In the latter 1880s, Spiritualism began to
become more organized and legitimate members of the movement
began to practice their methods of mediumship in ways that
differed from that of the
Fox Sisters, the Davenport Brothers and others. The
organized groups were now taking to steps to examine the
claims of their own members and they did so with such
thoroughness that mediums began to act with caution. This is
not to say that physical mediumship began to disappear from
the scene but the emphasis began to shift in 1880s away from
tipping tables and tooting horns to a more serious attempt
to examine those proofs of spirit existence that took the
form of messages and information. Commercial mediumship
suffered for a time.
|
And then along came Eusapia Palladino. This
Italian peasant woman became almost
single-handedly responsible for restoring the
prestige of physical mediumship and went on to
became perhaps the most famous medium of the
period --- and one who more than made up for the
lack of controversy that surrounded
Spiritualists like William Stainton Moses.
Eusapia Palladino was born near Bari in southern
Italy in 1854. Her mother died shortly after she
was born and her father was murdered in 1866,
leaving Eusapia an orphan at the age of 12. Even
then, it was later reported, she had experienced
many strange and supernatural events, such as
rapping sounds on the furniture, eerie whispers
and unseen hands that would rip the blankets
from her bed at night.
Friends and relatives sent Eusapia to Naples,
where it was hoped that she would find a
position as a nursemaid. Things did not go well.
The family that hired her was disturbed by the
fact that the eerie events continued to occur
around the young girl and also by the fact that
Eusapia refused to conform to life in the city.
She had a stubborn streak that ran through her
character, which often showed itself in her
refusal to bathe, comb her hair or learn to
read. She was soon dismissed from her position. |
Eusapia Palldino |
She
took shelter with some family friends, who dabbled in
Spiritualism. Eusapia attended a séance one night and almost
as soon as she sat down at the table, it tilted and then
rose completely into the air. She began to act as a medium
to reportedly avoid being sent to a convent, although she
claimed that she was afraid of her powers and avoided using
them. The family she was staying with asked Eusapia to stay
on with them, and continue holding séances, but with her
typical independence, she moved out and began to work as a
laundress. She later married a merchant named Raphael
Delgaiz and worked in his shop for a time before starting to
offer séances on a professional basis.
In
1872, a wealthy and influential Spiritualist couple named
Damiani sought Eusapia out. They had heard good things about
the séances that she had been conducting and wanted to
introduce her into society. Unfortunately, the coarse and
rude young woman was no more interested in education and
social polish than she had been years before and her
introduction was a disaster. The Damiani’s efforts to
develop and study Eusapia’s powers proved thankless and she
lapsed back into a life of ordinary mediumship, virtually
unknown outside of a small circle in Naples.
In this
way, Eusapia would have lived out her entire life if she had
not come to the attention of Ercole Chiaia, a doctor and
occult buff, who sought her out in 1886. Acting almost like
a manager, Chiaia too upon himself to publish an open letter
to the famed Italian psychiatrist and criminologist Cesare
Lombroso. In the letter, which he wrote as if describing a
patient, Dr. Chiaia gave a summary of Eusapia’s mediumistic
abilities and urgently requested Lombroso’s help in
determining whether or not she possessed some sort of new
physical force. The letter turned out to be a stroke of
genius for Eusapia’s career. Even though Lombroso ignored
the letter (at that time), her livelihood saw an immediate
boost.
Dr.
Chiaia wrote: She is 30 years old
and very ignorant; her appearance is neither fascinating nor
endowed with the power with modern criminologists call
irresistible; but when she wishes, be it day or night, she
can divert a curious group for an hour or so with the most
surprising phenomena. Either bound to a seat or firmly held
by the hands of the curious, she attracts to her the
articles of furniture which surround her, lifts them up,
holds them suspended in the air like Mahomet’s coffin, and
makes them come down again with undulatory movements, as if
they were obeying her will. She increases their height or
lessens it according to her pleasure. She raps or taps upon
the walls, the ceiling, the floor, with fine rhythm and
cadence. In response to the requests of the spectators
something like flashes of electricity shoots forth from her
body, and envelops her or enwraps the spectators of their
marvelous scenes. She draws upon cards that you hold out,
everything that you want --- figures, signatures, numbers,
sentences, by just stretching out her hand toward the
indicated place.
