The Feilding Report on Eusapia Palladino

The Society for Psychical Research chose its three investigators for a specific competence. Everard Feilding, W. W. Baggally and Hereward Carrington had all investigated mediums before and all had exposed them; Baggally was an accomplished amateur conjuror and Carrington had written on the methods of fraudulent mediumship. They took a room in a hotel in Naples in November and December 1908, so that the setting was theirs rather than hers, and held eleven sittings.

Two of them held Palladino's hands and feet at all times, describing the grip in the record. A stenographer took down events as they were called out, so the account is contemporaneous rather than reconstructed. Their report, published in the society's Proceedings the following year, describes a table lifting clear of the floor with her hands visible on its surface, a small table moving across the room, curtains bulging, and touches on the sitters from what felt like hands, under conditions in which they state they could not see how she was doing it. They also record occasions on which she was caught, and describe those separately. Carrington had published a book on the methods of fraudulent mediums shortly before the sittings, which meant that at least one man in the room had recently catalogued in print every technique she might have used.

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.