by Deborah Blum
There was nothing else to do, really. The sittings were held in the evenings, and the researchers had been instructed not to socialize beforehand with their captive medium. The group did gather for dinner, cooked and served by the lighthouse keeper’s wife. These meals tended to lapse into cacophony. The investigators conversed in French. Eusapia spoke Italian, in the Neapolitan dialect, loudly. She liked to shout down her companions, demanding that they listen to her life stories, over and over.
She particularly liked to recall the dramas of her life, and she not only verbally re-created the moments, she acted them out in style. When she told of the brigands of her childhood—thieves who had reportedly killed her parents—she did it by leaping onto the table and, in Lodge’s fascinated words, “waving kitchen knives about like sabers.”
It was worse if the conversation turned to her occult abilities, especially if any shard of doubt appeared. She routinely worked herself into a screaming fit—“a Neapolitan rage,” as Lodge described it—when the subject of trickery arose. The problem was that it always arose, because she always cheated when she could. Ochorowicz called this “reflex fraud.” He suspected that it was a game for her, almost a flirtation; she liked to see what she could get away with. Only after Eusapia tested the limits would she settle into the business of being a medium.
Ochorowicz was a big, fair-haired man with a deceptively relaxed demeanor. He was suspicious enough to search Eusapia, her luggage, and her room regularly and without warning. She put up with it, but she resented it. Did these scientists think the spirits complied, the power appeared, every time? She liked to get the job done. If she couldn’t call upon supernatural powers, she would use her own.
As she told Ochorowicz, it was up to the investigators to discern which occasions were which.
Eusapia and her inquisitors gathered around a lamplit table in the early evenings. Each night, one of them—usually Richet’s secretary—took notes. The others took turns holding the medium’s hands and feet and even her head. Sometimes they used a traplike device designed by Ochorowicz, which caged her feet and caused a bell to ring if she moved them.
Lodge and Myers found the medium just as puzzling as Richet had warned them she would be. A music box sitting on the table began to play and then rose to press against Myers’s chest. When it dropped to the floor, Myers stumbled forward. Something was pushing him from behind, he called out; would they please go look at it? His colleagues could hear a slapping sound against Myers’s back, but there was nothing there. A white protuberance suddenly extended from the medium, stretching in the dim light until it prodded Myers in the chest. He flinched back; it was fingerless, but it felt, he said, like a hand grasping his ribs.
There were nights when a brass key sailed off the library table to fit itself into a door lock. Other times, a strange yellow and blue glimmer of light winked on, off, on again in the empty air. And there was that strange wind, rising out of a vacant corner, stirring the edges of the room.
“There is no doubt to this business,” Myers wrote to James, “& we are plunged into the grossest superstition.”
MYERS AND LODGE left so convinced of Eusapia’s legitimacy that they determined to write up a report on her and submit it to a science journal. Their first choice was Science magazine. Dismayed, James did his best to discourage that plan, reminding them of the fate that William Crookes had suffered at the hands of female mediums. The Sidgwicks were equally unenthusiastic; they’d also sat with Eusapia and found her puzzling but not persuasive.
The Palladino situation was a “crisis,” Sidgwick wrote to a friend. The SPR had worked hard for “a reputation for comparative sanity and intelligence by detecting and exposing the frauds of mediums.” Sidgwick hated to see that credibility squandered on a medium whose phenomena—levitations and ghost hands—were the mainstay of fraudulent mediums, many of whom had been exposed by his organization. He worried equally about losing the appearance of objectivity: “It will be rather a sharp turn in our public career if our most representative men come forward as believers.”
Consider the reputation of Cesare Lombroso. Still struggling to explain his encounters with Eusapia, Lombroso had now published a theory that the medium could access an unknown psychic force, capable of reaching into the “ether” for its power. In their search for scientific acceptance, the members of the SPR definitely did not want to find themselves associated with ether theories of psychical powers.
