Eusapia Palladino (also spelled Paladino; January 21, 1854 – May 16, 1918) was an Italian spiritualist medium. She claimed to have special abilities, such as making tables float, speaking to the dead through her spirit guide named John King, and creating other supernatural events.

Many people believed her abilities were real, but during her lifetime, she was discovered to use tricks to create illusions. Magicians, such as Harry Houdini, and people who studied her claims concluded that her demonstrations were not genuine and that she used clever methods to deceive others.

Her séances in Warsaw during the early 1890s inspired scenes in the historical novel Pharaoh, which the author Bolesław Prus began writing in 1894.

Early life

Palladino was born into a farm family in Minervino Murge, Italy. She received very little or no formal education. When she was a child, she lost both of her parents and was taken in by a family in Naples, where she worked as a caregiver. Early in her life, she married a traveling magician and theatrical performer named Raphael Delgaiz, and she helped manage his business. Later, she married a wine merchant named Francesco Niola.

Poland

Palladino visited Warsaw, Poland, twice. Her first and longer visit happened when Dr. Julian Ochorowicz, a psychologist, invited her. He hosted her from November 1893 to January 1894.

Ochorowicz studied the events that happened during Palladino’s séances. He did not believe the events were caused by spirits. Instead, he thought they were the result of a "fluidic action," which used the energy of the medium and other participants in the séances.

Ochorowicz introduced Palladino to Bolesław Prus, a journalist and novelist. Prus attended several of her séances. He wrote about them in newspapers and included scenes inspired by Spiritualism in his historical novel Pharaoh.

On January 1, 1894, Palladino visited Prus at his apartment. As Ochorowicz described, this was part of their interactions during her first visit.

Palladino returned to Warsaw in the second half of May 1898 while traveling from St. Petersburg to Vienna and Munich. At that time, Prus attended at least two of the three séances she held. These two séances took place in the home of Ludwik Krzywicki.

England

In July 1895, Palladino was invited to England to Frederic William Henry Myers’s house in Cambridge for a series of investigations into her mediumship. According to reports by the investigators Myers and Oliver Lodge, all the phenomena observed during the Cambridge séances were the result of tricks. Her fraud was so clever, according to Myers, that it "must have needed long practice to bring it to its present level of skill."

During the Cambridge séances, the results were harmful to Palladino’s reputation as a medium. She was caught cheating to free herself from the physical controls used during the experiments. Palladino was seen moving her hands by placing one controller’s hand on top of another’s. Observers on either side were found holding each other’s hands, which allowed her to perform tricks. Richard Hodgson observed Palladino freeing a hand to move objects and using her feet to kick furniture. Because of the discovery of fraud, British SPR investigators such as Henry Sidgwick and Frank Podmore considered Palladino’s mediumship to be permanently discredited. She was banned from further experiments with the SPR in Britain. The magician John Nevil Maskelyne, who was involved in the investigation, supported Hodgson’s conclusion. However, despite the evidence of fraud, Oliver Lodge believed some of her phenomena were genuine.

In the Daily Chronicle on 29 October 1895, Maskelyne published a detailed description of Palladino’s fraudulent methods. According to historian Ruth Brandon, Maskelyne concluded that everything depended on whether Eusapia could free a hand or foot occasionally. She moved so much that it was impossible to control her properly throughout. If she could free one hand or foot, everything could be explained.

In the British Medical Journal on 9 November 1895, an article titled Exit Eusapia! questioned the scientific legitimacy of the SPR for investigating Palladino, a medium with a reputation for fraud. The article stated, "It would be comic if it were not deplorable to picture this sorry Egeria surrounded by men like Professor Sidgwick, Professor Lodge, Mr. F. H. Myers, Dr. Schiaparelli, and Professor Richet, solemnly receiving her pinches and kicks, her finger skiddings, her sleight of hand with various articles of furniture as phenomena calling for serious study." This led Henry Sidgwick to respond in a letter to the British Medical Journal on 16 November 1895. Sidgwick wrote that SPR members had exposed Palladino’s fraud during the Cambridge séances. He added, "Throughout this period we have continually combated and exposed the frauds of professional mediums, and have never yet published in our Proceedings, any report in favour of the performances of any of them." The article questioned why the SPR wasted time investigating phenomena that were the "result of jugglery and imposture" and did not urgently concern the welfare of mankind.

