Such statements are quite reckless. Eusapia Palladino tricked habitually, on the confession of Morselli and Flammarion and her greatest admirers, from the beginning of her public career. Eusapia began her public career in 1888, but was little known until 1892. She was exposed at Cambridge by the leading English Spiritualists in 1895, only three years after she had begun her performances on the great European stage. Myers and Lodge reported that not one of her performances (in 1895) was clearly genuine, and that her fraud was so clever (Myers said) that it "must have needed long practice to bring it to its present level of skill." Mr. Myers was quite right. She had cheated from the start. Schiaparelli, the great Italian astronomer, investigated her in 1892, and said that, as she refused all tests, he remained agnostic. Antoniadi, the French astronomer, studied her at Flammarion's house in 1898, and he found her performance "fraud from beginning to end." Flammarion himself reports that she tried constantly to get her hands free from control, and that she was caught lowering a letter-scale by means of a hair. Thus her common tricks had begun as early as 1898, 1895, and even 1892.
"Our hands are clean," Sir A. C. Doyle retorted to my charge of fraud. That is precisely what they are not. Spiritualists have from the beginning covered up fraud with the mantle of ingenious theories, like this "grey" theory. Fifty years ago (1873) a Mr. Volckmann, a Spiritualist, grasped "Katie King," the pretty ghost who had duped Professor Crookes for months. He at once found that he had hold of the medium, Florence Cook; but the other Spiritualists present tore him off, and put out the feeble light; so Florence Cook continued for seven years longer to dupe Spiritualists, until she was caught again in just the same way in 1880. From the earliest days of materializations there were such exposures, and the Spiritualists condoned everything. The medium, they said, when the identity of ghost and medium was too solidly proved, had acted the part of ghost unconsciously, in a state of trance. The ghosts had economized, using the medium's body instead of making one. Some even said that the ghost and medium coalesced again (to save the medium's life!) when a wicked sceptic seized the phantom. Some said, when gauzy stuff, such as any draper sells, or a curl of false hair, was found in the cabinet, that the spirits had forgotten to "dematerialize" it. Some laid the blame on "wicked spirits" who got snow-white mediums into trouble. Some learnedly proved that thoughts of fraud in the mind of sceptics present had telepathically influenced the entranced medium!
These things are past, Sir A. C. Doyle may say. Not in the least. In the decade before the War exposures were as frequent as in the palmy days of the middle of the nineteenth century, and Spiritualist excuses were just as bad. Craddock, the most famous materializing medium in England, who had duped the most cultivated Spiritualists of London for years, was caught and fined £10 and costs at London in 1906. Marthe Beraud, the next sensation of the Spiritualist world, was caught in 1907, and had to be transformed into "Eva C." Miller, the wonderful San Francisco maker of ghosts, was exposed in France in 1908. Frau Abend, the marvel of Berlin and the pet of the German Spiritualist aristocracy, was exposed and arrested in 1909. Bailey, the pride of the Australian Spiritualists, was unmasked in France in 1910. Ofelia Corralès, the next nine days' wonder, passed among the black sheep in 1911; and Lucia Sordi, the chief medium of Italy, was exposed in the same year. In 1912 Linda Gazerra, the refined Italian lady who had duped scientific men and the Spiritualist world for three years, came to the same inevitable end; and Mrs. Ebba Wriedt, the famous American direct-voice medium, met her disaster in Norway. In 1913 it was the turn of Carancini; in 1914 of Marthe Beraud in her new incarnation, "Eva C."
We will consider the trickery of these people in detail later. This mere list of names, of more than national repute, gathered from one single periodical (the German Psychische Studien), shows how the mischievous readiness of Spiritualists to find excuses, and their equally mischievous readiness to admit "phenomena" where real control is impossible, make the movement as rich in impostors to-day as it was half a century ago. It must be understood that behind each of these leading mediums—men and women of international interest—are thousands of obscurer men and women who cheat less cultivated and less critical folk, and are never detected. It is therefore useless to divide mediums into professional and amateur, or into black, white, and grey. You take a very grave risk with every one of them. You need a close familiarity with all the varieties of fraud, and these we will now carefully examine. We will then consider more patiently and courteously what phenomena remain in the Spiritualist world which are reasonably free from the suspicion of fraud.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Les forces naturelles inconnues (1907), p. 18.
[2] Same work, p. 213.
[3] Materialisations-phänomene (1914), pp. 22, 28, and 29.
[4] Personal Experiences in Spiritualism (1913), p. ix.
[5] Metapsychical Phenomena (1905), p. 46.