent further says that a pair of platform scales being
previously placed convenient to his reach, the said Honto stood thereupon four
separate times for deponent to weigh her, and that without having apparently
changed her bulk, or divested herself of any portion of her dress, she weighed
respectively eighty-eight pounds, fifty-eight pounds, fifty-eight pounds and
sixty-five pounds at the several [four] weighings.”
This particular certificate was subscribed and
sworn on September 30, 1875, before H.F. Baird, a local Justice of the Peace
(Olcott, p.243).
The most astonishing manifestations that Olcott
witnessed, however, were connected with the renowned Madame Blavatsky whom he
met at Chittenden when she arrived there on October 14, 1874. On that
very evening a phantom materialised colourfully clad in a Georgian jacket,
baggy trousers, yellow leather leggings and a white fez, an apparition whom
Blavatsky recognised at once as a certain Michalko Guegidze of Kutais , Georgia Philadelphia , stating that he was
himself a native Georgian, one of the only three Georgians in the United States Vermont
The following evening, to the general astonishment,
another Georgian phantom calling itself Hassan Agha appeared. Madame
Blavatsky claimed to recognise him as a wealthy merchant from Tiflis
whom she had once known well. He appeared gorgeously attired in a long
yellow coat, Turkish trousers and a black astrakhan cap covered with the
national bashlik or hood, with its tasselled ends thrown over his shoulder
(p.310). Along with him came a Russian peasant woman who was greeted with
delight as a retainer of the Blavatsky family, an old nurse who had looked
after Madam Blavatsky and her sister when they were children. Both of
these phantoms addressed her, the one in Russian and the other in Georgian
(p.310). To cap it all, a picturesquely dressed Kurdish warrior, carrying
a spear over twelve feet in length, later walked out from the cabinet. He
was identified as Safar Ali Bek lbrahim Bek Ogli, who had been one of the
Kurdish bodyguard attached to Blavatsky’s late husband when he was
Vice-Governor of Erivan (p.320).
The artist, Kappes, who had accompanied Olcott to
Chittenden to provide illustrations for the Daily
Graphic, sketched all these phantoms where they stood, thus providing us
with an independent witness to Olcott’s veracity. Olcott’s book
reproduces a bold drawing of this Kurdish warrior with his long spear in his
hand, a weapon which Olcott asserts he had conjured up from the air even as they
watched. Even more astonishing was the appearance of a tall Negro dressed
in a short tunic, wearing on his head four horns with bent tips with brass
balls hanging from each point. Madame Blavatsky promptly recognised this
phantom as chief of a party of African jugglers whom she had once encountered
in upper Egypt.
In his History
of Spiritualism (1926), Arthur Conan Doyle comments favourably upon
Olcott’s reports of the ten weeks he spent investigating the Eddys. As
the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle himself could hardly be said to
have an uncritical or credulous intellect, yet he accepts without demur
Olcott’s assertion that he saw four hundred apparitions appear from the Eddy’s
cabinet. His only reservation was that he did not believe that the
sitters could infallibly recognise the spirits of their relatives since:
“With a dim light and an emotional condition, it is
easy for an honest observer to be mistaken. The author has had the
opportunity of gazing into the faces of at least a hundred of these images, and
he can only recall two cases in which he was absolutely certain in his
recognition. In both these cases the faces were self-illuminated and he
had not to depend upon the red lamp. There were two other occasions when,
with the red lamp, he was morally certain that in the vast majority of cases it
was possible, if one allowed one’s imagination to work, to read anything into
the vague moulds which rose before one. It is likely that this occurred
in the Eddy circle. The real miracle consisted not in the recognition but
in the presence of the figure at all”
(Doyle, 1926, p.267).
The fact that so shrewd an observer as Conan Doyle
had carefully examined Olcott’s account and was prepared to grant that these
materialisations had actually occurred is highly significant. In fact, he
goes so far as to reprove Olcott for his hesitations and reservations about
what he had seen, pointing out that his concern that the phenomena he had
witnessed were not experienced under “test
conditions” was quite unjustified:
“This expression ‘test conditions’ has become a
sort of shibboleth which loses all meaning. Thus, when you say that you
have beyond all question or doubt seen your own dead mother’s face before you,
the objector replies: ‘Ah, but was it under test conditions?’ The test
lies in the phenomenon itself. When one considers that Olcott was
permitted for ten weeks to examine the little wooden enclosure which served as
the cabinet, to occlude the window, to search the medium, to measure and to
weigh the ectoplasmic forms, one wonders what else he would demand in order to
make assurance complete” (Doyle,
p.97).