If
you place in the corner of the room a vessel containing a
layer of soft clay, you will find after some moments the
imprint in it of a small or large hand, the image of a face
(front view or profile) from which a plaster cast can be
taken. In this way portraits of a face at different angles
have been preserved, and those who desire so can thus make
serious and important studies.
This
woman rises in the air, no matter what hands tie her down.
She seems to lie upon empty air, as on a couch, contrary to
all the laws of gravity; she plays on musical instruments
--- organs, bells, tambourines --- as if they had been
touched by her hands or moved by the breath of invisible
gnomes. This woman at times can increase her stature by more
than four inches.
She
is like an India rubber doll, like an automaton of a new
kind; she takes strange forms. How many legs and arms has
she? We do not know. While her limbs are being held by
incredulous spectators, we see other limbs coming into view,
without her knowing where they come from. Her shoes are too
small to fit these witch-feet of hers, and this particular
circumstance gives rise to the intervention of a mysterious
power.
This letter, which turned out to be her first real
introduction to the glare of the public spotlight, would be
typical of Palladino’s entire career. It described incidents
in the séance room that were both common Spiritualist
manifestations, along with events that were much more rare
--- and much harder to explain. What, for example, was to be
made of the bowls of clay where handprints appeared and yet
were out of reach of the bound medium? And what of the
phantom feet and limbs that appeared and could not be
explained? Nearly the entire history of Palladino’s next 30
years was devoted to accounts of the committees and
investigators who sought to answer these, and other,
mysteries about her.
|
Cesare Lombroso |
The first
major researcher to seek out Eusapia was Cesare
Lombroso, the same man who had ignored the
letter from Dr. Chiaia two years before. He came
to Naples in 1890 and arranged to hold a number
of private séances with Eusapia at his hotel.
Most of these initial sessions were below the
level of Eusapia’s usual impressiveness, with
one exception. At the close of one séance, the
lights had been turned up and the observers were
discussing their impressions while Eusapia was
still tied to a chair, about 18 inches in front
of the curtain that formed her spirit cabinet.
Suddenly, sounds were heard from the alcove
behind her, the curtain began to swing and
billow forward and then a small table emerged
from behind it and began to slide across the
floor towards the medium. Lombroso and his
associates hurried into the cabinet, convinced
that a confederate must be hiding inside, but it
was empty, save for a few musical instruments.
The observers were stumped and Lombroso
dismissed any previous doubts that he had about
Eusapia’s abilities. He had no explanation for
what he had seen. |
Lombroso published a report of his findings and it was
greeted with shock and surprise by many. Other investigators
began contacting the medium and in October 1892, Eusapia was
asked to sit for a scientific committee in Milan. Among its
five members were Lombroso himself and Professor Charles
Richet, a noted student of psychic phenomena and a winner in
1913 of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. He would
also go on to publish a number of books about psychic
phenomena and investigate other mediums during his career.
The séances that were held for the Milan committee were the
first of which they were relatively reliable records
concerning the manifestation of Palladino. They are also the
first to not only make note of unexplained occurrences but
also of something else that would shadow the career of the
medium: Eusapia cheated.
There was no question whatsoever, even among her most ardent
supporters, that she took advantage of every lapse in
attention or muscular relaxation on the part of those who
were supposed to “control” her movements, in order to
produce touches, raps, or movements of objects in places
where they should have been impossible. Sometimes her tricks
were clumsy and obvious and at other times, subtle and
clever but it could not be denied that she cheated. It
seemed to make no difference to her either that she might be
exposed in these activities (as she repeatedly was), given
the slightest opportunity, Eusapia cheated.
