Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
cases. No less an authority than John Milne suggested installing a seismom-
eter at Ballechin, in the interest of determining the origin of the sounds
and serving “seismic research.” He also made the potent point that the
former proprietor of Ballechin, Lady Moncrieff, had been cited as an earth-
quake witness by David Milne himself.
65
An earlier generation of psychic
researchers—including Cromwell Varley, the telegraphist and proponent
of an electrical theory of earthquakes—had applied telegraphic apparatus
to the detection of spirits.
66
Now, one defender of the SPR objected that it
would be “pedantic” to apply “elaborate tests,” such as those for “seismic
disturbance,” to the phenomena at Ballechin. on the other hand, the au-
thor of the 1897
Book of Dreams and Ghosts
asked his reader to consider the
case of a house “where noises are actually caused by young earthquakes.
would anybody say: 'there are no seismic disturbances near Blunderstone
House, for I passed a night there, and none occurred'? why should a noisy
ghost (if there is such a thing) or a hallucinatory sound (if there is such a
thing), be expected to be more punctual and pertinacious than a seismic
disturbance?”
67
the same author suggested in the
Times
that the sounds at
Ballechin might be explained as “collective hallucinations.”
68
the consen-
sus, then, was that the same standards of evidence should be applied to
earthquakes as to ghosts.
Seismic testimony typically came from common folk who were, in the
eyes of the scientific elite, effectively anonymous. Spirit testimony often
came from witnesses who remained anonymous for other reasons. “It would
be hard to afford a more ludicrous example of the methods of the SPR than
is given by X. in her own letter. . . . Can anything be more useless or more
absurd than inquiry in which names of persons and places are omitted from
the depositions? what value can be assigned to evidence when the names of
the witnesses are kept secret? Such proceedings are the caricature of a legal
inquiry and the parody of a scientific investigation. the SPR cannot have
the remotest idea of the legal or scientific meaning and value of evidence.”
Yet the authority of this anonymous witness, like that of seismic observers,
rested not on personal circumstances but on the local knowledge derived
from long-term residence.
In the end, the last word went to an anonymous reader who suggested
that the seismic and psychic explanations of the “disturbances” were equally
tenuous:
I learn with pleasure that the latest tenant of Ballechin has been absolutely
undisturbed by any unexplained noises. But what is the correct philosophical
inference? the noises of which earlier tenants complained were accounted
