I ended up reading the Philpott book about Dean Bridgman Conner right away. (A link to the complete text is found in the comments thread of the last post.) It’s a good, quick read and sheds valuable light on Mrs. Piper’s mediumship. Philpott establishes convincingly that Piper’s spirit controls produced a raft of false information about the supposedly kidnapped Conner, who actually had died of typhoid fever just as the authorities originally reported.
At the same time Piper also provided accurate and detailed information about Conner’s itinerary prior to his death, the part of the hospital in which he died, and the view from a certain specific vantage point in Mexico. All of this, however, could have been obtained telepathically from the sitters, with the possible exception of the hospital room in which the young man died (a fact not necessarily known to anyone present at the seances). Philpott concludes that in this case, Piper’s mediumship can be explained in terms of “mind reading,” rather than spirit communication.
Overall, he makes a strong case and deserves credit for his indefatigable investigation, which consumed five months, and for his judicious approach to a controversial subject. Perhaps most important, he challenges the standard view of Piper’s chief investigator, Richard Hodgson, as a cool, capable, objective researcher. Philpott sees him, at least in this instance, as decidedly emotional, obsessed with using the Conner case to prove spiritism to the world, and so personally committed to Piper’s mediumship that he would explain away or simply refuse to face any facts that called the spiritist hypothesis into question.
Unfortunately, I suspect there’s a lot of truth in this. Hodgson does seem to have become caught up in the excitement of “the new revelation” (in Arthur Conan Doyle’s phrase) at the expense of his detachment and scientific rigor.
I do have a quarrel with one of Philpott’s claims, though. He says that Hodgson was convinced that a successful resolution of the Conner case would prove spiritism to doubters once and for all. Possibly he did believe this; but I’m not convinced. Surely someone as well versed in the super-psi argument as Hodgson must have been – or as any member of the SPR had to be – would have realized that even the dramatic rescue of young Conner from his supposed Mexican captors would still be compatible with super-psi. After all, proponents of super-psi would simply argue that Mrs. Piper had used her wide-ranging telepathy to read Conner’s mind while he was in captivity, or had used clairvoyance to spy on him in his prison cell. The Conner case could no more have disproved super-psi than any other case, since super-psi, by its nature, is not disprovable.
Maybe Hodgson was too excited by grandiose fantasies of worldwide acclaim to perceive this rather simple point; but I think it is more likely that Philpott (who shows little grasp of the super-psi argument) is misinterpreting Hodgson’s position here.
Philpott’s more important point is much harder to dispose of. To what extent was Piper’s vaunted mediumship based on reading the minds of her sitters? It may well be true that telepathy played a larger role in the proceedings than Piper’s most vigorous champions (then and since) would allow.
Still, there are arguments against mind reading as an all-inclusive explanation. One that occurs to me offhand involves Piper’s spirit control “George Pellew,” who successfully identified thirty out of thirty-one friends and relatives known to the living Pellew. Yes, Piper could have read the minds of those thirty and determined their connection with Pellew. But the thirty-first case is more problematic. That particular sitter had been a child when the living Pellew last saw her; since then, she had grown up. Accordingly the Pellew control did not recognize her until he was prompted. But if Piper could read the sitter’s mind, why wouldn’t “Pellew” have recognized her immediately?
I suppose we could speculate that Piper’s subconscious was so crafty, it deliberately avoiding recognizing the sitter in order to undermine the telepathy argument. But this seems like an overly elaborate charade, even for a subconscious that is going to great lengths to fool the conscious mind.
Other examples are possible, of course. Perhaps the best that can be said is that Piper’s mediumship was a mixture of telepathy and spirit communication, as may in fact be true of all mediums.
And it would be well to keep in mind that Richard Hodgson may not always have been the supremely competent and clinically impersonal investigator he is so often made out to be. In aligning his reputation and his life’s work so decisively with Mrs. Piper, he in effect made the choice to become her apostle, rather than her inquisitor. That choice is understandable – but it may have been wrong.
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