The foregoing shows how vacillating the mind of Mr. Carrington was at the time he was conducting the Palladino seances, and when after a personal contest with the medium he stated his conviction he should have known he was talking the impossible; that no one man could control Palladino beyond the possibility of fraud and at the same time detect her false moves. In the same article he writes:
“I may remark just here that this medium has been caught in trickery from time to time, and will almost invariably resort to it unless she is prevented from doing so by the rigidity of the control (that is, the degree of certainty obtained in holding her hands and feet). The reason for this is that Eusapia, knowing that the production of genuine phenomena will exhaust her nervous forces, resorts to this simpler method, if her sitters are sufficiently credulous to allow it, in order to save herself from the painful after effects of a genuine seance. Nearly every investigator has at one time or another discovered this fraud, which is petty, and more or less obvious to any careful investigator, and consists in the substitution of one hand for two, and in the production of phenomena with the remaining free hand. If, however, sufficient precautions are taken, it is a comparatively easy matter to frustrate her attempts at fraud; and when this is done so-called genuine phenomena are produced. Many of the phenomena are so incredible that by far the simplest explanation is that fraud has been operative in their production; but I can say positively (and I believe the records will show this) that fraud was quite impossible throughout our seances, not only because of the nature of our control of the medium, which was rigidly exacting, but because of the abundance of light. Any theory based upon the supposition that confederates were employed is absolutely discounted: first, because the seances were held in our own locked rooms in the hotel; and secondly, because throughout the seances it was light enough for us to see the whole room and its occupants. It is hardly necessary to add that we examined the cabinet, the table, instruments, and all articles of furniture, both before and after each seance.”
This last seems just as a manager might be expected to talk of the merit of his own show. A salesman should not decry his wares.
There is no question but what Palladino was given to fraud.[55] In personal conversations with Hon. Everard Feilding, W. W. Baggally, E. J. Dingwall and Hereward Carrington, each stated positively that they had caught her cheating and that they knew her to be a fraud. They claimed that toward the end of her career she lost her occult power and at such times as the Spirits failed her she would resort to trickery rather than confess failure. They believed her a genuine medium because of the things which she did under test conditions which they could not explain, their knowledge of fraud being overpowered, apparently, by a willingness to believe in the impossible simply because they were not able to solve the problem.
If you go to a department store and ask for a well advertised bit of merchandise and when you get home you find the clerk has substituted “something just as good” you either report the clerk to the management or else you do not patronize the store again; if you go to a tailor and he sells you an “all-wool” suit and you find that most of the “wool” grew on cotton plants you pass that store by when you are ready to buy another suit; if you catch your best friend cheating at cards you refuse to play with him again ever and a life-time friendship is broken up. But Palladino cheated at Cambridge, she cheated in l’Aguélas, and she cheated in New York and yet each time that she was caught cheating the Spiritualists upheld her, excused her, and forgave her. Truly their logic sometimes borders on the humorous.
F. W. H. Myers wrote in “Borderland” in 1896:
“These frauds were practiced in and out of the real, or alleged, trance and were so skillfully executed that the poor woman must have practiced them long and carefully.”
Palladino is summed up in these few lines.
My opinion is that Palladino in her crafty prime may have possessed the agility and abundant skill in misdirection together with sufficient energy and nerve to bamboozle[56] her scientific and otherwise astute committeemen, but as time demanded its toll she probably lost her vim and nerve and became unable to present her “performances” with the success that attended her earlier demonstrations.
My old friend, John William Sargent, who died on September 24, 1920, was one of the committee which finally dethroned Palladino, and I believe it no more than just that the last word of this chapter should be said by him.