Conan Doyle has made a very good point. This
early literature has on the whole been completely disregarded by researchers in
parapsychology as quite unscientific. It is alleged that we cannot
possibly trust any of these accounts; that the narrators themselves are not
qualified observers; that the phenomena did not take place under laboratory
conditions and that it all happened so long ago that it is impossible to take
it seriously. But none of these arguments seem to me to hold water.
A narrative must be judged by its own internal consistency as well as the
critical comments of the time. What we are dealing with here, after all,
is history. Olcott’s book is an historical document which has to be
weighed and assessed in exactly the same way as any other historical
document. The fact that the occurrences it described are themselves
apparently incredible should not deter us from making a judgment, let alone
inspire us to dismiss the matter out of hand but rather make us even more
cautious and thorough in our critical approaches to the text. This means that
the historian has to scrutinise the text closely for inconsistencies, falsehoods,
contradictions and obviously inaccurate reporting. At the same time, he
has to use all the other historical evidence he can obtain and bring it to bear
upon the text.
In this case we are dealing with the known
character of Olcott, his position as a reporter for the Daily Graphic and his previous and subsequent status as an
observer. We are fortunate that Olcott has left us a detailed and
intimate account of his own life in his other book, Old Diary Leaves, which enables us to form a much clearer idea of
his capabilities and shortcomings. On the basis of this, we should be
prepared to conclude that Olcott was a courageous and truthful observer who was
not afraid to state what he believed he had witnessed, even though such
testimony would do nothing to increase either his popularity or his standing in
the community.
We must also be prepared to look closely at other
journalists involved. Olcott’s account of the Eddys is substantiated by
many other writers, among them C.C. Massey and M.D. Shindler. Massey, who
spent a fortnight with the Eddys, while insistent that few of the sitters could
recognise the phantoms which appeared, never doubted what he saw.
Shindler’s book A Southerner Among The
Spirits (1877) also provides valuable corroboration of Olcott’s assertions.
Furthermore, Olcott’s articles in the Daily Graphic caused a nation-wide
sensation, with the result that almost all the major American dailies sent
reporters to Chittenden. Over the next few months the Eddys’ home was
invaded by a score of hard-bitten, sceptical journalists from all over the
United States
In the light of all this I believe we must be
prepared to take Olcott’s allegations seriously. We can no more dismiss
them out of hand than we can dismiss any other historical document which has
been proved largely trustworthy and consistent by both internal and external
evidence. It is not enough to be able to say simply: ‘What Olcott relates
is impossible, therefore it could not have happened’. Such a procedure,
though totally inadmissible, appears to have been adopted as a general rule by
practically all modern psychical researchers and historians of the occult.
Olcott on the whole emerges extremely well from
this inquiry. After the lapse of over a century he still comes across to
us as a practical man full of shrewdness and commonsense who was prepared to
spend ten uncomfortable weeks living in a primitive farmhouse in the middle of
an isolated rural community in the company of uncongenial people in order to
discover the truth about materialisation. I find his character portraits
of the Eddys singularly convincing. They were illiterate farmers endowed,
unfortunately for them, with a rare and perilous gift. Had they been born
into a more congenial culture, say that of India ,
China or Tibet
Circumstances could not have been more unfavourable
for them. The miracle is rather that they were allowed to survive at
all. Had they been born even a century or so earlier, they would
undoubtedly have met their fate, like so many of their kind, in the agony of a
blazing bonfire. No wonder, then, that they were surly, suspicious and
often downright hostile. They did not get on with Olcott, who was their
social and intellectual superior, nor he with them. But this only makes
his testimony as to the magnitude and vigour of their mediumistic powers all
the more convincing.
In the final analysis the question we must ask
ourselves is simply this: Did Olcott really see what he claimed to have
seen? Unpalatable though it may seem to many of us, the answer must be an
unqualified “Yes”. The phantoms that came into being on the stage of that
lonely farmhouse so long ago were real enough, for they were witnessed by many
observers. The presence of these four hundred entities of many shapes and
diverse nationalities, talking half a dozen different tongues, among them
languages as remote as Georgian, constitutes perhaps the most astonishing,
sustained demonstration of mediumistic power ever witnessed. The Eddy
family must undoubtedly rank as the greatest materialisation mediums of both
the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.
References
Doyle, A.C. (1926) The History of Spiritualism, Volume 1.New York
Olcott, H.S. (1875/1972) People From The Other Worlds.Rutland , Vermont
Shindler, M.D. (1877) A Southerner Among The Spirits.Memphis , Tennessee
[Journal of
Alternative Realities, Vol 8, Issue 1, 2000]Doyle, A.C. (1926) The History of Spiritualism, Volume 1.
Olcott, H.S. (1875/1972) People From The Other Worlds.
Shindler, M.D. (1877) A Southerner Among The Spirits.
COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM
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