In 1898, Myers was invited to a series of séances in Paris with Charles Richet. Unlike previous séances where he had observed fraud, he now claimed to have seen convincing phenomena. Sidgwick reminded Myers of Palladino’s trickery in the earlier investigations as "overwhelming," but Myers did not change his position. This angered Richard Hodgson, then editor of SPR publications, who banned Myers from publishing anything about his recent séances with Palladino in the SPR journal. Hodgson believed Palladino was a fraud and supported Sidgwick in the "attempt to put that vulgar cheat Eusapia beyond the pale." It wasn’t until the 1908 séances in Naples that the SPR reopened the Palladino file.

The British psychical researcher Harry Price, who studied Palladino’s mediumship, wrote, "Her tricks were usually childish: long hairs attached to small objects in order to produce 'telekinetic movements'; the gradual substitution of one hand for two when being controlled by sitters; the production of 'phenomena' with a foot which had been surreptitiously removed from its shoe and so on."

France

In the summer of 1894, Charles Richet, a French researcher who studied psychic phenomena, worked with Oliver Lodge, Frederic William Henry Myers, and Julian Ochorowicz to investigate the medium Eusapia Palladino at her home on the Mediterranean island of Ile Roubaud. Richet reported that furniture moved during the séances and that some events could not be explained by natural causes. However, Richard Hodgson, another investigator, argued that the séances lacked proper control and that the precautions taken did not prevent trickery. Hodgson wrote that all the events described could be explained if Palladino managed to free her hands or feet. Lodge, Myers, and Richet disagreed, but Hodgson’s claims were later supported during the Cambridge sittings, where Palladino was observed using tricks exactly as he had described.

In 1898, the French astronomer Eugene Antoniadi studied Palladino’s mediumship at the home of Camille Flammarion. Antoniadi concluded that Palladino’s performances were entirely fraudulent. He noted that she repeatedly tried to free her hands from control and was caught using a strand of her hair to lower a letter-scale.

Camille Flammarion, who attended Palladino’s séances, believed some of her demonstrations were genuine. In his book, he included photographs of a table appearing to levitate and an impression of a face in putty. However, Joseph McCabe did not find this evidence convincing. He pointed out that the face impressions always matched Palladino’s face and could have been made easily, and that she was not clearly separated from the table in the levitation photos.

In 1905, Eusapia Palladino traveled to Paris, where Nobel Prize-winning physicists Pierre Curie and Marie Curie, along with Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Charles Richet, studied her alongside other scientists such as Henri Bergson and Jacques-Arsène d’Arsonval. Investigators noticed signs of trickery but could not explain all the events.

Other scientists in the Curies’ circle, including William Crookes, future Nobel laureate Jean Perrin and his wife Henriette, Louis Georges Gouy, and Paul Langevin, also explored spiritualism. Pierre Curie’s brother, Jacques, was a strong believer in spiritualism.

The Curies treated mediumistic séances as scientific experiments and recorded detailed notes. Historian Anna Hurwic wrote that they believed spiritualism might reveal a new energy source connected to radioactivity. On July 24, 1905, Pierre Curie told his friend Louis Georges Gouy, “We have had a series of séances with Eusapia Palladino at the [Society for Psychical Research].” He hoped to convince Gouy of the reality of some phenomena and planned to conduct experiments methodically. Marie Curie also attended the séances but was less interested in them than Pierre.

On April 14, 1906, just five days before his death, Pierre Curie wrote to Gouy about his final séance with Palladino: “In my opinion, there is here a whole domain of entirely new facts and physical states in space of which we have no conception.”

In 1906, professors Gustave Le Bon and Albert Dastre of Paris University examined Palladino and concluded she was dishonest. They placed a hidden lamp behind her and observed her using her foot during a séance. In 1907, investigators found Palladino using a strand of her hair to move an object toward herself. They also noted that the objects she moved were within her easy reach.

Italy

In the late 1800s, a crime expert named Cesare Lombroso attended séances with a woman named Palladino. He believed she had supernatural abilities. Lombroso was invited by Palladino’s manager, Ercole Chiaia, to witness her séances. Chiaia challenged Lombroso in a letter published in a magazine called La Fanfulla, asking him to investigate Palladino’s abilities if he was fair and unbiased. Lombroso at first refused the challenge, but a young Spanish doctor named Manuel Otero Acevedo accepted it. Acevedo traveled to Naples, studied Palladino, and convinced Lombroso and other scientists to examine her abilities. Lombroso later changed his opinion, and this change helped make Palladino famous in the early 1900s.

