Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
1896, when the estate of Ballechin, about twenty miles away, became the site
of an experiment by the London Society for Psychical Research. the society
had been founded in 1882 to pursue studies of “mesmeric, psychical and
'spiritualistic'” phenomena “in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned
enquiry which has enabled Science to solve so many problems.”
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In 1896,
several members of the SPR—including the physicist oliver Lodge, Fel-
low of the Royal Society—occupied Ballechin for three months to test the
claim that the house was haunted. A debate soon exploded in the letters
column of the
Times,
in which the experiment was condemned by some
of the very people who had participated in it. the initial attack, signed “A
Late Guest at Ballechin,” charged that “a so-called experiment had been
carried on there for nearly three months at the time of my visit by the Psy-
chical Research Society, without any attempt at either experimentation or
research. Unscreened evidence of improbable phenomena had been col-
lected in heaps, but the simplest and most obvious tests had not been ap-
plied. the residents and visitors, it seemed to me, had been sitting there
all the time, agape for wonders, straining on the limits of audition, and
fomenting one another's superstitions without taking any precautions
to prevent deception or employing reagents to clear up turbid observa-
tions. . . . Practical joking, hallucination, and fraud will account for the bulk
of the occult phenomena recorded at Ballechin during its occupation by the
Psychical Research Society. what remains—if anything—may be explained
by earth tremors (Ballechin is only 20 miles from Comrie, the chief centre
of seismic disturbance in Scotland), by the creaking and reverberations of
an old and somewhat curiously-constructed house, or by some other sim-
ple natural cause.”
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thus were Comrie's extinct earthquakes revived at this
late date. they had acquired plausibility only relative to the paranormal
alternative. Apparently, no one bothered to consult Charles Davison, who
had documented an “exceedingly slight” earthquake at Comrie in 1895, but
none at all in 1896.
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Still, Comrie's earthquakes proved only marginally more robust than
ghosts. the debate in the
Times
over the Ballechin experiment ran on for five
months. It underlined the uncomfortable proximity of observational seis-
mology to the “pseudoscience” of psychical research. Skeptics discredited
the observations of the SPR researchers at Ballechin in much the same terms
as the press mocked earthquake observations from Comrie. In seismology
as in psychic research, the construction of evidence depended on coopera-
tion between metropolitan experts and local residents. It hinged further
on the trustworthiness of witnesses who testified to phenomena that were
inherently “transient and elusive.”
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the same solution was urged in both
