What happened
Jan Guzik, a weaver’s son from Rączna near Kraków, worked as a medium from the age of fifteen and became famous in Warsaw. At his séances, held in complete darkness, objects moved, raps sounded and sitters felt the touch of invisible hands and the fur of “animal” apparitions. Among those who believed in him was the French researcher Gustave Geley. The journalist Paul Heuzé and a magician performing as Professeur Dicksonn, however, insisted it was simple trickery. In November 1923 Heuzé arranged a series of séances at the Sorbonne under the eye of five scientists, among them the physicist Paul Langevin. Objects moved only within the medium’s reach, and when controls were tightened, nothing happened.
Witnesses
Paul Heuzé, Paul Langevin and the other members of the Sorbonne committee; earlier, Gustave Geley and sitters at the Warsaw séances.
Explanations and hypotheses
In the journal L’Année Psychologique the committee declared the fraud “complete and without reserve”: Guzik freed a leg from control and used it to touch the sitters and move things. British researcher Harry Price also caught him cheating – the jaw-snapping “animal”, he said, was a hand in a stocking – and in December 1924 in Kraków a photograph caught the medium moving a curtain with his hand. Even so, Guzik kept loyal followers until his death in 1928.
Hoax A proven or admitted hoax.
Sources
- Paul Langevin, Étienne Rabaud, Henri Laugier, André Marcelin, Ignace Meyerson, Rapport au sujet des phénomènes produits par le médium J. Guzik (L’Année psychologique, vol. 24, 1924)
- M. Brady Brower, Unruly Spirits: The Science of Psychic Phenomena in Modern France (University of Illinois Press, 2010)
- Sofie Lachapelle, Investigating the Supernatural: From Spiritism and Occultism to Psychical Research and Metapsychics in France, 1853–1931 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011)
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