The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [81]
It would take a temperamental Italian peasant woman with an apparent gift for summoning the wind to make Richet wonder if that assumption was, perhaps, a little arrogant.
ON AUGUST 9, 1888, an obscure Italian physician from Naples posted an open letter in a leading newspaper of Rome. He addressed it to his country’s most famous psychologist, Cesare Lombroso.
Lombroso, known to his countrymen as the Master of Turin, had built his reputation on the study of criminal behavior; he was one of the first psychologists to propose that killers were born, made by biology, an argument that would gain even greater appeal when the science of genetics came of age.
Lombroso’s 1876 book L’uomo deliquente (Criminal man) explained that natural killers were easily recognizable: stupid, small-skulled, heavy-browed, throwbacks to the club-bearing early humans. His notion of phrenology—the science of reading a person’s behavior in the shape and size and even the bumps of his skull—would rapidly become one of the most influential ideas in Victorian psychology.
Lombroso was notoriously hostile to spiritualism; he’d publicly made a point of siding with both John Tyndall and T. H. Huxley in their indictments of occult beliefs. But he was also known as a thoughtful man; he might believe that criminals were born, not made, but he also advocated humane treatment of prisoners. He was passionately against the routine use of capital punishment.
The doctor in Naples hoped merely to catch his famous countryman’s interest. “I want to say something about a patient,” wrote Ercole Chiaja in the Fanfullu della Domenica, “a sick woman belonging to the lower ranks of society and who is now about thirty years old.” The woman in question had been orphaned at thirteen and was wild almost beyond control. She refused to learn to read or write. She refused to take daily baths. She liked to drink; frequented bars on the docks; picked up sailors, a different one each night if possible. Her friends tried to cultivate her mind “with unremitting patience but without avail.”
Eusapia Palladino had the face and body and waddling walk of a bulldog. She was uneducated and flamboyantly promiscuous. She made furniture fly. She caused marks to appear on paper by merely extending her hand. Tied to a chair, she caused fingerprints to appear in a smooth block of clay across a room. Those were only a few of the bizarre occurrences that swirled around her, the doctor said.
Chiaja realized that this sounded improbable—no, impossible. But he had seen these things, all of them. He had only one request: he wanted Italy’s best psychologist, the great Lombroso, to tell him whether he, Chiaja, was crazy or sane.
MANY PEOPLE WOULD be glad to leave the year 1888 behind. It had blown in on the ill winds of a lethal winter, lapsed into a tragic summer, and it would leave on a note of homicidal insanity. From August until November, a faceless killer nicknamed Jack the Ripper haunted the streets of London, butchering five prostitutes before disappearing like a demon in the night.
Against such murderous drama, one might think that the continuing downfall of the Fox sisters would barely register. But for better or for worse, they were still the stuff of newspaper sales. In October 1888, desperate for money, Maggie Fox Kane sold a confession to the New York World, a declaration that the Fox sisters had built their careers on a rare ability to loudly pop their toe joints. The resulting rattle first fooled their parents, she said, then their neighbors, then the rest of the world.
The month after the article appeared, Maggie Fox—washed, sober, neatly dressed—rated a stage demonstration at the New York Academy of Music. As her sister Kate, who was also there, wrote a friend, the hall overflowed with hostile faces, ill wishers happy to see the Fox sisters fall from grace. The event’s managers cleared a good $1,500. Maggie saw little of that,