A Case That Refuses to Resolve

Set against the Naples report is Palladino's record everywhere else. At Cambridge in 1895 the society's own investigators caught her working a hand and a foot free of her controllers, and the society's leadership treated the matter as closed for a decade afterwards. In New York in 1909 and 1910 investigators placed an observer under the table and caught her using her foot. Her method was consistent: get a limb loose, substitute the controller's grip so both believe they hold one of her hands, then work. Any competent controller can block it, and when it was blocked she sometimes produced nothing at all.

The sceptical position is that a performer who cheats whenever permitted cannot be credited on the occasions when nobody spotted it, and that three trained observers in a dim room are still three observers who can be misdirected. The opposing position is that the Naples controls were unusually tight, the record contemporaneous, and no one in the century since has identified how a specific reported event was produced. This atlas does not adjudicate. It records that both the exposures and the report stand in the same society's Proceedings, and that the case has not been resolved by anyone in over a hundred years.