As described by him, the séances which produced the phenomena differed little from those conducted all over Europe and America at the time, when spiritualism was re-energised by the grief of those who lost their loved ones in the Great War. The participants would enter an attic room, and form a circle around the séance table. The room would be illuminated by a dim red light, in this instance a gas jet ensconced in a lantern having a red glass sliding front, for normal light was thought to be injurious to the phenomena. The sitters, said Crawford, clasp each other’s hands in chain order, and the séance begins. One of the members of the circle begins the proceedings with a prayer, and then a hymn is sung. Within a few minutes, sounds — tap, tap, tap — are heard on the floor close to the medium. They soon become louder and stronger, and occur right out in the circle space, on the table, and on the chairs of the sitters. Their magnitude varies in intensity from barely audible ticks to blows which might well be produced by a sledgehammer, the latter being really awe-inspiring and easily heard two storeys below, and even outside the house. The loud blows perceptibly shake the floor and chairs. Sometimes the raps keep time to hymns sung by the members of the circle; sometimes they tap out of themselves complicated tunes and popular dances on the top of the table or on the floor.
Other extraordinary effects include imitations of a bouncing ball — one would really think there was a ball in the room — the sawing of the table leg, the striking of a match, the walking of a man, and the trotting of a horse. Sometimes the raps sound perfect fusillades, for all the world like gunshots. After a quarter of an hour or so the rapping stops, and another type of phenomenon takes place. Remember, said Crawford, that the members of the Circle are simply sitting in their chairs holding each other’s hands in chain order. The little table is standing on the floor within the circle, and is not in contact with any of them, or any portion of their clothing. Suddenly the table gives a lurch, or it moves along the floor. It lifts two of its legs into the air. Then all four. The table rises completely into the air of itself, where it remains suspended for several minutes without support, said Crawford.
According to Crawford, the phenomena were produced by ‘psychic rods’, which emerged from the orifices of Kathleen Goligher’s body, and, anxious to verify their physical existence, he made several attempts to photograph them. On 23rd October 1915, as described by him in The Reality of Psychic Phenomena, he succeeded in obtaining an image which seemed to corroborate his theory. On the developed plate, plainly visible within the Goligher Circle, was a vertical column of whitish translucent material, about four inches in diameter and rising to a height of about five feet. The pattern of the wallpaper was quite easily seen through it, said Crawford. At its summit, however, it appeared quite opaque, as if the psychic stuff, issuing from its source, had exhausted its velocity at the top, and had doubled over on itself. The column, moreover, had several arms or branches, one of which appeared to terminate in or emanate from the chest of the medium. Others were joined to Miss Anna Goligher and Master S. Goligher. The whole photograph suggested to Crawford that the medium was in reality a psychic pump, with a complete pressure system. Perhaps, during levitation, the vertical column was under the table, in which case the pressure range would appear much greater. As it was, the psychic fluid appeared to be losing its energy much in the same way as a vertical jet of water, projected upwards against its own weight only, inevitably loses impetus and falls back.
Interestingly, Crawford failed to reproduce the photograph to support his verbal account, though it appeared in his posthumous book, The Psychic Structures at the Goligher Circle. In like manner, wanting to show that the sounds produced by the Circle were not the result of a collective hallucination, he hired a phonograph — an Edison Standard model — from a local dealer and, on 14th April 1916, ten days before the Easter Rising in Dublin, he successfully recorded the phenomena, which according to Crawford were produced by spiritual ‘operators’ who manipulated the psychic rods that emanated from Kathleen Goligher’s body.
I was struck not so much by this alleged proof as by the fact that the recording session took place on the same day that my father was born, and I was struck by a powerful nostalgia for a time I had never known. The Golighers were textile workers, and I imagined Belfast as it would have been then, its air trembling with noise from the linen mills which were then producing fabric for British aeroplanes in the Great War, and I indulged myself in a fancy that, since everything affects everything else, so Crawford’s phonograph had recorded not only the sound of the psychic raps but a trace, however subliminal, of the whole aural hinterland of Belfast, including the voices of its people, and that the wax cylinder contained in one of its grooves a series of infinitesimal pits and tics, a wavering scratch a fraction of a micron deep, caused by the first cry of my father as he came into the world.
I told you, Nina, how Billie Holiday’s singing affected me when I first heard it on your hi-fi system, little altered from the original recordings; and I think the hiss and crackle of old wax cylinders or shellac discs is even more atmospheric, for the dust which surrounds the music, as it drifts into the grooves, provides a more faithful molecular record of the sound in the air than is possible in a modern, hermetically sealed studio. So, when I hear Caruso’s singing — his ‘Ave Maria’ of 1914, for example, a favourite recording of my father’s — it is like dust-motes drifting through a shaft of sunlight in an empty room. The door has closed. The person has gone but the voice remains. I dreamed about my father that night, singing ‘Ave Maria’, as he used to do on Sunday evenings, sitting in the gloom of the parlour at Ophir Gardens.
A few pages later I came across a detail that once again fleetingly reminded me of my father, who happened to be born precisely one year after the death of Ludwig Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto. In October 1916 Crawford asked the ‘operators’ if any languages besides English were spoken in the other world they inhabited. By now it had been established that the operators were indeed entities who had once lived on this planet, but had passed on to a higher plane, this information being relayed by a system of coded raps, somewhat like Morse. After some hesitation the operators rapped out, E … S … P. Crawford could make no sense of this, beyond the speculation that the letters might stand for English, Spanish and Portuguese; the term ESP, meaning extrasensory perception, had not yet been coined. I was disappointed that Crawford had not entertained the possibility that it might be the beginning of the word Espagnol, or Esperanto; but I thought no more about it, until, several months later, I came across an article, in the journal Esperanto Studies, that made an explicit connection between Esperanto and the Brazilian version of spiritualism known as Spiritism, or Kardecism. Allan Kardec is the pseudonym of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (1804–1869), who was born a Catholic in Lyon, but was educated in Protestant Switzerland under the famous pedagogue Pestalozzi. After completing training as a teacher, Rivail returned to France, where he taught French, mathematics and sciences at various schools. Around the years 1854–55 the ‘talking-table’ fad had swept through the salons of Europe, and Kardec, initially sceptical, began to examine the extraordinary claims made by its practitioners. He found to his satisfaction that many of the phenomena were genuine, and summarised his findings in Le Livre des Esprits (1857). He concluded that the spirit world was made of souls in various stages of enlightenment, as the living on earth are in various stages of ignorance.