One of her most common ruses was to convince the two people
assigned to hold her arms that each had continued to keep
contact with a separate limb, when actually one of them had
transferred his hand to her other arm. This was possible
because Eusapia constantly moved about while in her trances,
thrashing restlessly back and forth. In the course of her
tossing her head and waving her arms about, it took great
skill on the part of the handlers to be sure they were not
both controlling the same hand. This was especially true as
the handlers were usually allowed only to follow the
medium’s hands by touch but not to restrain her movements in
any way. Because of all of the excitement, it was also
nearly impossible to decide whether or not Eusapia’s feet
were where they were supposed to be.
And while the reports from the Milan’s sittings made it
clear that Eusapia would cheat whenever she could, there
were also manifestations that occurred that could not be
explained. During the sessions, which were held by a dim red
light, members were able to see and feel what were
apparently a number of spectral hands that groped outward
from behind the cabinet curtain while the medium remained
plainly visible in front of them. Given the fact that
Eusapia was not above faking certain effects, was it
possible for anyone (let alone a semiliterate peasant woman
with no knowledge of applied mechanics) to bring about such
happenings through trickery? That is the exasperating
problem that haunted the scientific minds of the time and
still haunts us about Eusapia Palladino today.
|
Bizarre, and
usually unexplainable, events became commonplace
during Palladino's séances. The most common
problem that investigators experienced was
trying to discover what was genuine and what was
the result of Eusapia's constant cheating.
|
 |
Eusapia continued to baffle the scientists and the
investigators. She performed for Russian zoologist N.P.
Wagner in Naples in January 1893 and then did so again later
in Rome. She sat for Polish psychologist Julian Ochorowicz
in Warsaw at the end of the year and at the beginning of
1894. During every session, the results were mixed. Some of
the effects that occurred were plainly the result of
cheating. Some of them could have been produced by cheating
although witnesses were prepared to state that no cheating
had taken place. And some of the effects were judged to be
inexplicable in terms of any of the methods of cheating that
Eusapia had so far been known to use ---- and possibly
inexplicable in any way whatsoever.
|
Charles Richet |
A more revealing series of
séances was held in 1894 at the home of
Professor Charles Richet in France. Almost every
member of this group of sitters was major name
in the fledgling field of psychical research. In
addition to Richet himself, the earlier
mentioned Dr. Julian Ochorowicz, and the German
researcher Baron von Schrenck-Notzing, there
were also four highly influential English
investigators. They were Sir Oliver Lodge,
Professor and Mrs. Henry Sidgwick and F.W.H.
Myers, all of whom had been founders of the
Society for Psychical Research in 1882. (More
about the society and its founders will be
featured later in the book)
The entire group was well aware
of the medium’s tendency to cheat and the need
for suspicious watchfulness. In spite of this,
they observed the cabinet curtain billowing when
there was no breeze, they experienced repeated
“spirit touches” at times when all were certain
that Eusapia could not have been responsible and
saw and heard objects being moved around the
séance chamber. One of these items was a
stalkless melon that weighed more than 15
pounds. It somehow moved from a chair behind the
medium to the top of the séance table.
|
Even if Eusapia had managed to get a hand (or foot) free on
this occasion, it’s difficult to guess how she could have
grasped an object as smooth as a melon, somehow moved it
from a chair behind her to a table and managed to do it
before the eyes of a group of trained observers. It seems
impossible and because of this, alternate theories emerged
to explain the incident. Some suggested that the observers
had simply hallucinated the “magic melon”. Others claimed
that one or more of the committee members had been in league
with the medium, which seems even more unlikely given the
reputations of those present.
So, how did this bizarre event occur? No one knew then and
no one knows now. This is why investigators came to realize
that there was a need for the more extensive use of
recording devices and photographs during the investigations.
That way, the control of the medium and the occurrence of
the phenomena would not be subject to errors in human
perception. Unfortunately, though, even after this important
series of séances, such improved methods of investigation
were not used with Palladino until a later period, and even
then, were not as thoroughly applied as they should have
been.