One of the most unusual events was a phenomenon Lombroso called “The Levitation of the Medium to the Top of the Table.” However, other researchers later found that the table’s levitations were fake. According to authors William Kalush and Larry Sloman, Lombroso had a romantic relationship with Palladino. Lombroso’s daughter, Gina Ferrero, wrote that in his later years, Lombroso suffered from a disease called arteriosclerosis, which harmed his health. Joseph McCabe wrote that this condition may have made it easier for Palladino to trick him.

Another researcher, Enrico Morselli, studied Palladino and believed some of her abilities were real, possibly evidence of a hidden force in humans.

In 1908, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) sent a group of three people to Naples to investigate Palladino. The group included Hereward Carrington, an investigator and amateur magician; W. W. Baggally, an experienced investigator and magician; and Everard Feilding, a trained investigator who had studied fraudulent mediums. They rented three rooms on the fifth floor of the Hotel Victoria. The middle room, where Feilding slept, was used for séances in the evening. A séance cabinet was created in the corner using black curtains to form an enclosed area with a small round table and musical instruments. A wooden table was placed in front of the curtains. During séances, Palladino sat at the wooden table with her back to the curtains. The investigators sat on either side of her, holding her hands and feet. Some guests, like professors and a man named Ryan, attended certain séances.

Although the investigators saw Palladino cheating, they still believed she produced real supernatural events, such as table levitations, moving curtains, and touching objects. Charles Sanders Peirce, an American scientist and philosopher, commented on the first report by Carrington and Feilding.

Frank Podmore, in his book The Newer Spiritualism (1910), criticized the Feilding report. He said the report lacked enough details about key moments and had conflicting accounts from the investigators about who held Palladino’s hands and feet. Podmore also noted that the report left many opportunities for trickery. The black curtains and Palladino’s black dress were often mixed together, and Palladino told a professor that the curtains were “indispensable.” Researchers later suspected she used the curtains to hide her feet.

The psychologist C. E. M. Hansel criticized the Feilding report because the séances were held in dim lighting and late hours, which could cause fatigue. He also said the investigators were too eager to believe in the supernatural, which might have influenced their judgment.

In 1910, Everard Feilding returned to Naples with his friend William S. Marriott, a skilled magician who had exposed psychic fraud. Feilding and Marriott repeated the 1908 séances and discovered Palladino cheating again. She moved objects with her foot, shook the curtain with her hands, and touched the sitters. Milbourne Christopher wrote that once people knew how tricks could be done, only the most skilled performers could hide them.

In 1992, Richard Wiseman studied the Feilding report and suggested Palladino used a secret helper who could enter the room through a fake door panel near the séance cabinet. Wiseman found this trick was mentioned in a book from 1851 and showed a carpenter could build a false door quickly. He suspected Palladino’s second husband might have been the helper. Paul Kurtz suggested Carrington could have been her helper, noting he became her manager after the 1908 séances and was absent during the last one. However, Massimo Polidoro and Gian Marco Rinaldi, who also studied the report, concluded no helper was needed, as Palladino could have used her foot to create the effects during the 1908 séances.

America

In 1909, Palladino traveled to America with Hereward Carrington as her manager. American newspapers, including the New York Times, and magazines like Cosmopolitan, wrote many articles about her during her visit.

Howard Thurston, a magician, attended one of her séances and said that Palladino’s ability to make a table float was real. However, during a séance on December 18 in New York, Hugo Münsterberg, a Harvard psychologist, discovered that Palladino used a hidden person under the table to help her lift the table with her foot. He also saw her remove her shoe and use her toes to move a guitar inside the séance cabinet. Münsterberg claimed she used a rubber bulb in her hand to blow air and move curtains from a distance. Daniel Cohen noted that Palladino was not discouraged by Münsterberg’s findings. She had faced similar exposures before but had still succeeded. Her supporters did not take the exposure seriously.

In January 1910, a series of séances were held at Columbia University’s physics laboratory. Scientists such as Robert W. Wood and Edmund Beecher Wilson attended. Magicians, including W. S. Davis, J. L. Kellogg, J. W. Sargent, and Joseph Rinn, were present during the final séances in April. They found that Palladino had freed her left foot to create the illusions. Rinn described seeing her perform tricks in a way that showed she was not genuine.

Milbourne Christopher later wrote about the exposure: Palladino was offered $1,000 by Rinn if she could perform a trick under controlled conditions that magicians could not copy. Palladino agreed to the challenge but did not appear for it. Instead, she returned to Italy.

