If you are inclined to think that this applies only to professional mediums, whose need of money drives them into trickery, listen to this further verdict, which M. Flammarion says he could support by "hundreds of instances":—
I have seen unpaid mediums, men and women of the world, cheat without the least scruple, out of sheer vanity, or from a still less creditable motive—the love of deceiving. Spiritualist séances have led to very useful and pleasant acquaintanceships, and to more than one marriage. You must distrust both classes [paid and unpaid].[2]
Listen to the verdict of another man who believes in the powers of mediums, and who has studied them enthusiastically for thirty years, a medical man with means and leisure—Baron von Schrenck-Notzing[3]:—
It is indisputable that nearly every professional medium (and many private mediums) does part of his performances by fraud.... Conscious and unconscious fraud plays an immense part in this field.... The entire method of the Spiritualist education of mediums, with its ballast of unnecessary ideas, leads directly to the facilitation of fraud.
If this is not enough, take another gentleman, Mr. Hereward Carrington, who has studied mediums for two decades in various parts of the world, and who also believes that they have genuine abnormal powers:—
Ninety-eight per cent. of the [physical] phenomena are fraudulent.[4]
These are not men who have dismissed the phenomena as "all rot." They believe in the reality of materializations or levitations. They are not men who have been recently converted, in an emotional mood. They have spent whole decades in the patient study of mediums. I could quote a dozen more witnesses of that type; but the reader will be able to judge for himself presently.
Some Spiritualists try to tone down this very grave blot on their religion by distinguishing between the professional medium and the unpaid. The men I have quoted warn us against this distinction. It is quite absurd to think that money is the only incentive to cheat. The history of the movement swarms with exposures of unpaid as well as paid mediums. An unpaid medium who can display "wonderful powers" becomes at once a centre of most flattering interest; and we shall see dozens of cases of this vanity leading men and women of every social position into fraud and misrepresentation, even in quite recent times. All that one can say is that there is far less fraud among unpaid mediums. But there are far less striking phenomena among unpaid mediums, as a rule, and so this helps us very little. The "evidence" afforded by mediums like Mr. Vale Owen, and the myriads of quite recent automatic writers and artists, is absolutely worthless. What they do is too obviously human.
We must remember, also, that the distinction between "paid" and "unpaid" is not quite so plain as some think. Daniel Dunglas Home is always described by Spiritualists as an unpaid medium, but I will show presently that he lived in great comfort all his life on the strength of his Spiritualist powers. Florence Cook, Sir William Crookes's famous medium, is described as "unpaid," because she did not (at that time) charge sitters; but she had a large annual allowance from a wealthy Spiritualist precisely in order that she should not charge at the door. To take a living medium, and one very strongly recommended to us by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle under the name of "Eva C." (though it has been openly acknowledged by her patrons on the continent for six years that her name is Marthe Beraud): she has lived a luxurious life with people far above her own station in life for fifteen years, in virtue of her supposed abnormal powers.
The distinction is, in any case, useless. When Spiritualists try to conciliate us to their wonderful stories by telling us that the medium was "unpaid," they do not know the history of their own movement. The most extraordinary frauds have been perpetrated, even in recent years, by unpaid mediums, or ladies of good social position. Flammarion, Maxwell, Ochorowicz, Carrington, and all other experienced investigators give hundreds of cases. Not many years ago Professor Reichel, tired of examining and exposing professional mediums, heard that the daughter of a high official in Costa Rica was producing wonderful materializations. He actually went to Costa Rica to study her, and he found that she was tricking (dressing a servant girl as a ghost) in the crudest fashion, as I will tell later. The daughter of an Italian chemist, Linda Gazerra cheated scientific and professional men for three years (1908-11), but was at last found to conceal her "ghosts" and "apports" in her false hair and her underclothing. There is no such thing as a guarantee against fraud in the character of the medium. Every case has to be examined with unsparing rigour.