Detectives, Anonymous Sitters, and an Unfinished Case

The precautions taken against Piper were more thorough than those applied to almost any other claimant of the period. Richard Hodgson employed private detectives to establish whether she or her family gathered information about sitters. Sitters were introduced anonymously, sometimes under false names. In 1889 she was taken to England, where Oliver Lodge and others arranged sittings with people she had never met, in a country whose newspapers and social registers she had no access to, and Lodge went so far as to replace his household servants for the duration so that nothing could be learned from them. No fraud was found by anyone at any point across several decades.

The sceptical case therefore does not rest on exposure but on mechanism: that a skilled trance speaker produces a large volume of statements, that sitters actively help by responding to fishing questions and by remembering the successes, that the claimed communicators were vague when tested precisely, and that the alleged personalities behaved in ways more consistent with dissociated fragments of Piper herself than with surviving individuals. Piper's own view fluctuated and she once told a newspaper she did not know whether the spirits were real. The case is unresolved rather than concluded, which is the honest description.