The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [106]
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.
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