Ghosted by Alice Vernon

Author:Alice Vernon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781399418690
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2025-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

She professed that she hadn’t written to Oliver Lodge about these conversations, but Raymond allegedly encouraged her to publish a magazine article and send it to his father. There’s no evidence whether she did so, or if the Lodge family ever read her book. Perhaps, in their inherent belief in Raymond’s spirit, they would have been grateful that he was speaking to all who wanted to communicate with him. But there’s just something distasteful about a complete stranger declaring that they regularly talk to the spirit of your loved one, without you knowing about it. In this way, interwar Spiritualism put private grief in the public domain; by turning the lost soldiers into larger-than-life characters, it encouraged believers to think that they had a right to carry out their own séances with other people’s dead relatives. As we’ll soon see, it was this sudden perversion of traditional bereavement that touched a nerve for sceptics.

Regardless of the controversy, these automatic-writing texts appear to have had a profound influence on readers, especially those struggling to come to terms with their own personal losses.

A sad example is that of a New Zealand woman, Elizabeth Stewart, whose faith in the veracity of Spiritualism led her to attempt to contact her dead husband. Lieutenant Colonel George Stewart died of dysentery in November 1915, in an Australian military hospital on the Greek island of Lemnos. Historian Rachel Patrick investigated Elizabeth’s letters to her family and siblings-in-law, and charts her growing determination to speak to George using spiritualist methods. Elizabeth was active in the war, too, as a nurse stationed in Egypt. But once the war ended, she returned to the home she had shared with George, and that was where she believed she would finally reach him. In 1919, she wrote to a member of her family that she wasn’t lonely in the house, as ‘Geordie is very near & with this knowledge comes a great peace.’6 While we may laugh at ‘X’ in conversation with Archduke Franz Ferdinand, or scorn Durand’s alleged conversations with Raymond, to see an example of the personal impact of this cultural movement complicates the matter. The investigations into the afterlife, while often fruitless and disappointing, at least offered people a way to cope with their grief – they could at least feel as though they were doing something in the pursuit of messages from the dead.

As Lodge began to collect and corroborate evidence (Raymond described a photograph which the Lodges had never seen, but which is sent to them by a soldier sometime later), a new thread started to emerge. So far, our main characters were Lodge, his wife and Mrs Leonard, but Raymond also had two brothers, Alec and Lionel. They, as much as their parents, would have given anything to have Raymond back, but there was a clear distrust – more than mere scepticism – of Mrs Leonard’s séances.

Alec and Lionel began to set traps. Secretly, they asked Raymond questions to which only the three siblings would know the answer.

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