Chasing Ghosts, page 11
So did Piper actually possess some form of superpower, be it telepathic or spiritual? Some people were skeptical, including Granville Stanley Hall, president of Clark University, and his assistant, Dr. Amy Tanner, who studied Piper in 1909. During several of their sittings, Piper allegedly channeled the spirit of Dr. Hodgson, who’d died in 1905. When asked about a fictitious niece, Bessie Beals, Hodgson’s spirit acknowledged her as if she was real. When questioned about it, the spirit got defensive and eventually claimed he was mistaken about the person he was thinking about. “Her name was not Bessie, but Jessie Beals,” he said. Had Piper been caught in a trap like the one John W. Truesdell laid for Henry Slade decades earlier, or does occasional confusion follow us into the spirit world?
Other skepticism comes from some of the strange, nonsensical utterances Piper had given, like the time in 1895 when she muttered about evil monkeys living inside the sun. Further doubt was cast in 1898 when magician Joseph Rinn attended a Piper séance and reported that she held the hands of Hyslop and Hodgson. This, he believed, allowed her to sense feedback and perform what mentalist performers call muscle reading.
Still Piper’s case gave researchers great cause for excitement. And she wasn’t the only one. Around the same time that Piper began her trances in Boston, another medium some four thousand miles away in Italy was making a splash with a host of physical phenomena.
The Physical Powers of Eusapia Palladino
Sitting at a séance with Eusapia Palladino, one might experience table levitation, the appearance of spectral hands and faces, flashes of light, foreign tongues rambling on, a dead rat appearing out of nowhere, and solid objects moving on their own. These objects, as one report described, were of the big and heavy variety: “bookcases and bedsteads get up and dance barn dances, and do other incomprehensible things.” Palladino even emitted a cool breeze from a one-inch scar on the left side of her forehead—the mark being a result of a bad fall when she was one year old. The scar wasn’t in the shape of a lightning bolt, but its effect was as mysterious as that of Harry Potter’s. All this happened while the short, stout, uneducated psychic was supposedly in a trance, bound in a chair with her hands and feet held by those in attendance.
“At the beginning of a trance Mme. Palladino is hoarse and tears and perspiration flow,” a reporter for the Baltimore Sun described in 1909. “Then come tremors and twitchings. She becomes rigid. Finally her face turns a deathly pallor and her eyes roll in so that the eyeballs are barely visible.” Once fully in this trance, the writer added, “she exhibits many of the signs peculiar to epilepsy or nervous hysteria. She laughs spasmodically and wildly and chews frequently. She utters strange words occasionally in foreign tongues, which she could by no possibility have knowledge of in the flesh. When more important phenomena occur she moans as if in agony or else drops into a semi-comatose state.”
This series of photos depicts a method the medium Eusapia Palladino used to secretly free one of her hands during a séance.
Palladino began attracting the attention of scientists from around the world shortly after her first mediumistic experience as a teenager. She’d attended a séance and caused a ruckus by psychically tilting the table and then lifting it completely off the ground. Astonished as anyone, Palladino began holding her own sittings in her small Italian village and building notoriety over the next few years. At some point during this early period of her mediumship (the timing is unclear) she married a conjurer. She later denied he was a magician and claimed only that he had been “connected with theatricals” and knew his way around stage mechanisms and trick devices. The young medium had married a mentor, yet this did not seem to concern the many scientists who would soon descend upon her.
Among her first of these befuddled observers were astronomer Giovanni Schapiarelli, who first spotted the lines on Mars that were believed to be canals; celebrated Italian physician Cesare Lombroso; and French physiologist Charles Richet. Their detailed studies of Palladino left them in utter disbelief and of the opinion that her phenomena were “unfathomable.” With brilliant minds like these giving her the stamp of approval, her fame skyrocketed. Soon the peasant woman was pulling in as much as five hundred dollars per séance—a fee wealthy families were more than happy to pay.
