Eusapia Palladino

Palladino's record is the reason she is impossible to dismiss and impossible to accept. She was investigated at Cambridge in 1895 by the Society for Psychical Research and was detected freeing a hand and a foot from the controllers holding her, after which the society's leadership regarded the matter as closed. She was tested in Naples, Warsaw, Paris and Genoa by scientists including physiologists and physicists, several of whom reported effects they could not account for. She sat in New York in 1909 and 1910 and was caught again, this time by investigators who had planted a man under the table to watch her feet. She was, in short, a proven cheat, and she cheated in a specific and consistent way, by working a limb loose from the person holding it, which is a method any competent controller should have been able to block.

The awkward fact is that the investigators who blocked it most carefully did not thereby obtain a null result. That combination, reliable fraud plus a residue that tightening did not remove, is the reason her case was argued for thirty years and is still argued. It is worth adding that she never claimed to be in control of what happened. She told investigators to hold her tightly and warned them that she would cheat if they let her, which several of them recorded at the time and which is either candour or an unusually effective piece of stagecraft.

The Society for Psychical Research sent Everard Feilding, W. W. Baggally and Hereward Carrington to Naples in 1908 with an unusual qualification between them: all three were practised in conjuring, Baggally particularly so, and all three had gone into the investigation of mediums expecting fraud and had found it many times before. They held eleven sittings in a hotel room they controlled, took shorthand records as events occurred rather than writing up afterwards, and physically held Palladino's hands and feet throughout. Their report, published in the society's Proceedings in 1909, states that they observed a table rise clear of the floor, objects move at a distance, and touches from what felt like hands, under conditions they could not see how to fake, and it reads throughout like a document written by men who would much rather have reached the other conclusion.

Sceptical responses have argued that even three trained observers in a dim room can be misdirected by a performer who has spent thirty years perfecting one act, that the shorthand record captures what the sitters believed they perceived rather than what occurred, and that Palladino's exposure in America the following year settles the matter. The Feilding report has never been shown to contain a specific error, and it is cited by both sides.