Tricks

In England, America, France, and Germany, Palladino was found using tricks during her séances. Psychical researchers like Hereward Carrington, who believed some of her demonstrations were real, acknowledged that she sometimes used trickery.

Historian Peter Lamont wrote that Palladino’s supporters admitted she sometimes cheated, but they argued that the strongest evidence (where cheating was impossible) supported her. Critics, however, claimed investigators failed to notice the tricks. Paul Kurtz, a philosopher and skeptic, discussed these issues in his writings.

In 1910, Stanley LeFevre Krebs wrote a book titled Trick Methods of Eusapia Paladino, which exposed the tricks she used. Joseph Jastrow’s book The Psychology of Conviction (1918) included a chapter titled "The Case of Paladino" that described her tricks.

Magicians such as Harry Houdini and Joseph Rinn claimed all of Palladino’s feats were tricks. Houdini wrote that Palladino cheated in Cambridge, l'Aguélas, and New York, but Spiritualists supported her despite being caught. John Mulholland noted that Palladino was caught cheating many times, even by those who believed in her. Some researchers believed her first husband, a traveling magician, taught her séance tricks. Magician Milbourne Christopher demonstrated her tricks in his performances and on The Tonight Show.

Palladino controlled the lighting and "controls" during her séances. Her right hand rested on the back of one controller’s hand, while her left wrist was held by another controller. Her feet rested on the feet of her controllers, sometimes beneath them. A controller’s foot touched only the toe of her shoe. Occasionally, her ankles were tied to the legs of her chair, but she had four inches of movement. During séances in the dark, her ankles became free. Usually, she was unbound. In one case, a controller released her to allow phenomena to occur.

Theodor Lipps, who attended a séance in 1898 in Munich, noticed that he held the hand of a sitter instead of Palladino’s, freeing both her hands. Others in Germany, including Max Dessoir and Albert Moll of Berlin, identified the tricks Palladino used. They wrote that her main trick was to distract attention and free her hands or feet.

Palladino refused to let someone hold her feet from under the table. She avoided levitating the table from a standing position. The table was rectangular, so she sat only at the short side. No walls could block her from the table. The table weighed 17 pounds and rose 3 to 10 inches for 2–3 seconds. She was skilled at freeing her hands or feet to create phenomena. She sat at the short side of the table so her controllers sat closer together, making it easier to trick them.

To levitate the table, she freed one foot, rocked the table, and slipped her toe under one leg. She lifted the table by rocking back on the heel of that foot. She made "spirit" raps by striking the table’s leg with a free foot.

A photograph taken in the dark showed a small stool claimed to have levitated, but it was actually on Palladino’s head. After seeing the photo, the stool remained on the floor. A plaster impression of a "spirit hand" matched Palladino’s hand. She was caught using a hair to move a scale. In dim light, her fist, wrapped in a handkerchief, appeared as a materialized spirit.

Science historian Sherrie Lynne Lyons wrote that glowing hands in séances could be explained by rubbing phosphorus oil on the hands. In 1909, The New York Times published an article titled "Paladino Used Phosphorus." Hereward Carrington admitted he painted Palladino’s arm with phosphorescent paint to track her movements, though newspapers misquoted him.

Conjuror W. S. Davis published an article with diagrams exposing Palladino’s tricks. He speculated she used a hidden wire in her dress to tilt the table. He noted she protested when a screen was placed between her and the table. Physician Leonard Keene Hirshberg observed Palladino hooking her skirt and foot into a reed table and heard a noise like a wire or pin moving under the table.

Psychologist Millais Culpin wrote that Palladino intentionally cheated but may have also deceived herself due to symptoms of hysterical dissociation. Laura Finch, editor of Annals of Psychical Science, wrote in 1909 that Palladino had "erotic tendencies" and that some male sitters were influenced by her. Deborah Blum noted Palladino had a habit of "climbing into the laps of male investigators."

M. Lamar Keene wrote that observers saw Palladino experience obvious orgasmic reactions during séances and that she preferred handsome male sitters. In 1910, Palladino admitted to an American reporter that she cheated, claiming her sitters had "willed" her to do so. Eric Dingwall, who investigated Palladino’s mediumship, concluded she was "vital, vulgar, amorous, and a cheat."

• Alexandr Aksakov (right) "controls" while Palladino levitates table, Milan, 1892.
• Cesare Lombroso and Charles Richet "control" while Palladino levitates table, Milan, 1892.
• Joseph Jastrow
• Palladino with fake ectoplasm hands.