Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [133]
I try to attend as many séances as I can, wherever I travel. Often I find it difficult to gain admission, since I am recognized. The Devil is not welcome at the wedding. When I manage to blend in with the others, I see exactly the same methods being used to deceive the faithful in every country. Two of the most common gimmicks are the stalwarts of the trade: table-tipping and billet-reading. A brief discussion of these procedures will serve to illustrate just how simple yet devious the methods of operation can be.
The Fox sisters—daughters of an otherwise normal rural family of Hydeville, New York—discovered in childhood how easily raps and thumps might be produced secretly and ascribed to discarnate beings.From toe raps on the footboard of their bed, they graduated to tables, around which the faithful sat. Any noise at all, a creak or a tremor, was considered a communication from Summerland (their cute terminology for heaven). But when the table began tilting about, then rising from the floor, spiritualism was at last airborne. And nothing could keep it down.
There are various degrees of this miracle, and the description of the actual event, as usual, always rises a degree or two, never lowers.In its simplest manifestation, a light table such as the common folding card table tilts upward on two legs while four persons sit around it, hands pressed on the surface with palms down. Often the outer digits of the hands so placed are touching to establish "control" (a word freely thrown about in this business), assuring everyone that no chicanery is possible. This is like tightening the cork on a bottle with a hole in the bottom. Explanations of the table-tipping trick are obvious.
Pressing the hands down and drawing them toward the body causes the table's two far legs to lift off the floor.
Pressing the hands firmly on the tabletop and pushing to the left causes the two right-hand legs to rise.
When NBC-TV (before this network totally committed itself to supporting such matters) called on me back in the early 1960s to oversee a table-tipping conducted in the apartment home of Mrs. Nandor Fodor, widow of the prolific writer on poltergeists and other wonders, the planned filming went down the drain after I was able to establish the modus operandi for this activity. In this case, the mediums were a woman and her teenage son, whose method was to sit opposite one another while the table cavorted. Immediately complaints were raised about my "negative presence," so I offered to leave the seance after telling the NBC-TV crew how to set up proper conditions. The performer was required to sit against the wall, with hands flat on the table and elbows pressing two pieces of cardboard against the wall. Any attempt to creep the hands forward for a horizontal pull to tilt the table would cause the cardboard pieces to drop. They did, several times, and the experiment was called off.
Such simple, direct tests are easily designed by anyone. But they inhibit psychic phenomena for some strange reason...
The second stage of table-tipping involves actual "levitation" and was a feature of the famous Eusapia Palladino, an Italian medium who visited the United States and was finally exposed—though not in the opinion of the believers—by experts who troubled to open their eyes and declare the truth. She used a variety of methods, to judge from the reports,