Ectoplasm

The term ectoplasm entered the language through Charles Richet, a French physiologist and eventual Nobel laureate in medicine, who coined it in 1894 during his investigations of the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino, building the word from Greek roots meaning "outside" and "something molded" to describe a substance he believed emerged from a medium's body and could take on a life or shape of its own. Richet did not himself claim the substance was spiritual in origin, treating it instead as an unexplained physiological phenomenon, but the term was quickly adopted throughout spiritualism to describe the visible material from which materialised spirit forms, faces, hands, or whole bodies, were said to be built during a séance.

German physician Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing produced the most extensive photographic record of the substance in the 1910s, particularly in his sittings with the French medium known as Eva C. (born Marthe Beraud), publishing dozens of images of pale, cloth-like material apparently emerging from her mouth or body under dim red séance lighting, images that circulated widely in the press and in Schrenck-Notzing's own books, and shaped the public image of ectoplasm for decades afterward.

Every occasion on which a sample of claimed ectoplasm was obtained and subjected to actual chemical or microscopic analysis identified it as ordinary material. Psychical researcher Harry Price, investigating the Scottish medium Helen Duncan in 1931, obtained a sample and had it analysed by a chemist, who found it consisted of cheesecloth mixed with egg white and other mundane chemicals, consistent with material swallowed before a séance and regurgitated during it.

Researcher Eric Dingwall's later analysis of ectoplasm samples from Schrenck-Notzing's star subject, Eva C., found paper, cotton, and human hair, and separate examination of some of Schrenck-Notzing's published photographs found the "materialised" faces were two-dimensional and matched images that had previously appeared in printed magazines, suggesting cut-out pictures had been used rather than any three-dimensional substance. Schrenck-Notzing's investigative conditions have themselves been criticised as inadequate, dim lighting and no thorough physical search of the medium before sittings, weaknesses that made the production of concealed material straightforward. No sample of claimed ectoplasm has ever been identified, under proper analysis, as anything other than ordinary textile, food, or paper material consistent with concealment and regurgitation by the medium.