The majority of mediums during the movement of Spiritualism were fraudulent women and men intent on using stage tricks to convince their sitters that they were actually communicated with lost loved ones and fork over more cash. However, there were a few women and men who stood out from the rest, ones that have never been proven frauds.
Daniel Douglas Home
The book Mysteries of the Unknown: Spirit Summonings by Time-Life Books gives a wonderful account of the life of the infamous Daniel Douglas Home. He was born in Scotland in 1883. His alleged psychic talents were with him, it is said, from the very beginning. When the infant Daniel would cry, unseen hands would rock his crib. At the age of four, he foretold the death of a cousin.
At the age of nine, he moved to Connecticut to live with his aunt, Mary Cook, and it was in America where he got the terrible news: he had tuberculosis (TB). The unusual things that seemed to accompany Daniel wherever he went was surely because he was in league with the Devil, or so his aunt thought. She threw him out of the house when he was only 15 years old.
He might have been a young man, penniless and alone in the world, but Daniel was a survivor. Spiritualism had been born a few years earlier with the antics of the Fox Sisters in New York, and Daniel gravitated to dimly lit parlors for sittings, perhaps trying to figure out how he could best channel his psychic gifts. He soon found that most mediums were frauds.
For nearly the rest of his life, he traveled all over the world, holding sittings in the houses of those wealthy and affluent families who took him in. He never took money for his sittings, per se, but each one had all of the hallmarks of a séance held by a physical medium.
Then, in August of 1852, he preformed one of the most daring of feats, one that baffled witnesses and researchers alike. This highly debated incident took place in the home of home of Ward Cheney in Connecticut. Ward was a wealthy man and was accompanied by journalist F. L. Burr, whose main goal was to catch Daniel in the act of trickery. However, this did not happen. Daniel suddenly lifted into the air with no evidence of fraud.
In 1958, he married Alexandria de Kroll, the daughter of a rich Russian man. The happy couple had one child, Gregoire, but sadly, Alexandria passed away in 1862. He later lived with a middle-aged woman who successfully had all of her money returned to her by the courts when she sued Daniel in 1866.
In December of 1868, he was staying with Lord Adare, who was accompanied by his cousin Captain Charles Wynne, when suddenly Daniel went into a trance and floated out a third-story window and back into another one, where his companions were watching in awe.
He died of tuberculosis in 1886. The odd thing was, no one was ever able to prove he was a fraud.
Eusapia Palladino
The case of the Italian physical medium Eusapia Palladino (1854 – 1918) has baffled parapsychologists ever since the Society of Psychical Research (SPR) of London studied her. She was a fraud, anyone could see that and as the book Occult and Supernatural Phenomena by D. H. Radcliffe explains, she was married to a professional stage magician before she began conducting expensive séances.
In Ghost Hunters, author Deborah Blum documents the SPR experiences with this woman. Three men, Hereward Carrington of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), W. W. Baggally and Everard Feilding, were appointed to the investigation. In the dark, she was able to accomplish most of the feats of other fraudulent physical mediums, such as levitating objects and producing a substance that became known as ectoplasm. There were other hallmarks as well, such as musical instruments that played apparently of their own accord and phantom winds that seemed to have no source.
Blum goes on to recount that even though her clumsy attempts as tricking investigators were always caught, on rare occasions the wild woman would slip into a trance and her control, or spirit guide, John King would act as an intermediary between the investigators and the spirit world. In this calm state under strict controls, she could answer questions to which, the investigators noted, she could have possible knowledge of.
Leonora Simonds Piper
Leonora Simonds Piper (1859 - 1950) was one of those rare spiritualists in time when physical mediums were praying on the bereaved that only wished to make contact with spirits of lost loved ones. She was what parapsychologists call a mental medium.
In Ghost Hunters, author Deborah Blum retells the story of Leonora’s fist experience with spiritual communication. When she was eight years old, she came rushing in from the garden and told her mother that her Aunt Sara wasn’t really dead. As it turns out, Sara had died around the time Leonora made this odd statement.
Blum goes on to say that Leonora had experiences stomach pains all her life, and when she married William Piper of Boston in 1881, she found a wonderful friendship with her new father-in-law. Three years later, he took her for treatment by a blind self-acclaimed clairvoyant, J. R. Cook. When Cook went to examine her, the world suddenly went dark.
Upon waking, she discovered many curious faces surrounding her. She had apparently gone into a trance and had begun answering questions other patients had asked. Questions to which she could have no way of knowing the answers to. She and Cook began an association and began holding séances.
It was at one of these private sittings that she met with first-time sitter, Mrs. Gibbens. Her son was none other than William James, a Professor at Harvard University, and she told him of the wonderful medium. He decided he would visit this woman himself and expose her for the fraud he knew she was.
William was shocked to find that she held séances in her living room where there were no props used by professional mediums, and that Leonora explained there were no physical phenomena that would accompany her trance.
Her control, or spirit guide was allegedly an Indian girl named Chlorine. This gatekeeper eventually subsided and a deceased French doctor, Phinuit became the primary control. Phinuit was able to give detailed and accurate information about William’s deceased family members, even though William was sure there was no way the medium could have obtained this information.
That William was interested in the paranormal was no secret. That same year he started the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) and turned over Leonora’s case to Richard Hodgson, a member of the British Society for Psychical Research who was sent to put the New York chapter in order.
Richard was sure Leonora was a fraud. He attended over 50 séances with her, always keeping a keen eye on the medium, ready to pounce on any comments she made that were too vague or leading. Even though the information she provided various sitters was uncanny in accuracy, Richard turned his attention to her control.
Phinuit couldn’t speak French and knew nearly nothing of medicine, despite claiming to have been a French doctor. Member of the ASPR began theorizing that perhaps he was actually a second personality Leonora’s mind had invented to deal with her allegedy stunning psychic talents. However, Phinuit soon gave way to George Pelham, the new primary spirit control. This personality had recently deceased, though he could not argue philosophy through the medium as he could in life.
People who consider her controls to be separate personalities often point out that her last control was Rector, a protective personality that would control what answers were given and completely shut down if the questions would upset Leonora.
She was later whisked away to England to meet the more prominent members of the SPR. She impressed them all and in 1898, the hardened skeptic William James proclaimed her the real deal.
Even those members who did not believe she was in contact with the deceased couldn’t deny the reality of her trances. When she was in this state, they were able to wave noxious fumes under her nose, pinch her and poke her with needles, but she would take no notice of the mistreatment whatsoever. When she would come around again, she would take notice of the injuries and this later forced her to deny any scientific involvement in her séances. She was not to be mistreated!
Her alleged abilities moved towards automatic writing in 1911. She was never proven to be fake, nor could anyone understand how she could have attained the information she apparently received form thin air.