The most misbegotten spiritualists, Helena Blavatsky among them, had embraced this idea of the “ether.” The ether, being invisible, was difficult to describe, but it was postulated as a kind of cosmic cream that oozed through space, pervaded all matter, and acted as a kind of spiritual filler between this world and others. Blavatsky claimed that the breath of early gods had formed it, and that only the most advanced mystics (including herself) could use it to acquire unearthly, etheric powers.
The spiritual version rested on an idea from the science of physics, dating back to Isaac Newton, that an unknown material might fill unoccupied space and serve as a conducting medium for light and heat. Oliver Lodge was among those who’d looked for evidence of such mysterious matter, and he’d also helped discredit the idea of Madame Blavatsky’s kind of spiritual ether. The previous year a British shipbuilder and spiritualist had provided money for Lodge to design a machine specifically to test for the psychic ether.
Lodge’s machine used a pair of powerful dynamos to spin metal disks into a blur, whirling them 4,000 revolutions per minute, producing a sizzling electrical charge. Its purpose was to test a favorite theory of the spirit believers, that the ether had a natural affinity for charged atoms, that its ability to carry electrical energy might be thus responsible for psychic powers. The machine contained instruments to measure any “etheric” effect on the sparking, electrically charged disks.
The instruments registered absolutely nothing.
Resurrecting the ether was likely to make them all look like fools, James wrote to Myers; already it made Lombroso appear as “the greatest donkey of the age.” Prematurely advocating for Eusapia Palladino, without thoroughly eliminating all the suspect parts of her seances, would be a mistake. The SPR didn’t really understand her—any more than Lombroso did—and until then, James urged self-restraint. “You ask what I think about popular publication? I must confess myself extremely averse,” he wrote to Lodge. “The more startling the secrets we have to disclose, the more, in my opinion, should we calmly pursue the tenor of our ways and publish proceedings at their due date. The stuff will keep and the bigger the bomb to be exploded at once in the proceedings, the greater the shock.”
IN THE WARM AUTUMN of 1894, Dick Hodgson was running like a dynamo himself, hunting ghost stories, reading journals, writing letters, speaking, holding meetings, and writing up the G.P sittings for his next Piper report.
He thrived on the work, along with what recreation he could sneak into his days: handball and pool at the Union Boat Club, drinking beer with friends, hurrying through his favorite bachelor meals of eggs, bread, and tea. His letters to his friend Jimmy Hackett rang with optimism; psychical research looked more promising than it had ever seemed before.
The news that Myers and Lodge wanted to gamble the reputation of the whole enterprise on a rather shady medium ruined that sense of well-being. Hodgson understood that everyone wanted a base of psychics that extended beyond Leonora Piper. But they were fooling themselves if they thought that this woman would ever be credible.
He immediately cabled to Myers, imploring him to back away from Eusapia Palladino. Myers was beginning to feel beleaguered. His reply had a snap to it. Hodgson hadn’t been there, Myers wrote back, so the ASPR secretary couldn’t properly evaluate what had happened.
Now a little angry, Hodgson stayed up late for several nights running to write a crisp—and undiplomatic—analysis of how the Ile Roubaud group had been deceived. They might think they could see through Eusapia’s little cheats to a bigger truth. But in
fact, Hodgson concluded, that was upper-class arrogance. She might not be Cambridge educated, but she was far more cunning than they.
He mailed his report to Nora Sidgwick, along with another tirade in the form of a letter. He dismissed Lodge as a poor investigator, despite training in physics, and Myers as easily gulled once a medium had gained his sympathies. “This is part and parcel of his big, poetic, divine genuine soul, & he can’t help it!”
Nora was then editor of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. As ever, she was unmoved by emotional appeals. But cold intelligence called to her like a siren song, and Hodgson’s dissection of the Ile Roubaud experiments was both clinical and smart. She published his analysis, unabridged, in the April 1895 edition. She expected to infuriate every person who had been on that island, and frankly, she didn’t care.
Hodgson was ruthlessly to the point: Eusapia behaved like a fraud because she was one. By constantly twitching her hands away and moving them, she could lead two sitters to grab the same hand, freeing her other one. Or she might even trick them into holding each other’s hands. In the dim room they’d allowed her, the investigators couldn’t see what they were holding anyway. Their own less than meticulous records, Hodgson added, contained no proof that they’d effectively prevented her from using such methods. Thus, all their mysterious little stories were meaningless.
