The spirit cabinet

I have not yet met with any Ghost Story that was proved to me

The Ghost Club disbanded shortly after Dickens’ death. The author had famously dabbled in the supernatural across various works of fiction, from “The Signal-Man” to A Christmas Carol. He was, in a word, obsessed. Common sense, however, tended to prevail.

“My own mind is perfectly unprejudiced and impressible on the subject,” he wrote to historian William Howitt. “I do not in the least pretend that such things are not. But … I have not yet met with any Ghost Story that was proved to me, or that had not the noticeable peculiarity in it—that the alteration of some slight circumstance would bring it within the range of common natural probabilities.”

Dickens was far from the only high-profile member. Born in Cambridge, the club would boast multiple Nobel Prize winners among its ranks over the years. Computing pioneer Charles Babbage was said to be a member. So, too, was horror actor and Star Wars villain, Peter Cushing. Fittingly, Thomas Douglas Murray, a member of high society said to be cursed by a mummy, was enshrined among its ranks.

A second Ghost Club was established on All Saints’ Day, 20 years after the establishment of its predecessor.  A rather famously credulous Arthur Conan Doyle would join. The following century, William Butler Yeats – a friend of Murray’s – would grow increasingly involved with the group. The Irish poet’s beliefs grew in the wake of automatic writing sessions and his discretion was “thrown to the wind” during hours-long speeches espousing his ideas.

The club minutes of his final meeting notes that he “referred to his intended publication lessons in philosophy he had received from a group of beings on the other side.” He described the appearance of specters in medieval attire and the occasional scent of roses. The minutes continue,

Bro[ther] Yeats’ conclusion, founded on the conception of the Universe, as based on one thought, were that with this premise, it should be possible to forecast the probability of certain event, the actual precipitation of these events being left to the agency of human beings.

The club’s evolution from skeptical analysis to an earnest catalog of spirits was driven, in part, by the rise of the spiritualism movement in the U.S. and Europe. Ira and William Davenport, were more than happy exploit this phenomenon in their own right amid an era when the lines between magician and medium were thoroughly blurred.

Their first foray into the space occurred before they had reached their teen years. Four years after their police officer father began hearing strange noises in their Buffalo home, the boys and their younger sister were said to have successfully executed a table-turning séance. First came the rapping, followed by table levitation and then, ultimately, the appearance of a ghostly figure.

It was rope tricks that ultimately raised their profile in the U.S. and Europe. In the most famous example, the two were tied inside a seven-foot-tall “spirit cabinet,” with musical instruments strewn out on the floor. The door was closed and music began emanating from inside. It was opened soon after to reveal them still bound. After 10 years of growing stateside success, the duo made their way to England, where Doyle, ever the true believer, declared them, “probably the greatest mediums of their kind that the world has ever seen.” In spite, or perhaps because of these claims, The Ghost Club opened an investigation into the act.

Fellow magician and friend of Doyle, Harry Houdini, denounced the pair as faux spiritualism. In A Magician Among The Spirits, he both describes the secret of the rope trick and prints a letter written by Ira.

"We never in public affirmed our belief in spiritualism,” the elder Davenport writes. “That we regarded as no business of the public, nor did we offer our entertainment as the result of sleight-of-hand or, on the other hand, as spiritualism. We let our friends and foes settle that as best they could between themselves but, unfortunately, we were often the victims of their disagreement."

The Club quietly concluded that the act was a hoax. Doyle disagreed, insisting that the pair held firm to their spiritual beliefs, even off-stage and away from the crowd.

“I am quite sure that if the Davenport Brothers had done their performance as if it were a conjuring trick, and never told the honest and unpopular truth that it was of psychic origin,” he wrote, “ they would have amassed a comfortable fortune and been far wiser from a worldly point of view — which, after all, is not the highest wisdom when the end of the story comes to be told.”

The brothers’ fraud would be uncovered several more times over the course of their career. In his book, Humbugs of the World, JT Barnum describes one such notable instance in Liverpool. The act often employed a member of the audience to tie the knots around the Davenports’ ankles and wrists. On this night, a man named Cummins was chosen, bounding the duo too tightly to escape. According to Barnum, Ira managed to partially escape and whispered to the stage manager to free him, only to be cut by a knife in the process. Now visibly bleeding, Ira fled the stage with William close behind.

“Cummins at once explained; the audience became disgusted, and, enraged at the impudence of the imposture, broke over the foot-lights, knocked Ferguson backward into the ‘cabinet; and when the discomfited agent had scrambled out and run away, smashed the thing fairly into kindling-wood, and carried it off, all distributed into splinters and chips,” Barnum writes. “Early next morning, the terrified Davenports ran away out of Liverpool; and a number of the audience were, at last accounts, intending to go to law to get back the money paid for an exhibition which they did not see.”

Sources:

Irish Writing London: Volume 1: Revival to the Second World War edited by Tom Herron

Ghost Club: Yeats’s and Dickens’s Secret Society of Spirits https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/10/31/ghost-club-yeats-dickens-secret-society-spirits/

The vanishing mysteries of the Ghost Club https://psmag.com/environment/meet-the-ghost-club

Discover “The Ghost Club,” the Historic Paranormal Society Whose Members Included Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle & W.B. Yeats https://www.openculture.com/2017/05/the-ghost-club.html

The Humbugs of the World, by P. T. Barnum