The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [104]
The first was something of a shambles. Led by Lombroso, the team also included a Russian psychologist, two Italian physicists, and the French physiologist Charles Richet. The sittings took place in the private home of a helpful Milan resident, who had agreed to have his house searched in advance and his parlor, to be used for the sittings, locked and sealed after each test.
But as Richet would tell his SPR colleagues, Lombroso was now so enthralled, the other scientists so unnerved by confronting a medium, and Eusapia so prone to scream like a fishwife when she didn’t get her way that they lost control of the experiments almost immediately. The scientists wanted full light. She insisted on a dim red light in a darkened room, claiming that bright illumination would put off the spirits. They gave in. The researchers asked her to stand, instead of sitting at the tables she planned to levitate, so that her feet were not concealed. She refused, declaring that her legs and knees trembled so violently during levitations that she could not possibly stay upright. They gave in again. And trying to control her hands and feet was like wrestling with a freshly caught squid. She was never still, Richet complained, always twitching her fingers away, wriggling her toes.
Most of the time, it was impossible to be sure that she wasn’t sneaking a hand away to produce a phantom touch, or nudging furniture with her feet or knees. Most of the time, Richet knew he was observing some rather obvious cheating. But every once in a while, the whole feel of the sittings changed: the sneaky medium disappeared, and a pale, still woman replaced her; the curtains began to shiver, as Lombroso had reported earlier, billowing in that nonexistent breeze. Hurrying to open the draperies, Richet would have sworn that he felt the touch of cold hands, although that could have been his nerves. No one was there, no wire, no body, no anything except empty air between the curtain and the window.
He could explain away the common cheat. It was the other, more elusive Eusapia who bothered him, the one who sat pinned to her chair while the cold fingers of the supernatural seemed to crawl into the room. As James had complained, there were few real mediums available to psychical researchers. It occurred to Richet that, with patience, Eusapia might offer a chance to study the difference between what was real—and what was contrived.
He tested her again, without the Italian and Russian scientists, who, he thought, had compromised the earlier observations. Those experiments yielded the same frustrating mix of deliberate fraud and inexplicable event.
In one sitting, at the Psychological Institute in Paris, he’d brought in several witnesses, including the formidable physicist Marie Curie, who Richet hoped could tell the other observers if there was any sign of unusual energy in the room. He and Mme Curie sat on either side of the medium, each gripping one of Eusapias hands. “We saw the curtain swell out as if pushed by some large object,” he noted. Richet reached up and grabbed the bump behind the fabric. It felt like a hand, but one with sausagelike fingers, much bigger than Eusapia’s “little hand,” and with nothing beyond the wrist itself. He glanced back to make sure the medium’s hands were still secured. Mme Curie assured him that she’d kept an unbreakable clasp on Eusapia’s fingers.
Richet tried another experiment, laying pieces of smoked paper on a table some distance away from the medium. Pale hands appeared and pressed against the paper. When he picked up the paper, the dark film of smoke had worn off in places, as if a finger had been rubbing at it. Eusapia’s hands remained clean, untouched by smoky residue. Those creeping hands, what to do with them? How to define them?
Out of his growing frustration, Richet invented a new word for the phenomena—ectoplasm, cobbled together from the Greek ecto, “exterior,” andplasm, “substance.” “C‘est absolument absurde, mais c’est vrai!” Richet exclaimed, deciding, like