Hodgson knew all about medium tricks, and he was happy to share his knowledge in detail: once Eusapia gained even a little mobility, she could levitate tables with secretly attached hooks, move objects, and prod researchers with a collapsible steel rod attached to her knee, all the standard devices of the trade. Those pale hands and projections were probably molded paraffin. She could have rigged the room when they weren’t looking, stringing it with fine twine that would not be visible in the dim light.
And the “inexplicable” wind? Another well-known trick. An inflatable bladder, a balloonlike device that puffed air when compressed. All she had to do was sit on it. As for ectoplasm or ether, please. The very concepts made him want to laugh. Hodgson only wished that his colleagues would start behaving like adult investigators.
As NORA HAD FORESEEN, indignation ran at high tide among the Ile Roubaud investigators. One after another they hurried forward to demolish Hodgson’s case against them.
Richet pointed out that they had searched Palladino, caged her feet, and conducted experiments in light as well as dark. They weren’t so dumb or so blind that they wouldn’t have noticed a rod stretched across the room, Richet said; they probably would have fallen over it when they hurried to investigate a moving object.
Not only that, Myers wrote, Eusapia didn’t wiggle away quite so often as Hodgson implied. Many times they’d had her hands securely locked in theirs. And did Hodgson really. think that Myers wouldn’t notice a hand switch, wouldn’t realize he was suddenly holding Lodge’s “massive, steady, round-nailed hand” instead of Eusapias’s “small, perspiring, quivering, sharp-nailed hand”?
Ochorowicz wrote that Hodgson, not a trained scientist, had missed the point. The most interesting possibility offered by physical mediums such as Eusapia was the rare, occasional hint of a different kind of power, that of telekinesis. Like telepathy, this was a new word, patched together from the Greek words for “far” and “movement.”
After all, Ochorowicz continued, if one medium could extract information from an object—as even Hodgson acknowledged Mrs. Piper seemed able to do—then perhaps another could exert energy on objects, not pulling facts from them but buffeting them with energy, making them move in response.
He cited a particular incident to illustrate that possibility: During one of the sittings, they had wedged Eusapia between Myers and Lodge, shoulders against shoulders, each man gripping her hands. Ochorowicz had then placed himself underneath the table to clasp her feet. A large table, some four feet away, had lifted into the air and turned itself upside down. They’d weighed it afterward. It was a hefty forty-eight pounds, suggesting that a tug on fine threads, had there been any such devices attached, would have accomplished nothing except to snap them.
It was possible, he continued, that Eusapia didn’t know her own gift. Responding to the spiritualist claims of the time, influenced by the very people who studied her, she liked to credit spirit power for her phenomena. But it might be nothing of the kind. It might be a power or energy form that she herself did not understand.
Certainly, he and his fellow investigators didn’t understand it. And from the vantage point of his Boston office, Ochorowicz wrote, Hodgson couldn’t possibly understand it either.
Faced with such divisiveness in the ranks, bombarded by angry and opposite opinions, Henry Sidgwick made a judicial decision. The investigators would simply start over.
This time, they would test Eusapia on their terrain. The British SPR decided to bring the Italian medium to England, as they had with Mrs. Piper. Further, they would train for her visit. They began practice sittings at the Myers’s house in Cambridge, trying different ways of holding hands and feet. Myers was particularly impressed—and secretly amused—by Henry Sidgwick’s newfound skill for dropping to the floor, his white beard trailing over the carpet, while he anchored Nora’s feet in place.
Hodgson wasn’t impressed all. He fired off an immediate demand that they bring him to England as well. He didn’t mean to be rude, but he was sure that without him they would get it wrong again.
EUSAPIA HATED CAMBRIDGE.
Everything was cold—the climate, even in this so-called summer of 1895, the oh-so-polite conversation, and the self-contained British personalities. She was a warm-blooded woman, hot in nature. In middle age, she was discovering that the occult could really steam her up.