In the early 1890s, after being sold on Leonora Piper, Oliver Lodge examined Palladino in England and concluded that much of her phenomena was genuine. But by 1897, fellow Piper fan Dr. Richard Hodgson cast a cloud of doubt over Palladino’s uncanny spirit world. He just wasn’t as gung-ho as everyone else.
“I have found in my experience that learned scientific men are the most easily duped of any in the world,” Hodgson wrote, regarding the earlier investigators’ beliefs. Richet stood by his group’s analysis and agreed to bring Palladino to Cambridge, England, for further tests. She ran through her typical repertoire of spirit manifestations, but Hodgson was unimpressed. While holding her hand during a séance, he noticed that she would cleverly substitute one hand for both, so that the sitters on both sides of her believed they were each holding one hand. He believed she did the same with a foot.
“Given a free hand and a free foot, nearly all the phenomena can be explained,” he wrote. “She has very strong, supple hands, with deft fingers and great coolness and intelligence.”
Hodgson added that strings may have been attached to objects to help move them, and faint outlines of ghostly visages and limbs may have just been “clever representations of the medium’s own free hand in various shapes.” Perhaps the uneducated peasant wasn’t so uneducated after all. Or maybe this was all part of an act to enhance the effect of her remarkable abilities.
Despite these findings, Palladino remained popular and continued to amaze audiences with her performances. These included her biggest fan, Hereward Carrington, a prominent member of both American and English societies for psychical research.
“I have been asked many times for my own explanation, but I have none. I know only that I can feel the force; that it seems to flow out of me; and that I obtain it in part from others…. Perhaps some day we will know all about this force. Only God and his people know now, and perhaps—the devil.”
—Eusapia Palladino, in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1910
Eusapia Palladino levitates a table at the home of Professor Camille Flammarion in 1906.
Carrington, who looked like Harrison Ford and acted like an occult version of Indiana Jones seeking artifacts of the spirit world, traveled to Italy to inspect this newest mediumistic sensation. He’d written extensively on the subject and frequently exposed the tricks of psychics. If Carrington had doubts about her authenticity, Palladino would soon erase them.
Throughout the course of his examinations, he filled several books with his observations. These included notes on Palladino’s famed table levitations, which “completely levitated” and rose forcibly against his own hand to six inches off the ground, and her unusual breezy forehead that let out a “distinctly perceptible” coolness, even when he held her mouth and nose to prevent her from breathing.
Carrington, however, was a seasoned researcher and not so easily fooled. As his studies continued, he, like Hodgson, detected moments of trickery. But he could not attribute everything to deception. Fraud, he determined, became an option when spirits weren’t cooperating and Palladino wanted to please her sitters. In other words, when people wanted a show, she gave them one. This tendency caused problems for Carrington’s star medium when he brought her to New York in 1909 for her American debut. Séances and studies continued through 1910, and further exposures resulted. A Harvard psychologist, Dr. Hugo Munsterberg, smuggled an assistant into one of the séances to crawl on the floor and observe Palladino’s feet. Similar to Hodgson’s discovery, the assistant spotted her slipping her foot out of her shoe while the shoe remained in position to make others think the foot was still restrained.
“That released foot does all the tricks of the performances,” Munsterberg reported, noting its ability to play instruments, tug at sleeves, and levitate tables. “It is a strong foot and an agile one. It really should have all the credit.”
Though he couldn’t explain everything, Munsterberg had learned enough to determine Palladino was nothing more than another clever fraud. Still, Carrington defended her as genuine and believed she cheated on occasion “simply and solely because of her love of mischief” and her delight “in seeing onlookers mystified at the phenomena produced through mediumship.”
“There was a very strong belief among the male population that women were not smart enough to deceive them. When you have scientists approaching this and they’re not looking for deception because they don’t think that women are smart enough to deceive them because they’re important, intelligent men, it was a lot easier to just do that.”
—Todd Robbins, performer and historian, on the ability of female mediums to stymie investigators, in 2020
THE MAN WHO DIED TO PROVE THERE’S NO DEATH
Whether they used slate writing, Ouija boards, voices, or other manifestations, mediums offered many ways to talk to the dead. But in 1921, a student of Spiritualism named Thomas Lynn Bradford wanted something more conclusive. And he was willing to die for the cause.
