Again let us, in order not to waste time, address ourselves at once to the classical case of Eusapia Palladino. Your common or garden medium, with his uncritical audience, has a dozen ways of tilting and lifting tables and pulling furniture about the room. To press on with the hands or thumbs (with four fingers "above the table" to edify the audience) and lift with the knees is easy. The same thing can be done by pressure against the inside of the legs of the table. The foot is still more useful, for the table is generally light. A confederate is even more useful. The more artistic medium wears a ring with a slot in it, and has a strong pin in the table. While his hands seem to be spread out above the table, he catches the head of the pin in the slot of his ring, and—the miracle occurs. Other mediums have leather cuffs inside their sleeves, with a dark piece of iron or a hook projecting to catch the edge of the table.
But we will take Palladino, who was examined by scores of scientific men, many of whom to this day believe that at least a large part of her "phenomena" were genuine. The average man hesitates immediately when he hears that everybody admits that part of her performances were fraudulent. She was a "grey" medium, Sir A. C. Doyle says. But he, and so many others, assure you at once that this is quite natural. She had real mediumistic powers; but these decay after a time, while the public still clamours for miracles, and the poor medium is strongly tempted to cheat. I have already said that Sir Arthur is here even more inaccurate than he usually is. He says that she was "quite honest" for the first fifteen years, as any person who studies her record will admit. Let us briefly study it.
Eusapia Palladino was an Italian working girl, an orphan, who married a small shopkeeper of Naples. She remained throughout life almost entirely illiterate, but she came in time to earn "exorbitant fees" (Lombroso's daughter says) by her séances. She had begun to dabble in Spiritualism, and lift tables, at the age of thirteen, but she did little and was quite obscure until 1888, when Professor Chiaia, of Naples, took her up. He challenged Lombroso to study her, and in 1892 a group of Italian professors investigated her powers at Naples. That is the beginning of her public career, and her performances varied little. She sat with her back to the cabinet—unlike other mediums, she sat outside it—and her chief trick was to lift off the ground the light table in front of her while the professors controlled her hands and feet. It was the ghost of "John King" who did these things, she said; and we remember "John King" as a classic ghost of the early fraudulent mediums. He rapped on the table and raised it off the floor; he dragged furniture towards the medium, especially out of the cabinet behind her; he flung musical instruments on the table, and prodded and pulled the hair of the sitters; he made impressions of hands and faces in plaster; and he even brought very faint ghosts into the room at times.
Lombroso and other professors regarded these things as genuine or due to an abnormal power of the medium (not to ghosts). In the end of his life, in fact, Lombroso announced that he had come to believe in the immortality of the mind, though he still regarded this as material. His daughter, Gina Ferrero, tells us that at this time he was a physical wreck, and his mental vitality was very low.[8] However, the professors of 1892 said that they did not detect fraud. The reader of their report may think otherwise. They put Eusapia, for instance, on a scale, and "John King" took seventeen pounds off her weight. Any person can perform that miracle by getting his toe to the floor while he is on the weighing machine; and the professors gravely note that, whenever they prevented Eusapia's dress from touching the floor, she could not reduce her weight! They note also that she cannot raise the table unless her dress is allowed to touch it.
In the same year, 1892, Flammarion invited her to Paris. He says frankly that he caught her cheating more than once. One of her miracles was to depress the scale of a letter-balance by placing her hands on either side of it, at some distance from it. Flammarion found that she used a hair, stretched from hand to hand. His colleague, the astronomer Antoniadi, who was called in, said that it was "fraud from beginning to end."
In 1894 Professor Richet, assisted by Mr. Myers and Sir O. Lodge, examined her at Richet's house, and found no fraud. But Dr. Hodgson insisted that she released her hands and feet from control and used them, and Myers invited her to Cambridge in 1895. The result is well known. In great disgust they reported that she cheated throughout, and that not a single phenomenon could be regarded as genuine. This was, on the most generous estimate, seven years after the beginning of her public career; and Myers, the most conscientious and respected of English Spiritualists, reported that she must have had "long practice" in fraud. Yet Sir A. C. Doyle tells the public that she was "quite honest" for the first fifteen years.
Her admirers were angry, and they continued to guarantee her genuineness. She became the most famous and most prosperous medium in the world. In 1897 and 1898 she was again in France, and Flammarion detected her in fraud after fraud. She released her hands and feet constantly from control. From 1905 to 1907 she was rigorously examined by the General Psychological Institute of Paris. They reported constant trickery and evasion of tests. Sitters were not allowed to put a foot on her right foot because she had a painful corn on it. One of her hands must not be clasped by the control because she was acutely sensitive to pain in that hand. She will not allow a man to stand near and do nothing but watch her. She wriggles and squirms all the time, and releases her hands and feet. She learns that, in a photograph they have taken of one high "levitation" of a stool, it is plainly seen to be resting on her head, so she allows no more photographs of this. And so on. Professor G. le Bon got her at his house for a private sitting in 1906. He was able to instal an illumination behind her of which she knew nothing, and he plainly caught her releasing and using her hand.
In 1910 the Americans tried her. At one sitting Professor Münsterberg was carefully controlling her left foot, as he thought, when the table in the cabinet behind her began to move. But one man had stealthily crept into the cabinet under cover of the dark, and he seized something. Eusapia shrieked—it was her left foot![9] Then the professors of Columbia University took Eusapia in hand, and finished her. They had special apparatus ready for use, but they never used it. In a few sittings they discovered that she was an habitual cheat, and they abandoned the inquiry in disgust.
These are the main points in Eusapia's official record. They suffice to damn her. She cheated from the start to the finish. Her moans and groans and wriggles habitually enabled her to release her hands and feet from the men who were supposed to control them. Nothing is more notorious in her career than that. She pretended that "John King" did everything, yet she used constantly to announce that "some very fine phenomena would be seen to-night." She pretended to be in a trance, yet she habitually called out "E fatto" ("It's done") when something had been accomplished, in the dark, two feet away from her. She was alive to every suspicious movement of the sitters, and controlled the light and the photographers. The impressions of faces which she got in wax or putty were always her face. I have seen many of them. The strong bones of her face impress deep. Her nose is relatively flattened by the pressure. The hair on the temples is plain. It is outrageous for scientific men to think that either "John King" or an abnormal power of the medium made a human face (in a few minutes) with bones and muscles and hair, and precisely the same bones and muscles and hair as those of Eusapia. I have seen dozens of photographs of her levitating a table. On not a single one are her person and dress entirely clear of the table. In fine, at every single sitting, from beginning to end, the observers were distracted by the "ghost." They were prodded and pinched and pushed, and their hair and whiskers were pulled. It seems a pity that they did not refuse to continue unless "John King" desisted from this frivolity. It was Eusapia spoiling their vigilance.