She tended to wake from trances hot, sweaty, and, well, aroused. Several times, she’d tried climbing into the laps of the male sitters at the table. In England, the men had a distressing tendency to stand up in response, rather than take advantage of the opportunity.
They wanted her to be comfortable so that she would be in a receptive state of mind for the seances. Evie Myers took Eusapia shopping, allowed her to cook Italian meals in their kitchen, listened smiling to all the medium’s chatter, although Evie herself spoke only a few words of Italian and had no idea what Eusapia was talking about. Evie also photographed the stubby Eusapia, who demanded to be draped in Sidgwick’s austere academic cap and gown.
“Sidgwick has to flirt with her,” Myers wrote to James, but he begged James to keep that part a secret. “This is not for Philistine ears.” Nora, serene as ever, came by regularly to translate for Evie and to write letters home in Italian for Eusapia, who had never learned to write.
The Myerses’ eight-year-old son, Leo, was recruited to play games of croquet with the medium. She enjoyed it, standing on the smooth green lawn, catching pale rays of northern sunlight, slamming around the bright-colored balls. But Leo complained to his parents that she cheated every time.
Nevertheless, Eusapia fell into an ill-tempered sulk, which carried over into the sittings. Exhibiting an indifference toward the whole enterprise, she refused to be tied in place, sometimes wouldn’t allow her feet to be held, yanked her hands away from confining grips. Little happened. Once or twice a table tipped. A few trinkets skittered across a mantel.
The most interesting result occurred during a visit from Lord Rayleigh, who had brought with him a friend and fellow physicist, J. J. Thomson. The tall thin Thomson and shorter, stockier Lord Rayleigh made a remarkably good pair of observers. Both men would win Nobel Prizes in physics within the following decade, Rayleigh for his work in atmospheric chemistry and Thomson for his elucidation of atomic structure.
At this moment in Cambridge, though, they were sitting in the Myerses’ library, watching Eusapia with ironic detachment. As they sat, suddenly the curtains billowed out before a closed window. Thomson went over to measure; the fabric had blown out two and one-half feet, by his calculation. The medium sat some feet away, eyes shut, a fain
t frown on her face.
Rayleigh walked over and put his hands against the curtains. They pushed back against him. He put his hand between Eusapia’s back and the curtain, felt along the floor between, and found no device, nothing to connect the cloth to the medium. He and Thomson weren’t willing to call it supernatural. They would commit to calling it odd—but as Rayleigh admitted, “odd” didn’t do it justice.
HODGSON ARRIVED AT Myers’s house with all the appearance of a born mark. Not a trace of the brusque and suspicious investigator was in evidence. Suddenly, he was a little clumsy, a little dumb, and uncharacteristically gullible.
Eyes wide, he shambled into the seances. He sat next to Eusapia, holding her hand, but not too tightly. He allowed himself to be distracted, jumping at shadows, watching others in the room.
It was open invitation to cheat—and she took it.
Within a single seance, he’d seen her wiggle a hand away, spread the other hand so that two hand-holders were each gripping an edge of that single hand, manipulate objects with her freed fingers. With her feet barely held, she used them as well, kicking the table, moving chairs. When her hands were securely held, Hodgson watched her drop her head onto a sitter’s shoulder, listened to the man’s startled exclamation that a hand had touched him in the dark.
As Hodgson had said before, and now said again, she was an obvious cheat. She was so easy to catch that she wasn’t worth any more of his time. He was going back to Boston, and he was done with the British SPR’s efforts to make something out of nothing. He didn’t want to hear anything more about bulging curtains, inexplicable winds, eerie white hands—or Eusapia Palladino.
As THE YEAR 1895 moved forward, civilized behavior—as James noted ruefully—seemed to be rapidly going in the opposition direction.
Italy was fighting in Abyssinia; the Chinese and Japanese were battling over the island of Formosa (later called Taiwan); in Cuba, citizens had risen in an attempt to shake off Spanish rule. The United States was quarreling with Britain over colonies in South America. The question of the precise border between Venezuela and British Guiana had become so heated that President Grover Cleveland threatened war against the United Kingdom.