Bradford lived by himself in a small, dingy rented room above a store in Detroit and spent his time writing about and lecturing on Spiritualism and the occult. He decided that if he had a partner—two minds perfectly attuned—they could stay connected after one left its body. So the ambitious forty-eight-year-old placed the kind of curious newspaper ad one might find on Craigslist today, searching for a special someone who was interested in communications with the dead. Ruth Doran, a forty-year-old local woman, answered.
Given that he was a Spiritualist, Bradford’s belief in being able to make contact from the beyond doesn’t seem outrageous. Yet, he only met Doran for one conversation at her home. This hardly seemed like enough time for two minds to connect, let alone form a pact over his death. Shortly after, on a Friday night, he turned on the gas in his room, lay down in bed, and began his experiment.
The next day his landlord found him dead. Near his body on the floor were several typewritten pages with the title, “Can the Dead Communicate with the Living?”
Bradford had mentioned his visit with Doran to the landlord, which sent investigators on a search for his apparent partner. When they found her two days later, she was shocked and denied being involved with his morbid scheme. Doran also noted she wasn’t a Spiritualist and thought the ad sought psychological conversation, not a psychical one. Besides, she added, if she had entered into such a pact, she wouldn’t have let him die in such a depressing manner. “I would have had flowers and music.”
Still, she felt a connection with Bradford and wanted to honor his experiment by awaiting any possible message. During a vigil a week later, almost to the hour of his death, Doran sat in the parlor of her home with three non-Spiritualist friends when suddenly she claimed to have gone into a trance. It was 9:15 p.m. Others around town had joined in on the vigil, and as one reporter said, “spiritualists and psychics throughout Detroit, through prearrangement, ‘concentrated’ to hasten or help the return of Bradford’s spirit.”
Doran placed her hands on her temples, asked a friend to turn off the lights, and told another to write down the next words she would utter. In a low, slow voice she delivered a series of short sentences:
I am the professor who speaks to you from the beyond. I have broken through the veil. The help of the living has greatly assisted me.
I simply went to sleep. I woke up and at first did not realize that I had passed on. I find no great change apparent. I expected things to be much different. They are not. Human forms are retained in outline but not in the physical.
I have not traveled far. I am still much in the darkness. I see many people. They appear natural.
There is a lightness of responsibility here unlike in life. One feels full of rapture and happiness. Persons of like natures associate. I am associated with other investigators. I do not repent my act.
My present plane is but the first series. I am still investigating the future planes regarding which we in this plane are as ignorant as are earthly beings of the life just beyond human life.
By ten o’clock she’d snapped out of it and turned the lights on. Doran said the message unquestionably came from Bradford. She was convinced the experiment had worked, regardless of what others might think. “I know the dead can talk,” she said.
It would seem other forces may have been at work beyond sheer curiosity and dedication to Spiritualism. However, Dr. I. L. Polozker, a Detroit psychologist, said the whole thing was perfectly sane. “His action, while bordering on the line of insanity, did not cross it,” he told the press of Bradford. “Whether right or wrong, he was logical. He believed the dead can talk—his scientific mind demanded proof. The way to prove a premise is to prove it. Prof. Bradford adopted an entirely logical manner of trying to do so.”
Bradford’s experiment didn’t seem to win over new converts, but fortunately it didn’t inspire any copycat Spiritualists either.
Eva Carrière Gives Birth to Ectoplasmic Ghosts
For an uneducated peasant, Eusapia Palladino displayed remarkable brilliance and ingenuity. But as the twentieth century progressed, so did the manifestations of other physical mediums. The latest and greatest shock came in the form of a gooey substance called ectoplasm. That’s right, the stuff from Ghostbusters.