After the sittings in France, the next important sessions
with Eusapia took place in England and were generally
regarded as a disaster. Of the four English participants in
the investigations of Professor Richet, only Sir Oliver
Lodge had found himself completely satisfied that Eusapia’s
phenomena was in part supernatural. The others, Myers and
the Sidgwicks, wanted further trials before they could reach
firm opinions. They invited Palladino to sit for that at
Myer’s home in Cambridge, where she went in the late summer
of 1895.
|
Unfortunately,
no detailed record of the Cambridge séances was
ever published by the Society of Psychical
Research (SPR) and so we have no way of knowing
what led up the conclusions reached by those
involved. We only know that in October 1895,
Professor Sidgwick announced at the society’s
general meeting that nothing had been witnessed
at Cambridge that could not be put down to
trickery. He then went on to withdraw what
limited support that he had for Palladino, based
on the French sittings, and to state that he had
come to believe that all of her manifestations
were fraudulent. Myers joined Sidgwick in
rejecting the Cambridge séances, although he did
choose to reserve judgment on what he had seen
in France, which he claimed was more impressive. |
A photograph from
one of the 1894 sittings with Palladino (center)
and Charles Richet (left). |
No one knows for sure what did occur in Cambridge that
summer but it is clear that there were things about
Palladino that would have likely offended the Sidgwicks and
their friends, regardless of the quality of their mediumship.
In fact, had it not been for her mediumship, it is highly
unlikely that these highly cultivated English people would
have ever associated with a person like Eusapia. Regardless
of her reputation as a medium, she did fit into the mold of
previous major mediums. She had none of the social graces or
charm of D.D. Home and certainly none of the sober and
upright character of William Stainton Moses. Instead, she
was almost everything that her Cambridge hosts were not ----
poorly educated, coarse, emotional, loud and quite
uninhibited about her interest in the opposite sex. She
tended to wake from her trances hot, sweaty and sexually
aroused. Several times, she had tried climbing into the laps
of male sitters at the table. This was something that simply
was not done in Victorian era England.
In spite of this, the Cambridge investigators did try and
make Eusapia as comfortable as possible so that she would be
in a receptive state for the séances. Professor Myers’ wife
took her shopping, allowed Eusapia to cook Italian meals in
her kitchen and listened to her incessant chatter, even
though Mrs. Myers spoke only a few words of Italian and had
no idea what Eusapia was talking about. The Myers’ young
son, Leo, was recruited to play croquet with her on the lawn
but even this young boy complained that she cheated during
every game.
Even after all of the efforts made, Eusapia was unhappy. She
hated the climate in Cambridge, the cool summer weather, the
polite conversation and cultured people. She fell into an
ill-tempered sulk that carried over into the sittings. She
became indifferent about the entire situation, refused to be
tied in place, sometimes wouldn’t allow her feet to be held
and performed poorly. Because of this, little happened,
tipping tables a time or two, but that was about all. It’s
not surprising that Sidgwick and Myers had enough of the
troublesome medium and withdrew their support of her after
that summer.
A denunciation by the SPR should have damaged Palladino’s
career but as it turned out, her work was far from over. She
left England and returned to the continent, where she had
always felt most comfortable. She presided over numerous
séances in private homes and the sitters were apparently
satisfied, for she continued to be in great demand. It was
not until November 1898 that Eusapia consented to be
examined by another scientific committee. This time the
investigation was held in Paris and the organizer was
Camille Flamarion, an eminent astronomer and a student of
the paranormal. One of his chief assistants was Professor
Richet.
The Paris séances produced a number of manifestations that
were familiar --- and some that were decidedly strange.
During one session, Eusapia was seated at one end of a
table, and controlled in the usual way, when the sitters
were stunned by the sight of a series of semi-transparent
female half-figures that seemed to glide out of her body and
down the length of the table.
