“Medium Stands Test… Professors at University Fail to Discover Any Trickery in Woman’s Acts – She Has Never Been Educated, but Converses in Several Languages while in a Trance and Writes like an Expert.”
Eusapia Palladino was riding high in 1907 following a series of tests at the University of Naples which apparently confirmed her amazing skills as a medium. The tests, which had been arranged by the Society for Psychical Research, were conducted by several professors at the University as well as members of the Society who were also amateur conjurers. Though the investigators had actually caught Palladino cheating during some of the séances she conducted, they concluded that she had also produced genuine evidence for the supernatural as well.
The newspaper coverage of the tests was largely enthusiastic (and with virtually no mention of the cheating). According to the Washington Post story on August 25, 1907, Palladino was “an ignorant woman and is known to have received no education whatever. Nevertheless, while in a trance she was able to converse in several modern languages and writes in each of them in script that is like copper plate.” The story also described how she made tables levitate, move curtains, produce spirit touches, and receive messages from the beyond. Aside from scant mention of her failures in previous tests, the coverage she generally received tended to describe her as one of the wonders of the modern age.
So, who was Eusapia Palladino? Though she was born to a peasant family in southern Italy in 1854 and received little formal education, she was certainly not as “ignorant” as the newspapers would later claim. Still, it's hard to get a handle on much of her early history since most of it comes from her own, decidedly biased, account of how she launched her career as Europe’s most famous medium.
According to Palladino, she first discovered her spiritual gifts when she was fourteen years of age. Already an orphan (her mother died when she was born and her father when she was twelve), she was living with another family when she became the focus of poltergeist activity. As she would later state, she had no interest in spiritualism and only participated in séances to please her host family and avoid being sent to a convent.
Within a few years however, she became famous for her séances and the wide range of supernatural activity that reportedly occurred when she was in a trance. By 1888, she was being scientifically tested by various scientists, including eminent Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. It’s open to question as to how impartial these scientists really were and Eusapia’s own behaviour towards them may have played a role in their endorsement of her psychic gifts (some evidence suggests that she and Lombroso had a sexual relationship for a time).
Despite being caught faking on numerous occasions, the circle of true believers that Palladino established seemed unable to see her as anything but a genuine psychic with amazing powers. For decades, she toured Europe doing séances and being tested by celebrities and scientists alike. In the many seances that she conducted across Europe, she would communicate with her spirit guide, John King, and display a range of impressive physical phenomena.
Levitating tables was her specialty but she could also produce spirit hands and faces, play musical instruments without using her hands, make flowers and other objects appear out of thin air, and contact the dead. She was the talk of Europe in her day and was highly sought after (despite the enormous fees she charged). Despite being caught faking numerous times, the controversy over Palladino’s mediumship continued. Many genuine skeptics regarded her as a practiced fraud using a wide range of tricks that allowed her to fool many of the experts who tested her. On the other side, there were the “open-minded” scientists such as Lombroso and Oliver Lodge who argued that there were enough unexplained results to suggest that something supernatural was going on.
As for the times she was caught faking, Palladino and her manager explained this away as only occurring when her powers were not working at their best. This became more common as she grew older and her powers diminished (or skeptics began demanding tighter controls, your call).
It was only natural that she drew psychic researchers across Europe, including leading scientists such as Pierre and Marie Curie and Theodore Flournoy. Although she appeared to welcome attempts at scientific validation of her powers, researchers who dealt with her came to fear Palladino's volatile temper and frequent tantrums. This was especially apparent during the various attempts to control the conditions under which she conducted her seances. It was common for Palladino to storm out in a huff whenever things failed to go according to her expectations.
When she came to the United States in 1909, Palladino was in fine form with enthusiastic newspaper stories proclaiming the genuine nature of her powers. Even on the steamer that brought her and her entourage across the Atlantic, she conducted three séances. Cesare Lombroso had died that same year and she quickly took advantage of this by boasting that she was able to communicate with his spirit as well during the dozens of séances she conducted.
Among the observers who were apparently taken in by her tricks were magician Howard Thurston and Harvard philosopher, William James. It was James (often called the “father of American psychology”) who become one of her biggest supporters. Already an ardent spiritualist, James was founding member of the American Society for Psychical Research and the author of various highly-respected works on religion and mysticism. He had previously endorsed the mediumship skills of American medium Leonora Piper by insisting that she knew details about his dead son William that she could not possibly have known. Though later biographers have suggested ways that Piper could have gained this information, the endorsement of someone like William James was considered powerful evidence in itself.
And then there was Hugo Munsterberg, also of Harvard University. Though it had been James who had first hired Munsterberg to run the psychological laboratory he had founded, they frequently clashed over Munsterberg’s persistent skepticism about spiritualism. By 1909, James and Munsterberg were locked in a war of words over mediums such as Palladino. James frequently accused Munsterberg of being overly analytical in rejecting supernatural explanations while Munsterberg in turn accused James of being naive.
After attending a number of seances, Munsterburg came to viewed Palladino as an alarming example of fraud masquerading as science. He wrote that Palladino was "a great artist, and as a vaudeville show she might be at the head of her profession, but I do not see how she can overcome in any cool observer, the feeling that it is trickery". It was during her American tour in 1909 when he attended a seance with Palladino and a "well-known scientist" (not named, but probably James).
During the seance, he sat on Palladino's left side and his companion on her right holding her hands and feet when the table behind them was supposed to move. Suddenly, there was a "wildly yelling scream". What Palladino did not know was that Munsterberg had arranged for an agent to slip in unobserved and to lie flat on the floor behind them to block any attempts at trickery. It turned out that she had slipped her foot out of her shoe and "with an athletic backward movement of the leg was reaching out and fishing with her toes" when the agent grabbed her foot (hence the scream).
Munsterberg was in his glory having caught Palladino in blatant fraud and many of his contemporaries viewed it as a refutation of James' views on psychic phenomena. As Josiah Royce later put it: Eeny meeny, miny mo/Catch Eusapia by the toe/If she hollers, then we know/That James' doctrine isn't so.
Suffice it to say, James was not amused (although he acknowledged the fraud) and by the time of his death in the following year, he and Munsterberg were largely estranged. While Palladino had been caught in fraud before, this latest revelation seemed to put the final nail in her coffin and her career never really recovered. Munsterberg's own abrupt death in 1916 put an end to his remarkable career as a psychologist and scientist and, while not as well known as other "ghostbusters" such as Harry Houdini, his legacy of skepticism lives on.