It’s been over 30 years since Peter Venkman, Raymond Stanz and Egon Spengler chased the spirits of New York City in Ghostbusters. Now the best known ghost movie of our time is getting a makeover and is set to be released in the summer of 2016. The Number 1 movie of 1984 grossed an estimated $250 million and established Saturday Night Live pals Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis as Hollywood power brokers. Murray and Aykroyd are sure to make cameos in the new version and Ramis reportedly contributed to the new script before his death in 2014. The original Ghostbusters film spawned a hit song and soundtrack, a sequel and popular cartoon series. The new version is sure to stir things up as well.
But did you know that there was a trio of real life ghostbusters working in England a century before that hit movie was released? The Victorian Ghostbusters were named Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers and Frank Podmore. Considered esteemed members of the scientific community and respected authors, it would eventually end badly for all three.
It all began with the formation of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882. Sandwiched between the Second Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age, the SPR was formed at a time when science was locked in a struggle with theology to explain the world in terms that often challenged traditional religious beliefs. The SPR began as an answer to the burgeoning field of Spiritualism after it emerged in upstate New York in the 1840s. Spiritualism is defined as “a belief that spirits of the dead have both the ability and the inclination to communicate with the living.” At the center of the Society’s activities was the collection and investigation of data.
The SPR’s literary committee produced a massive 776-page book titled Phantasms of the Living, written by Gurney, Myers and Podmore. Published in 1886, it contained over 700 carefully analyzed cases, presented within the telepathic theory of crisis apparitions involving the interpretation of communications from people dying or in life-threatening situations resulting in telepathically generated hallucinations. The benchmark book established the three men as pioneers in their field and its publication kicked off a decade that became known as the “Heroic Age” to honor their personal courage.
These three men investigated reports of ghouls and spirits in what became the first attempts to study ghosts in a detailed scientific fashion. They formed a new committee with the deliciously evocative name of the “Committee for Apparitions and Haunted Houses” that aimed to find evidence for human survival after death. Mr. Myers also commissioned a “ghost census” between 1889 and 1892 that revealed Victorian women were more susceptible to the supernatural, with 12 percent of women surveyed reporting seeing a ghost compared to 9 percent men.
The work of this Victorian ghostbusting trio might well have gone unnoticed had it not been for the fervent support of a man named William Thomas Stead. Stead was the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, a popular London newspaper that many credit as the foundation upon which modern tabloid journalism in Britain was built. Rightly or wrongly, Stead’s tenure at the Gazette (1883-1889) spread the news by any means necessary. Although mostly controversial, Stead went to extremes to make a point.
In one of the earliest examples of investigative journalism, Stead was arrested for “unlawful taking of a child” when he purchased 13-year-old Eliza Armstrong from her mother for the meager sum of five pounds, to highlight how easy it was to buy children. The paper’s extreme coverage of child prostitution helped get the government to increase the age of consent from 13 to 16 in 1885.
Ghostbusters Gurney, Myers and Podmore were in good company in the Pall Mall Gazette, appearing alongside well-known writers like George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Robert Louis Stevenson. The Gazette was referred to by Dr. Watson as one of the newspapers Sherlock Holmes advertised in, and appears in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula and H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and War of The Worlds (1898). In short, Stead turned the scientific trio of ghostbusters into rock stars.
The book Phantasms of the Living can be found in its entirety on the IUPUI.edu website. Although it is a ponderously slow, plodding volume by today’s standards, written in the most flowery Victorian Era prose, it has serious merit when viewed in the text of its time. Many of the original ghostbusters theories and investigations involved séances, deathbed wraiths, hauntings, apparitions and mediums solicited from society members, neighbors and friends.
Subjects were asked to answer “yes” or “no” to questions such as: “Have you ever, when in good health and completely awake, had a distinct impression of seeing or being touched by a human being, or of hearing a voice or sound which suggested a human presence when no one was there?” Another question was: “Can you recall that you have ever, in the course of the last ten years, when in good health, had a dream of the death of some person known to you (about whom you were not anxious at the time), which dream you marked as an exceptionally vivid one, and of which the distressing impression lasted for as long as an hour after you rose in the morning?”
