Eusapia Palladino

Who was Eusapia Palladino?

Eusapia Palladino was an Italian Spiritualist physical medium. In Italy, France, Germany, Poland and Russia, Palladino seemed to display extraordinary powers in the dark: levitating and elongating herself, producing apports of flowers, materializing the dead, producing spirit hands and faces in wet clay, levitating tables, playing musical instruments under the table without contact, communicating with the dead through her spirit guide John King, and other related phenomena, but after investigation all these things were discovered to be the result of trickery. It was expensive to watch one of her performances.

Some Europeans regarded Palladino as a genuine Spiritualist medium, and as late as 1926, eight years after her death, Arthur Conan Doyle in his History of Spiritualism praised the psychic phenomena and spirit materializations that she had produced. However, Palladino had been caught cheating in every country she had been investigated in, and after many investigations the scientific community concluded that she was a clever conjuror. Her Warsaw séances at the turn of 1893–94 inspired several colorful scenes in the historical novel Pharaoh, which Bolesław Prus began writing in 1894.