Richet apparently felt the Paris séances were so interesting
that they ought to be extended, and when the sittings
sponsored by Flamarion had ended (and Flamarion himself had
declared that he was satisfied that trickery could not
account for what had occurred), Eusapia consented to
continue the sittings. Richet quickly organized a new series
of séances and invited the attendance of F.W.H. Myers, as a
private individual and not as a representative of the SPR.
According to their individual accounts, these further
sittings were truly remarkable. But as with the Cambridge
séances, it is unfortunate (and more than a little
mystifying) that no official records exist as to tell us why
they were so exciting.
Whatever occurred, it led the formerly skeptical (and
hostile) Myers into declaring before the general meetings of
the SPR for December 1899 that he was now convinced of
Palladino’s gifts. He had just witnessed, he told the group,
phenomena “far more striking” than the séances that he had
attended by Eusapia in 1894. However, neither Myers not
Richet ever published any notes on these sittings, though in
the case of Myers the continuing negative attitude of his
friends in the SPR was apparently responsible for this.
The only surviving account comes to us from the unofficial
notes of Professor T. Flournoy of the Faculty of Sciences at
the University of Geneva, who was also present at the
séances. Flournoy was an experienced observer of the
Spiritualist movement but does not go into enough detail
about what he saw to permit any sort of strict analysis.
Regardless, there is no reason to doubt his overall
description of the conditions of the séances. It’s
interesting to note that this time Eusapia not only agreed
to produce her phenomena in a light that, while dim, was
more than sufficient for her movements to be seen by the
sitters but she also allowed her wrists and legs to be
firmly held rather than just followed about.
|
A photograph from
one of the 1898 sittings that Palladino held for
Camile Flamarion and Charles Richet
|
Under these
conditions, which were more satisfactory for
scientific observation than the medium usually
allowed, the manifestations that took place were
of familiar kinds but could hardly be dismissed
when so many were at a loss to explain them. The
curtains of the spirit cabinet blew about, as if
in a strong breeze, although the closed séance
room was still and quiet. A zither that lay on
the floor of the cabinet, well out of the
medium’s reach, was first to repeat a single
note over and over again and then began to thump
up and down on the floor. Finally, the
instrument was seen leaving the cabinet and
landing on the table in front of the sitters.
During these and other happenings, the witnesses
felt themselves pushed, pinched, patter and even
struck by what they described as a “large hand”.
All agreed that Eusapia’s hands were not only
tightly held but were clearly visible at all
times.
In spite of
there being no records for these séances, word
spread of the results and Eusapia’s fame
increased once again. Judging from the fact that
she had allowed the test conditions in Paris to
be much stricter than normal, she must have seen
these sittings as a way to recover ground that
she had lost when the SPR withdrew their support
of her. If this was her plan, they she
succeeded. Even in England, the Cambridge
disaster was all but forgotten and it seemed
that every scientist in Europe was anxious to
have a séance with Eusapia Palladino. |
|
The next investigations were
carried out in Genoa in 1901, under the
sponsorship of a society called the Minerva
Scientific Circle. This time, careful records
were kept and published but the manifestations
were far below the level usually carried out by
Palladino. It should be noted though that
Professor Enrico Morselli, the group’s leading
investigator, though fully aware of Eusapia’s
continued cheating, calculated that at least 75
percent of what occurred during the sittings was
genuinely paranormal.
Over the course of the next few
years, Eusapia sat for one commission after
another but time was wearing on her and she was
growing old. Her strong face had begun to sag
and lines etched her features. Sometimes, she
was unable to perform and sometimes she found
herself so exhausted after a séance that she was
barely able to walk. The feeling of constantly
being put to the test was starting to wear on
her and it manifested itself as contempt for her
sitters. She was tired but she could not stop.
