IV: Marvelous Supernormal Phenomena Notwithstanding the Most Rigorous Test Conditions
Prevalence of Fraud
EVEN so ardent a friend of Spiritualism as Dr. Minot J. Savage admits, respecting spiritualistic practices, “I know perfectly well, and the Society for Psychical Research has discovered over and over again, that there is any amount of fraud.” Prof. George G. Fullerton stigmatized Spiritualism as “the melancholy spectacle of gross fraud practised upon the uncritical portion of the community.” Mr. Rupert Hughes, a journalist of note, says: “The ugliest thing about Spiritualism is the ghoulishness with which its practitioners fatten in graveyards and haunt the houses of mourning to prey upon the broken-hearted.” In short, all the eminent men who have studied spiritualistic phenomena have testified that the whole system is honeycombed with fraud. Of course, they insist that there is much in Spiritualism which is genuine. Practically all psychics who, for gain, advertise their ability to give infallible advice on social, domestic, or business matters, are simply arrant knaves.
These roguish mediums gather information in a thousand unsuspected ways. It is their business to get it; if they fail to get it they must get out of the business. They employ confederates, consult reference books, record books, family Bibles; they study epitaphs, obituary notices, marriage and birth notices, property transfers, and pick up all the gossip they can. Where the town is large enough to support several psychics, they exchange confidences, and recommend their victims to one another. This is known as “passing the sucker along.” Another mode of acquiring information is to take in a silent partner, some person with a gift for gossip, some shop or factory girl who will supply news and send in new victims. There are numberless ways of finding out a few curious facts about almost anybody, and mediums become adept in the business.
“Once your spiritual biography is written by one medium, you are doomed,” writes Mr. Rupert Hughes. He writes further: “The information is entered in the text-book and scattered broadcast. The Brotherhood of Mediums accumulated a great directory of secret information called ‘The Blue Book,’ with a section for each city. It contained 7,000 names for Boston. . . . The most facile victims are given the honorary title of D. E.—‘Dead Easy.’”
Mr. Hughes furnishes the following typical entry from the Cincinnati section of the “Blue Book” (the names being changed):
“B. B. Barker, Rich., D. E. Spirit daughter Alice E., age 19, died pneumonia ’79, upper front teeth gold-filled. Extraordinarily long hair. Quite an artist, and one of her landscapes hangs in the parlor in gilt and plush frame. Spirit painting of her in the sitting-room, that is kept curtained. She is an artist in the spirit world. Supposed to have a son in spirit that had no earth life, named Egbert O.”
“Spirit son, Egbert O., never had earth existence; an inventor in spirit life, and supposed to work through Thos. Edison. Is especially interested in electrical work.”
“Spirit father, Robert B., died ’69, paralysis. Manufacturer of machinery, two fingers off left hand.”
“Spirit mother, Sarah, died when he was a child. Spirit brothers, James and Samuel. Spirit aunts, Lucy Wilkinson, Mary Wilkinson, and Eliza Shandrow.”
A Chicago detective seized a male ghost once and found him to be a woman with whitened face. He carried away “a wagon-load of masks, wigs, false whiskers, tin horns, gowns with safety-pins, etc.” The amateur investigator, with little or no experience, confronts a medium who for years has trained himself in the production of illusions, and who knows every variety of secret catch, trap-door, slide, dummy apparatus, concealed wires, etc.
Deception and Trickery Not Always Possible
Yet searching and intelligent scrutiny of spiritualistic phenomena soon brings us to instances which mere cunning and sleight-of-hand can not explain. Professor Morgan describes a table-tipping incident that no hypothesis of trickery can account for. A spectator at this séance sneered at the “spirits.” Automatically, without contact, the table around which the “circle” was standing broke violently away from them and pinned the scoffer against the wall.
For several months Sir William Crookes enjoyed unlimited opportunity to test the source of the rappings produced through the mediumship of Katie Fox. With regard to this experience Sir William says: “With mediums generally it is necessary to sit for a formal séance before anything is heard, but in the case of Miss Fox it seems only necessary for her to place her hand on any substance for loud thuds to be heard in it, like a triple pulsation, sometimes loud5enough to be heard several rooms off. In this manner I have heard them in a living tree, on a sheet of glass, on a stretched iron wire, on a stretched membrane, on a tambourine, on the roof of a cab, on the floor of a theater. Moreover, actual contact is not always necessary; I have heard these sounds produced from the floor, walls, etc., when the medium’s hand and feet were held, when she was suspended in a swing from the ceiling, when she was enclosed in a wire cage, and when she had fallen fainting on a sofa. . . . . With a full knowledge of the numerous theories which have been started, chiefly in America, to explain these sounds, I have tested them in every way that I could devise, until there has been no escape from the conviction that they were true objective occurrences, not produced by trickery or mechanical means.”
