Eusapia Palladino in Warsaw

When

November 1893–1894 date from records made at the time

Where

Verdict

Disputed

At Julian Ochorowicz’s invitation the famous Italian medium held séances in Warsaw attended by Bolesław Prus – echoes found their way into his novel “Pharaoh”.

What happened

Eusapia Palladino, an illiterate woman from Naples, was the most famous medium in Europe in the 1890s: in her presence tables rose, instruments played and hands reached out of the darkness. In November 1893 she came to Warsaw at the invitation of the psychologist and inventor Julian Ochorowicz and stayed until January 1894. Her séances were attended by, among others, the novelist Bolesław Prus, the former mayor of Warsaw Sokrates Starynkiewicz and the literary critic Ignacy Matuszewski. Participants held the medium’s hands and kept contact with her feet, yet – according to their accounts – the table lifted off the floor and invisible hands touched those present. Prus wrote about the séances in the press and carried their atmosphere into several scenes of “Pharaoh”, which he began writing in 1894. Palladino briefly returned to Warsaw in May 1898.

Witnesses

Julian Ochorowicz, Bolesław Prus, Sokrates Starynkiewicz, Ignacy Matuszewski and other sitters.

Explanations and hypotheses

Ochorowicz rejected the spirit hypothesis – he believed the phenomena drew on the forces of the medium and the sitters through an unknown “fluidic action”. Palladino, however, was repeatedly caught cheating, notably in Cambridge in 1895 and in New York in 1910, when she freed a hand or foot from control to move objects. Some investigators, such as the Society for Psychical Research committee in Naples in 1908, concluded that not everything could be explained this way. Today the prevailing view is that she was an exceptionally skilful trickster.

Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.

Sources

More: Wikipedia (pl) Wikipedia (en)