The séance room was her place of work and she
had no other way to make a living. |
A Palladino
séance in Germany in 1903 |
She was studied by Professor Bottazzi of the Physiological
Institute of the University of Naples in 1907 and by Jules
Courtier of the Paris General Psychological Institute at
intervals from 1905 to 1908. In every session, the same
problems occurred again and again. Eusapia made all of the
rules as to what kind of control of her movements would be
allowed. Any attempt to overstep these rules resulted in an
absence of any phenomena. On the other hand, the kind of
control that she permitted remained far from foolproof. She
was not only adept at the substitution of hands (described
earlier) but she could also sometimes slip a foot out of a
shoe in a way that the handler never realized the shoe was
empty. And, as the Davenport Brothers had shown, no amount
of rope being used is proof that a medium is immobilized.
The one innovation implemented by Courtier was the fairly
extensive used of recording devices during the séance.
Measurements were taken of the temperature, humidity,
barometric pressure and electrical conditions in the room.
Courtier also measured Palladino’s pulse and respiration
rate and also the decrease in weight of various objects that
levitated in the séance room. Nothing astonishing was shown
by these tests but they did serve to provide evidence that,
at least on this occasion, the phenomena was real and was
not merely caused by hallucinations on the part of the
witnesses. While much more progressive than any other
investigative methods used up to that time, the sensors
still did reveal anything about what caused the
manifestations, whether it was Eusapia or some “unknown
physical force.”
In 1908, Eusapia performed in Naples for a three-man
committee that was likely the most formidable that she had
ever encountered. One of the men was Hereward Carrington, an
American researcher who, though only 27 at the time, had
been engaged in exposing fraudulent mediums for eight years
and had written a book on their methods called The
Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism. Carrington had
persuaded the SPR (despite their continued misgivings about
Palladino) to send with him its honorary secretary, the
Honorable Everard Feilding, a man with little experience in
the séance room but also a man who was hard to convince of
the supernatural. The third member of the committee was W.W.
Baggally, who had been investigating the paranormal for more
than 30 years. He stated that he doubted that he had ever
actually met a genuine medium and was an accomplished
amateur magician who amused his friends and colleagues by
duplicating the tricks of fraudulent Spiritualists.
These men were not your average believers and Palladino
would have an uphill battle on her hands to convince these
men she was genuine. They planned to document everything to
the letter. The séance records were taken by a shorthand
stenographer and appeared in detail in Feilding’s later book
Sittings with Eusapia Palladino & Other Studies. The
records gave a minute-by-minute account of the researchers,
extensive descriptions of the séance room and its
furnishings, diagrams and measurements and even careful
notes on any changes in lighting. The phenomena witnessed
were not only noted but was classified and discussed in
separate sections. In addition, each investigator was given
ample space to note any disagreements he might have and to
state his individual conclusions.
Throughout the sessions, the investigators reported
movements and levitations of the séance table; movements of
the cabinet curtains; bulging of the medium’s dress; raps
and bangs on the table; noises inside of the cabinet; the
plucking of a guitar; movements of a small table from the
cabinet onto the séance table and movement and levitation of
it outside of the curtain; transportation of other objects
from the cabinet; touches by unseen fingers and hands;
appearances of hands from behind the curtain; appearances of
heads and objects that looked like heads from the curtain;
lights; sensation of a cold breeze issuing from a scar on
the medium’s brow; and the untying of knots.
The investigators were perplexed. These were highly
skeptical, yet open-minded men. They could find no easy
explanation for what they had witnessed. In their notes,
they wrote:
It was only through constant repetition of
the same phenomenon, in a good light and at moments when its
occurrence was expected, and after finding that none of the
precautions we took had any influence on impeding it, that
we gradually reached the conviction that some force was in
play which was beyond the reach of ordinary control, and
beyond the skill of the most skillful conjurer.