The spirit world was oozing into the living through the orifices of numerous mediumistic marvels. Perhaps the most notable psychic of this particular genre was Eva Carrière, better known as Eva C. and originally known as Marthe Béraud. The French phenom first discovered her mediumship in the early 1900s after her fiancé, the son of a general, died in Algiers. His distraught parents began holding séances led by their once future daughter-in-law. Béraud discovered during this time she had a talent for materializing spirits, and after a few publications of her wonders she drew the attention of Charles Richet. During the physiologist’s visit to this latest Spiritualist marvel, Béraud held séances and brought forth the spirit of a three-hundred-year-old Brahmin Hindu called Bien Boa. Richet sensed the spirit’s breath and felt its touch, convincing him of Béraud’s powers.
Medium Eva Carrière and her “materialisations” of ectoplasm, captured in Phenomena of Materialisation by Dr. Albert von Schrenck-Notzing.
“The personage in question is neither an image reflected on a mirror, nor a doll, nor a lay-figure,” Richet reported. “In fact, it possesses all the attributes of life.”
It did indeed have lifelike qualities because the old ghost was alive. Bien Boa would eventually be revealed by less credulous investigators as a not-so-old man wearing a cloak and beard over his flesh and blood. Exposed, it was time to move on.
Béraud moved to Paris in 1909 for a fresh start under the name Eva Carrière. There, she found a benefactor and lover in a wealthy older woman, Madame Juliette Bisson, and attracted the interest of a German physician and psychical researcher named Dr. Albert von Schrenck-Notzing. And then things really got weird.
A series of séances over the next decade, into the early 1920s, resulted in hundreds of photographs of Eva’s “materialisations” emanating and stretching from her nose, eyes, ears, and vagina as her face strained and winced amidst groans and gasps. Von Schrenck-Notzing said it was reminiscent of a woman in labor, as if the spirits put her through a mighty struggle to give birth to them in the realm of the living. Oftentimes these ectoplasmic births appeared with images of expressive faces. Maybe the ghosts were just as surprised by these bizarre happenings as everyone else.
Elizabeth Ann Tomson producing ectoplasm during a séance, captured by the San Francisco Examiner on July 15, 1923.
Such manifestations took place in a darkened cabinet behind a curtain after Eva was allegedly hypnotized. But before the show began, the cabinet would be inspected to ensure against fraud, and Eva would undress in an effort to prove she wasn’t hiding bits of muslin or chiffon or anything else that could create the ectoplasm instead of a ghost. Madame Bisson added to the thorough examination by inserting her finger into Eva’s vagina. She found nothing there, but the examination may have been as much for pleasure as it was for science. Von Schrenck-Notzing, of course, watched the whole thing and reported on it, along with every other detail of the séance on a nearly minute-by-minute basis. He felt pretty sure Eva’s body was in the clear.
“Assuming that a female medium wished to use the vagina as a hiding-place for closely rolled packets, e.g., chiffon gauze, she would have to attach some kind of cord or ribbon to the packet beforehand, in order to be able to withdraw it,” he wrote in his voluminous book Phenomena of Materialisation. “This cord would be detected during the exploration at the mouth of the vagina, and any finger introduced into the vagina would feel the foreign body. In the case of persons with a very wide vaginal entrance, it might be possible to withdraw the packet by means of the fingers, deeply inserted.”
He went on to exonerate her other orifice as well, stating “the hiding of objects in the anal aperture, and their withdrawal from it, is even less possible, on account of its closure by a firm ring muscle, which hinders the introduction of a finger” and that sneaking materials inside would be “almost unthinkable without the use of Vaseline.”
So he was convinced the ectoplasm and the faces appearing on its surface were legit. He met opposition from other investigators, like Richet in Algiers, who weren’t so sure about Eva’s act. The faces looked like images cut out from a magazine because they were. So were lines of text from newspapers and words from Le Miroir. Regarding this last peculiarity, a puzzled von Schrenck-Notzing wrote, “I cannot form any opinion on this curious result.” Another psychical researcher, Eric Dingwall, had less difficulty, saying Eva’s ectoplasm was nothing more than chewed-up paper. Regurgitation, it seemed, was her true power.
