Boston, and the Investigator Who Changed His Mind

Hodgson moved to Boston in 1887 to run the American branch of the society, and the second half of his career is the mirror image of the first. He took charge of the investigation of Leonora Piper, the trance medium who was already the most closely watched subject in the field, and he approached her exactly as he had approached the shrine cabinet at Adyar. He hired private detectives to follow her and to watch for informants or research; he arranged sittings under assumed names so that sitters could not be identified in advance; he sent her to England to be tested by people she had never met and could not have investigated.

None of it produced evidence of fraud. Over roughly eighteen years Hodgson moved from suspicion to the published conviction that Piper was in communication with surviving personalities, a position he held when he died suddenly in 1905. That trajectory is the reason he matters to a reference work. The same man, using the same methods, produced the field's most damaging exposure and one of its strongest positive claims, which makes it difficult to dismiss either verdict as the product of temperament. Sceptical readings of the Piper case attribute the results to cold reading and to information leaking through sitters, and Hodgson's conclusion is not the consensus one.