A typical entry reads: “Case 180. A case involving multiple sensations, for the percipient woke to feel the grip of a cold hand on his hand, and saw as well the image of his aunt rushing out of the room. The door was chained through the night, and no one could enter. The hallucination occurred in mid-July 1880; a month earlier, he had seen his aunt off for a trip to America. Two weeks after the incident, the percipient received word that his aunt had fallen ill in Canada and died about sixteen hours after the hallucination. The percipient was a sheriff’s officer and not prone to phantasms.”
In 1894, newspaper editor Stead wrote that he had concluded “of the thousand million persons now living on the planet, there would be, if they all lived to maturity, at least ten million who will see and recognize in the course of their lives realistic apparitions of dead persons.” Although dated, this pioneering study remains an indispensable tool for psychical research. More than just a first person account of “normal” ghost sightings whose model is followed by ghost authors to this day, it provides detailed insights into the Victorian fascination with the occult and the supernatural, and is still the most extensive collection of ghost-seeing accounts available in a single volume.
The Victorian ghostbuster trio’s moment of fame was never fully realized during their lifetimes and they, along with their chief documentarian, would all pay a high price for their modest moment in the sun. All four would meet untimely deaths under mysterious circumstances.
Edmund Gurney died on June 23, 1888 from an overdose of chloroform. At the inquest Arthur Thomas Myers, brother of Frederic, testified to having prescribed chloroform for neuralgia, and a verdict of accidental death was recorded. Friends and family believed that Gurney committed suicide resulting from disillusionment after discovering the exposed frauds of spiritualists he considered close friends.
In November of 1899 Frederick Myers was diagnosed with Bright’s disease, a liver disease that causes the heart to enlarge and the arteries to rapidly deteriorate. On the first day of 1901, he arrived in Rome, where his doctor injected him with an experimental serum developed from the glands and testicles of goats. Two weeks later, on January 17, 1901, he died.
Frank Podmore died by drowning in a swimming pool on the night of August 14, 1910. Despite evidence that he had committed suicide, a verdict of “found drowned” was returned. Podmore had recently been forced to resign from his supervisor post in the Post Office. In an eerie portent of the fate of British computer pioneer Alan Turning in 1954, Podmore was compelled to resign without pension because of alleged homosexual involvements which was forbidden by British law. Contemporary newspaper reports state that neither Mr. Podmore’s brother, his estranged wife nor any member of the Society for Psychical Research attended his funeral.
With their deaths, the Heroic Age came to an end. And journalist William Thomas Stead, whose “Government by Journalism” demonstrated how the press could be used to influence public opinion and government policy and paved the way for all tabloid reporting media that followed? He died on board the Titanic, after previously predicting he would die by drowning.
Until his death Stead remained a devoted spiritualist who continued to preach “peace through arbitration.” When he boarded the Titanic in Southampton he was travelling to America to take part in a peace congress at Carnegie Hall on April 21 at the request of President William Howard Taft. Stead accepted an all-expenses-paid invitation to speak at the next congress of the “Men and Religion Forward Movement” in New York City. According to legend, when the Titanic began to sink, rather than try to save himself, he spent his last two hours on earth quietly reading a book in the first class smoking room. This account can be found in Walter Lord’s seminal 1956 book about the Titanic tragedy, A Night to Remember.
Another account claims that Stead bravely stood on deck helping survivors into lifeboats to the bitter end. Yet another account claims that Stead was last seen clinging to a life raft with millionaire John Jacob Astor until both men froze and sunk to the bottom. Yet, it is Lord’s fatalistic portrayal of Stead, gallantly going down with the ship, that endures to this day. In the tradition of his own published spiritualist folklore, Stead had foreseen his death on the Titanic decades earlier. Stead wrote of his watery demise in two fictional “sinking” stories; “How the Mail Steamer went Down” (1886) and “From the Old World to the New” (1892). Spiritualists seized on the smoking room scene because it fulfilled their image of Stead as a gifted precognitive fatalist, bravely facing his own foreseen end.
Ironically, Gurney, Myers and Podmore, the original Victorian Ghostbusters, 1886 book’s official title was “Phantasms of the Living Volume I,” but unlike the Ghostbusters movie, there will be no part II or sequel. Truth is stranger than fiction, my friends.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest book is “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