That all “rappings” are not produced by trickery is indubitably proved by the fact that often the psychic can not control the sounds. Dr. Maxwell assures us that his mediumistic friend produced raps in restaurants and at railway lunch counters, contrary to his own desire; and they were so loud as to attract attention and cause personal annoyance. Every one who has given any thought to the history of Spiritualism knows that there are not a few persons who are haunted, at unseemly times, by their spirit “guides.”
“On five separate occasions,” declares Sir William Crookes, “a heavy dining-table rose between a few inches and one and one-half feet off the floor, under special circumstances which rendered trickery impossible.” Sir William testifies further that he has witnessed heavy tables and other articles of furniture levitated again and again, while the hands and feet of the medium were securely held, and under conditions which he had prearranged so as to assure unquestionable proof of the fact.
No Evidence of Fraud
Mr. D. D. Home was probably the most remarkable spiritualistic performer of the latter half of the past century. His séances were attended by the scientists and philosophers of two hemispheres, and even by the nobility and royalty. Crookes’s famous “Report” was based almost wholly upon the marvelous achievements of Home. Home never made use of a cabinet of any sort, and nearly always effected his inexplicable feats in the full light of day. Even Mr. Podmore, a member of the Research Society, who tried to explain every alleged spiritualistic phenomenon on purely natural grounds, was reluctantly constrained to admit that “with Home there is no evidence of fraud.” Mr. Carrington, who knows the tricky, shady side of Spiritualism from A to Z, admits: “So far as it is known, tho Home was under far more careful and prolonged scrutiny than any other medium, fraud was never detected at any of Home’s séances, nor was it even suspected on any occasion.”
In his well-known “Report,” the Earl of Crawford states that one evening he was sitting with Mr. Home and Lord Adore. During the sitting Home went into a trance and in that state he was carried out of the window of one room and brought in through the window of the adjoining room. The distance between the two windows was about eight feet, and they were seventy feet above the ground. The two noblemen heard the first window raised up, saw Home floating in the air outside, raise the second window, glide into the room, feet foremost, and sit down. Lord Adore then examined the window through which Home had been carried out. It was raised only eighteen inches, and he expressed wonder as to how Home had been carried through so narrow an aperture.
Home, still entranced, said: “I will show you,” and then with his back to the window he leaned back and was shot out of the aperture, head first, with the body rigid, and then returned into the room quickly and sat down. Lord Adore corroborates in writing the correctness of the account here given of this unequaled spiritualistic feat.
As Sir William Crookes has repeatedly noted, the proof for the Home phenomena, in quantity and quality, is altogether overwhelming.
Rigidly Scientific Investigation of the Psychical Powers of Medium
Eusapia Paladino, who has been called “the greatest living medium,” is an Italian peasant, and was born in 1854, near Naples. In her lowly home her powers first manifested themselves through the startling antics of furniture and bric-a-brac. Her rise to wide notoriety has been spectacular. Her psychical achievements have converted the greatest and most skeptical scientists of Europe. She has become not only the confidante of scientists, but also the protégé of Europe’s proud and exclusive nobility.
It was in 1891 that Cesare Lombroso, the eminent criminologist, consented to investigate her alleged occult powers. At that time Lombroso was openly and contemptuously skeptical of all spiritistic phenomena. A room in a local hotel was chosen by Lombroso himself in which to hold the séances. All the arrangements were entirely under his direction. A half dozen of the greatest Italian scholars were present to assist Lombroso in making the tests as searchingly severe as possible. The eminent astronomer, M. Flammarion, who was also present, says respecting the first test, that while they were standing around the table, the medium being still bound to her chair, they saw a large table which was behind them slowly advancing toward Eusapia. On seeing this strange phenomenon “occur in full light, we were all stupefied with amazement.” One of them dashed into the alcove whence came the table, under the impression that some one concealed there was producing the movement of the table by some hidden device. Their astonishment was unbounded when they found no one there, and yet under their very eyes the table continued to glide over the floor. So marvelously significant were the results of this series of sittings that Lombroso found himself constrained to believe in the reality and genuineness of spiritualistic phenomena. The weight of his authority was so great that other scientists determined to investigate the reputed powers of the now famous peasant woman. In a private home in Milan she gave a second series of séances. Every precaution was taken to obviate fraud in the medium and self-delusion in the investigators. The famous philosopher Charles Richet, of Paris, and Prince Aksakoff, Councillor of State of the Emperor of Russia, were among those who assisted in these investigations.
