Knowlton Biography, Chapter 12
Twelve: The Ghost Scrape
Towards the close of this term of lectures there was a "ghost scrape" in the medical building, which excited a good deal of interest, and was spoken of far and near. I have been informed that it even brought a letter of inquiry from the city of Washington to one of the professors. It was commenced in the cellar of the medical building, among an old lot of human and various other bones, by two of the medical students. For one or two evenings they played the ghost very successfully alone; but wanting assistance, and finding me very sceptical in relation to ghosts, they let me, with one or two others, into the secret.
Charles returned to Hanover for a second round of medical lectures in the fall of 1823. He went directly from Amos Twitchell’s home in Keene. Charles walked the sixty-five miles through the New Hampshire hills alone, carrying the small supply of clothing he’d need for the fourteen-week term on his back. There was a regular stagecoach between Keene and Hanover, but Charles couldn’t afford the fare.
The Hanover medical lectures were designed to cover all the information a medical student needed in a single, fourteen-week term. The extremely short course of study reflected the fact that there was much less material to teach in 1823, but it was also based on a different idea about how education worked. The Hanover professors reviewed anatomy by dissecting corpses, or lectured on the drugs that made up the Materia medica. But these lectures were just demonstrations or summaries of information the students were expected to learn on their own, by studying medical texts and by practicing with a preceptor. Sometimes, after completing their reading and apprenticeships, students returned for a second course of study. Returning to Hanover gave Charles the opportunity to hear the lectures again and compare them with his reading and experience. Returning students were also able to question the professors on issues that were still unclear to them and explore advanced topics before taking their licensing examinations. Charles had been recognized during his first term for his anatomical knowledge—and boldness. In his second visit to Hanover, Charles impressed his professors with his medical knowledge, and had a bit of fun at the expense of his more timid classmates.
In his first term at Hanover, Charles had been an odd, cadaverous creature shunned by his fellow medical students. Charles returned to the medical lectures with a reputation as not only one of the school’s brightest, but as one of its boldest students. It would have been impossible to keep the secret that Charles had been charged with body-snatching, and would have to leave Hanover to stand trial during the term. And the four other medical students who had escaped prosecution eliminated any chance there might have been of keeping the incident quiet. In a place like Hanover, where even the faculty were secretly employing body-snatchers to procure subjects for their demonstrations, Charles’s exploits made him a minor celebrity.
So it was no surprise, when ghosts appeared in the basement of the medical building, that his fellow students turned to Charles to lead the investigation. As a notorious body-snatcher, Charles was famously unafraid of the dead. Even better, Charles was an unbeliever. In the two years since Richard Stuart had introduced him to freethought, Charles had become a thorough materialist. Like many of his professors, Charles believed that life was a completely physical process that could be thoroughly understood without resorting to ideas such as spirits or souls. If life was physical, electrical, and chemical, his fellow students reasoned, then there were no such things as ghosts. So it had to be some kind of hoax, and Charles was just the man to uncover it.
The fun part was, the same materialist rejection of spirits that made him an ideal investigator also made Charles an ideal collaborator. Medicine, even as early as 1823, attracted science-oriented young men, but only some of them were freethinkers. Some of Charles’s fellow medical students retained their religious beliefs. Others clung to the idea that some spiritual “vital force” animated the body’s matter to produce life. And some of Charles’s classmates simply didn’t know what they believed.
But many of Knowlton’s professors, after decades of study and experience, knew exactly what they believed—and it was materialism. Although they often hid their “infidelity” from the general public, most of the professors at New England’s medical schools were freethinkers. That’s why medical schools were viewed with suspicion and distrust by pillars of orthodox religion such as Yale’s President Timothy Dwight, and why even in Hanover the medical program begun by Nathan Smith was still not officially part of Dartmouth College. Freethinkers among the student body and faculty must have been frustrated with the double standard that allowed the christian majority to take advantage of their services while denying them the freedom to express the beliefs their studies had led them to hold. So when the ghosts appeared in the medical school’s basement, even some faculty-members welcomed the opportunity to scare the more devout medical students and the pious Dartmouth undergraduates. One of Charles’s favorite teachers, Professor Oliver, loaned the “ghosts” his keys to the medical building.
Charles became a double agent. Officially, he was the leader of the investigation, responsible for discovering the cause of the hideous noises and the mysterious nightly rattling of bones that were kept in the basement of the medical building. Secretly, he was the leader of the hoaxers, and “continued to keep up the ‘ghost,’ in spite of all the ingenious plans of discovery which were suggested (and which, of course, to keep up appearances of earnestness, I must adopt) by the medical and college students.” Charles and his friends continued their tricks night after night, as the students became more and more alarmed. One medical student was so frightened “that he left the building where he slept, and ran across a pasture in his shirt tail.” The following morning Professor Oliver went to the blackboard and began his lecture by drawing a cartoon of the student running over the hill screaming “ghost!”
After a while, Charles and his associates grew tired of playing ghost every evening. They had fooled most of the college and medical students and frightened quite a few of them, although they had failed to make anyone publicly admit to believing in ghosts. But the conspirators wanted to wind up their hoax without giving themselves away or admitting it had been just a prank. It occurred to them that if a real ghost had been haunting the medical school, rattling bones and strewing them about the basement night after night, it wouldn’t just disappear. They had to give it a reason to go.
The following night, during one of his investigating committee’s midnight tours of the basement, Charles made a prepared speech:
Gentlemen, I cannot say that I believe in ghosts any more than you do…Nor am I prepared to say that there is any harm or impropriety in the living making use of the dead for useful purposes. But there is such a thing as decency in all things; and under all circumstances some degree of respect for the dead ought to be entertained. Here has been a promiscuous pile of human and other bones—sheeps' bones, horses' bones, dogs' bones, and so on. Perhaps a part of the bones of one of the most righteous and godlike men that ever lived are here, while the remainder are we know not where. The bones of the most wicked and abandoned of the human race, male or female, may also be here—all mixed up together. To some it may appear that there is no harm in all this; but I do propose—and surely there can be no harm in making the trial—that to-morrow morning all these human bones be carefully sorted out from among the others, put into a box, and then be deposited in the anatomical museum. It is possible that this may prevent a repetition of the noises, &c. that we have so frequently witnessed.
The committee adopted Charles’s plan, the bones were respectfully sorted the following morning, and the nightly hauntings ceased. Probably only a few of Charles’s classmates noticed the irony in his solution to the ghost problem. Not only were the students appeasing ghosts they refused to admit they believed in, but they were doing it based on the idea that there was a hierarchy of bones—that the remains of “righteous and godlike men” should never be mingled with animals or the wicked. This was just the sort of muddled thinking freethinkers found so frustrating in the religious majority, and Knowlton’s materialist classmates and professors probably thought his solution was wickedly funny. Charles had also stated his belief in the propriety of “the living making use of the dead for useful purposes.” He would argue this point two more times in the coming months, with very different results.