The investigators offered only two explanations. One, that
they were under some sort of hallucinatory trance that had
been caused by Palladino or two, that there was some sort of
unknown, unascertained force at work. The men reluctantly
adopted the latter explanation. They wrote:
We are of the opinion that we have witnessed
in the presence of Eusapia Palladino the action of some
telekinetic force, the nature and origin of which we cannot
attempt to specify, through which, without the introduction
of accomplices, apparatus, or mere manual dexterity, she is
able to produce movements of, and percussive and other
sounds in, objects at a distance from her and unconnected
with her in any apparent physical manner, and also to
produce matter, or the appearance of matter, without any
determinable source of supply.
The report turned out to be a tremendous victory of Eusapia.
In light of it, the SPR specifically withdrew its ban on
Palladino and reasserted her place among mediums meriting
serious investigation, in spite of her continued cheating.
Most investigators, familiar with the medium and her
trickery, felt that she was psychologically unable to
discontinue it. Easily identified, they chose to ignore it
in light of what they felt was the genuine phenomena that
she continued to produce.
One can only hope that Eusapia enjoyed this small bit of
glory for the rest of her story is bitter and tragic. It was
almost as if she managed one last spectacular series of
séances before she began to crumble into obscurity. In spite
of the success of the Naples sittings, Eusapia’s health was
breaking down and with it, her power to create her acclaimed
phenomena. Hereward Carrington was anxious to have her visit
the United States so that his American colleagues might have
the opportunity to witness her performances for themselves
and she agreed to come to America, despite her failing
health. The trip lasted from November 1909 to June 1910, a
period of constant disasters for Eusapia.
In her younger days, Eusapia would have loved the raw
vibrancy of excitement of America. She was have seen it as a
challenge but by 1909, she was aging, tired, in poor health
and used to be taken seriously. However, the American press
did not treat her as a visiting celebrity or even a
scientific enigma. Instead, they saw her as a carnival
sideshow and treated her more as an oddity than as a person
who had stumped scientists in the major cities of Europe.
She received many requests to perform but most of them came
from music hall managers rather than from scientific
committees. The prevailing attitude, from both the general
public and other mediums, seemed to be one of suspicion and
hostility. Eusapia was very unhappy and soon became angry
and difficult to work with.
The investigators at Cambridge could have predicted what
would happen next. When Eusapia was unhappy, her séances
suffered. Feeling undervalued in America, she became
irritable. She recognized immediately that most of the
sitters who were coming to her séances were inexperienced;
so when the phenomena were slow in coming, Eusapia cheated.
She was caught repeatedly (she underestimated the America
sitters) and each time the press reported the incident as
“exposure”, leading many of the American Spiritualists to
wonder if the woman had ever produced anything genuine at
all.
When Eusapia finally left America, she went into retirement.
The time for the world to learn about the mysteries of the
great medium had run out. She was a sick and tired woman by
this point and she vanished into history. Eusapia Palladino
died on May 16, 1918 and left to the scientific community an
exasperating legacy. It’s doubtful that the questions raised
by her mediumship will ever really be answered. As Hereward
Carrington once wrote, the question of Eusapia leaves us
with a choice “between two improbabilities” ---- either at
least some of Eusapia’s phenomena were genuine or human
testimony in such cases is without value.
There was no experiment that was conducted with her for
which any other method of control or observation would have
been more complete or with sitters who might have been
better qualified to judge the results. Some may criticize
what was done but can never agree on exactly what, given the
technical limitations of the time, should have been done
differently. There is no debate over the fact that she
cheated. The scientists both recognized and accepted this.
Her supporters maintained that she used trickery only when
the phenomena were slow in coming or that she did it to save
herself from illness and exhaustion. But should her trickery
nullify all of the séances that she conducted, even the ones
in which learned experts swore that no cheating took place?
Could Eusapia Palladino have been the “real thing”? Was she
truly a person who was able to harness that “unknown force”?
Or was she merely a clever hoaxer who managed to turn the
tables on scores of observers who she saw as her
intellectual and social betters? Did this common peasant
woman have the last laugh?
Doubtless, we will never really know for sure, leaving us
with one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the heyday of
the Spiritualist movement.
© Copyright 2008 by Troy
Taylor. All Rights Reserved.
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