The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [166]
Frank Podmore, who sometimes sardonically referred to himself as the SPR’s “skeptic in chief,” had published a two-volume history of spiritualism, suggesting that against such a background all mediums must be considered suspect, dismissing Eusapia Palladino as a bad joke played on his colleagues and Leonora Piper as a woman with some telepathic skills and an excellent memory for facts shared casually by her sitters. He had no proof of the latter, Podmore said, but her overall record, although impressive, failed to convince.
Perhaps this was too cynical, Podmore allowed. “The accurate appreciation of evidence of this kind is an almost impossible task,” he wrote in his book Modern Spiritualism. “Mrs. Piper would be a much more convincing apparition if she could have come to us out of the blue, instead of trailing behind her a nebulous ancestry of magnetic somnambules, witchridden children, and ecstatic nuns.”
The same ancestry made Eusapia Palladino impossible to defend, Podmore said flatly, although Hereward Carrington was willing to try. Drawing on his own talents as a magician, Carrington had tried to repair her reputation—and his—by holding a New York stage show to illustrate the difference between conjuring—which he knew well—and real magic.
As reported in city newspapers, he began by stepping onto the stage of New York’s Berkeley Theatre and placing a wax hand atop four glass tumblers sitting on a wooden table. He then retired to a corner of the stage and “asked” the hand questions. In response, the wax fingers had rapped on the glasses. The audience was mystified, reporters declared, until Carrington revealed a fine black thread attached to the hand, and an assistant attached to the thread, hidden behind a curtain, busy tugging on the line.
Carrington levitated tables using wires and hooks that were concealed in his sleeves, materialized a floating baby’s hand (attached to his foot), generated from a cabinet a misty figure which turned out to be a piece of cheesecloth dusted with phosphorus. He knew the tricks, Carrington said, and he’d checked for all of them with Eusapia Palladino. “I have always said that she will resort to trickery if she can, but if she was carefully watched she still performs the most marvelous acts and some of these acts I can explain only on supernormal grounds.” He saw, belatedly, that he had underestimated his opposition, that unsympathetic researchers had deliberately ignored his warnings, wishing only to see the medium exposed.
At Carrington’s request, Everard Feilding returned to Italy to retest Eusapia after the American tour. He found her sick, demoralized, viciously bitter, and unable to produce a single decent result: “Everything this time was different,” he said. If she had ever possessed an unpredictable power, it had abandoned her.
Neither Hyslop nor James rejoiced that their warnings against her American tour had proved true. They would much rather have been wrong.
PERHAPS, James wrote in his last essay on psychical research, it was unfair to expect anything resembling purity in the endeavor. All human enterprises contained some fraud; James accepted that it was an integral part of human nature to sometimes prevaricate, to wander that fine line between true and false, right and wrong.
“Man’s character is too sophistically mixed for the alternative of ‘honest or dishonest’ to be a sharp one,” he said, noting that despite its attitude of superiority, science itself was not immune to deceit. “Scientific men themselves will cheat—at public lectures—rather than let experiments obey their well-known tendency toward failure.” He recalled a well-known physics demonstration using an apparatus intended to show that whatever the outer stresses, its center of gravity remained