They succeeded in photographing levitated tables as the latter floated without support in the air. “Prints of astral [spirit?] hands were made on smoked paper prepared for the purpose; yet the medium’s hands, examined immediately, were found free of any sign of soot.” One of the investigators was Dr. Porro, the noted astronomer, director of the observatories at Genoa and at Turin. In a detailed report, he said: “The phenomena are real. They can not be explained either by fraud or by hallucination.” In May, 1907, Morselli, one of the greatest of European physicists, declared, in part: “There can no longer be any doubt as to the reality of Eusapia’s phenomena. They have now been seen by too many persons under excellent conditions of verification, with the full certainty that the medium had not her hands and feet free, and that many of the phenomena occurred at a distance which excluded all possibility of deception.” These hard-headed scholars also testify that many of Eusapia’s most startling manifestations6have been in the light of day or in the full glare of electric light. Her greatest triumphs have been in the cold, unsympathetic interiors of physical laboratories, surrounded by scientific instruments which register with the nicest exactitude every phase of her manifestations. “At last,” says Fremont Rider, “and for the first time, we would seem to have psychic phenomena brought out from the baffling obscurity of mysticism, superstition—and fraud—into the dazzling white light of purely scientific test and observation.”
Richet, still skeptical, however, invited Eusapia to his home in Paris. Here under the severest possible scrutiny in a scientific laboratory, she baffled his expert scientific knowledge and met triumphantly every test imposed. Richet made this admission: “Alone with her and Ochorowics (a noted psychologist), a man of penetrating perspicacity, I renewed my experiments in the best possible conditions of solitude and quiet reflection. We thus acquired a positive proof of the reality of the facts announced at Milan.”
In the Universities
Eusapia was finally prevailed upon to enter the laboratories of the Universities of Naples and Genoa. Her sittings here were under the rigid, unsympathetic direction of Professor Bottazzi, head of the department of physics at the University of Naples. He was sneeringly skeptical of Paladino’s powers. He had scoffed at the reports of Crookes, of Lombroso, and of Richet. He compelled Eusapia to submit to having all her apparel thoroly examined before each sitting. He called in a coterie of cold-blooded scientists to assist him “in applying the screws.” Every movable thing was nailed or screwed fast to the walls of the cabinet. He compelled “John,” Eusapia’s spirit “control,” to have all his movements automatically registered upon a cylinder of smoked glass, effected by the use of a metronome and a dynamometer. Bottazzi determined to secure a graven record, so that no wiseacre could say: “O, you were all hypnotized, or were the victims of ‘collective hallucination!’”
Yet under these scientifically rigorous conditions the following supernormal wonders were observed: A great black hand and arm crept slowly out from the cabinet, and touched Bottazzi’s wife, who happened to be nearest, and then apparently dissolved into thin air. “We felt the sensation as of contact of a real hand,” Bottazzi reported, “bony, nervous, often neither hot nor cold, but sometimes hot; a hand, in fact, of flesh and bones and blood. To whom does this hand belong, which is generally encountered more than half a yard away from the medium’s head, and while her visible hands are rigorously controlled by her two neighbors?” At a subsequent sitting the same black hand appeared and grasped Bottazzi by the nape of the neck. Bottazzi felt for this ghostly hand and clasped it. It was a left hand, neither hot nor cold, “with rough, bony fingers which dissolved under pressure—it dematerialized, melted.” Again, etheric (spirit) hands and fists would hover over Eusapia’s head. These ghostly hands were actually photographed. Little twirling tongues of flame often floated across the curtains of the cabinet; sometimes they appeared above Eusapia’s head. A mandolin rose automatically into the air, floated there while being played by unseen hands. A table weighing seventeen pounds, at one of these sittings, floated high in the air and turned itself over. When it had quieted down for a moment, Dr. Arullani, who was skeptical, approached the table to inspect it more closely, but the table “moved violently toward him and repulsed him.” The medium announced quietly, “I am going to break the table.” The table passed behind the curtain where it was seen to turn over on one of its short sides, while one of the legs of the table came off violently. At this point the table came violently out of the cabinet and “continued to break up under the eyes of every one present; at first its different parts were torn off, then the boards themselves went to pieces. Two legs which still remained united by a thin slip of wood floated above us and placed themselves on the séance table.” Examination showed that “the nails were torn out, the rivets and boards were broken. . . . The strength required literally to pull to pieces such a table is enormous, greater than any man could exert.” The skeptical investigators admitted their complete mystification.
But the inspired word, given us as “a lamp to our feet and light to our path,” makes all these mysteries clear, as will be seen in a subsequent article.
