Gallery Guide | The Melancholy Museum

Spiritual Afterlives
MURPHY TEMPLE
PhD candidate, History, and
ASTRID JOHANNAH SMITH
Rare Book and Special Collections Digitization Specialist
and Stanford MLA candidate
THE STANFORDS BELIEVED IN THE “ETERNAL ESSENCE” OF THE
soul, as proclaimed by Jane Stanford’s inscription in honor of her
husband on the east transept wall of Stanford Memorial Church. Death
was a gateway to a new form of existence. Jane’s words, carved in
stone, suggest a desire to transcend mortality. Leland Stanford Jr.’s
death in 1884 shook the very foundations of the Stanfords’ faith that
a life well lived would reap its loving rewards. Nondenominational
Protestants, with an appreciation of Roman Catholicism from their
travels and especially from Jane’s fascination with the Spanish
missions of Alta California, they explored varied means to give their
son his immortality and keep him present in their lives.
In Paris and New York, the grief-stricken parents attended séances,
hoping to contact their beloved son’s departed soul. Former president
Slate Apport, n.d. Stanford University Archives
Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia, introduced them to Doctor John
Philip Newman, a Methodist minister known for his rousing brand
of Spiritualism, and his wife, Angeline, who acted as a medium. The
Stanfords invited the Newmans to accompany them to California
to preside over Leland Jr.’s memorial service on November 27, 1884.
Leland Sr. remained skeptical that the Newmans’ séances would
permit them to communicate with their son, and Jane reluctantly
agreed that the results were disappointing. The Newmans returned
east, leaving behind rumors that the Stanfords were committed
Spiritualists who founded their university by consulting a medium.
For Leland Sr., immortality took the concrete form of a university. He
used his immense fortune to rethink education, building an institution
to prepare students—men and women, rich and poor—“for personal
success and direct usefulness in life.” He called them missionaries for a
new ideal. Late in life, his tender affection for his equine progeny struck
contemporaries as filling the emotional void created by his son’s death.
Jane’s views of how her spirit might exist in perpetuity evolved
with the university. She envisioned Memorial Church as Stanford’s
heart and soul, nurturing the spiritual lives of her adoptive sons and
daughters while memorializing her family. The sandstone, stained
glass, and inscriptions in the church—her “jewel box”—were of her own
design. While visiting her brother-in-law Thomas Welton Stanford
during a 1903 trip to Australia, she found his intense spiritualism
disturbing—a sign that she had moved beyond her early efforts to
speak with the dead by any means. Welton bequeathed an endowment
for psychic studies at Stanford with his collection of apports
(objects enabling communication with the dead). While fated to be a
perpetually grieving mother and widow, Jane remained frustrated by
Spiritualism, finding her son more readily in the church and private
home chapels, in the mausoleum, and in the survival of his collection.
In his 1906 Founder’s Day address, philosopher and psychologist
William James emphasized the university’s spiritual qualities. He
argued that spiritual life arose from the contagious effect of human
spirits imprinting themselves in the objects, places, and ideas that they
touched or fostered. While the bodies of the Stanford family rest in
their mausoleum—Jane situated eternally between her husband and
her son—their spirits still suffuse every aspect of the university around
them, including the museum, where they live on through artifacts that
evoke their own curiosity, taste, and passion for discovering the world.
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