Thunderstruck

STRANGE DOINGS

THE ILE ROUBAUD STOOD AMONG a group of small islands in the Mediterranean, off the coast of France, and had only two houses, one occupied by a lighthouse keeper, the other, at the opposite side of the island, by a scientist named Charles Richet, a physiologist who a decade later would win the Nobel Prize for his discovery of anaphylaxis, the extreme reaction ignited in some people by bee stings, peanuts, and other triggering agents. The house served him primarily as an escape from the heat of the mainland, but now even the island was hot. The month, August 1894, would be remembered long afterward for the exceptional temperatures it brought throughout Europe. Those gathered at Richet’s house, however, quickly found themselves distracted by a series of events that would have sent any ordinary mortal rowing for the mainland.

The evening was clear, the air hot and still and scented with brine. Oliver Lodge, Richet, and two others—a man and a woman—collected in the dining room of the house, while a fifth member of the party sat outside in the yard just below a window, notebook in hand, to record observations called to him from inside. Curtains of a sheer, ethereal material framed the window but did not move, testimony to the heat and the lack of breeze.

The woman was an Italian named Eusapia Palladino, and she now took a seat at the table in the center of the room. The men placed a device under her feet that would sound an alarm if either foot lost contact. To prevent her from simply using one foot “to do the duty of two,” as Lodge put it, the men installed a screen around each. They extinguished lamps until the room became darker than the night outside, the windows rectangles of soft blue light.

Richet took a seat on one side of Palladino. Another man, a friend of Lodge’s, sat at Palladino’s other side. He was Frederic W. H. Myers, a poet and school inspector and one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research. Myers had coauthored for the society a catalog of reports of ghostly and telepathic doings called Phantasms of the Living, published in 1886 in two large volumes containing what the authors believed to be dispassionate analysis of seven hundred incidents. This had led Myers and several fellow members to produce a “Census of Hallucinations,” for which 410 people around the world distributed a survey which began: “Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living or inanimate object, or of hearing a voice; which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause?” Twelve percent of the women surveyed and 7.8 percent of the men answered yes. The authors concluded, “Between deaths and the apparitions of dying persons a connection exists which is not due to chance alone. This we hold as a proved fact.”

Now, in the darkened dining room of Richet’s summer house, Lodge walked to the table and stood behind Eusapia Palladino. Richet took her right hand, Myers her left. Lodge placed his hands on opposite sides of her head and held fast.

PALLADINO WAS FORTY YEARS OLD. By most accounts, she was illiterate, or nearly so. She claimed that she had been an orphan for much of her childhood—that her mother had died giving her birth and that when she was twelve her father had been murdered by bandits. She then went to live with a family in Naples and earned her keep doing laundry. The family had a Spiritualist bent and in the evening often convened séances, inviting Eusapia to participate. At one such gathering the family learned in a vivid way that there was more to Eusapia than met the eye. As the séance progressed, furniture began to move.

Word of Palladino’s alleged gift spread quickly, and soon she found herself in demand. In the lexicon of paranormal research, she was a “physical” medium as opposed to a trance medium. Trance mediums served merely as a kind of telephone to the beyond. Physical mediums also entered trances but then busied themselves conjuring forces that squeezed hands, touched faces, and moved furniture. During sittings by both types a psychical entity known as a “control” was said to guide communication with those beyond the veil.

Palladino had the right powers at the right time. Spiritualism was gaining adherents around the world, and reports of ghosts and poltergeists and premonitions-come-true became commonplace. Families acquired Ouija boards and scared themselves silly. Legendary mediums emerged, including two of the most famous, Madame Helena Blavatsky, eventually exposed as a fraud, and D. D. Home, whose talents convinced even skeptics.

By 1894 Eusapia Palladino too had achieved global fame. Lodge, Myers, and Richet now planned to put her powers to the test.

THE MEN HELD TIGHT. The room was dark and hot and very still. As Palladino entered her trance, a spirit entity named “John King,” her control, took over the séance. “I am not presuming to judge what John King really was,” Lodge wrote, “but the phenomena were certainly as if she were controlled by a big powerful man.”

With each new manifestation, the men called out to each other, and to the secretary outside the window, to describe what had happened and to confirm that Palladino’s hands and head remained under their grasp. They reported in French, “constantly ejaculating for the benefit of the others, whenever anything occurred,” as Lodge put it.

Myers shouted, “J’ai la main gauche.”

I have the left hand.

Richet: “J’ai la main droite.”

In the darkness Lodge felt the sensation of having his hands squeezed, even though Palladino’s hands were restrained.

“On me touche!” he said.

Something is touching me.

Lodge wrote, “It was as if there was something or someone in the room, which could go about and seize people’s arms or the back of their necks, and give a grip; just as anybody might who was free to move about. These grips were very frequent, and everyone at the table felt them sooner or later.” At one point Lodge felt “a long hairy beard” brush the top of his head. “It was said to be John King’s beard, and the feeling was certainly eerie on my head, which even then was incipiently bald.”

A writing desk stood against one wall. In the darkness, with the men still holding Palladino’s hands, she gestured toward it. “Every time she did this, the piece of furniture tilted back against the wall, just as if she had had a stick in her hand and was pushing it.” The tilting occurred three times. To Lodge this was perplexing though apparently not terrifying. “There must be some mechanical connexion to make matter move: mental activity could never do it,” he wrote. The tiltings suggested the existence of “some structure unknown to science, which could transmit force to a distance.”

As the séance progressed, Lodge wrote, “there appeared to emanate from her side, through her clothes, a sort of supernumerary arm.” It was a ghostly extension, pale, barely visible, yet to Lodge unmistakably present and fluid, not the static shuddering appearance that might be expected from some device hidden underneath Palladino’s clothes. Lodge—renowned physicist, professor at University College of Liverpool, member of the Royal Institution, revered lecturer, soon-to-be principal of Birmingham University, and destined for knighthood—wrote: “I saw this protuberance gradually stretching out in the dim light, until ultimately it reached Myers, who was wearing a white jacket. I saw it approach, recede, hesitate, and finally touch him.”

Myers said, “On me touche” and calmly reported the sensation of a hand gripping his ribs. History is silent on why Myers did not leap from his chair and run screaming into the night.

LODGE STRUGGLED TO HAUL THESE occurrences back from the world of ghosts and into the realm of mechanical law. “As far as the physics of the movements were concerned,” he wrote, “they were all produced, I believe, in accordance with the ordinary laws of matter.” The emanations from Palladino’s body prompted Richet to invent a new word to describe such phenomena: ectoplasm. Lodge wrote, “The ectoplasmic formation which operated was not normal; but its abnormality belongs to physiology or anatomy—it is something which biologists ought to study.” He acknowledged that this was dicey territory and cautioned that care had to be taken to distinguish between real manifestations and those easily faked. “Let it be noted that ectoplasm proper is more than a secretion or extrusion of material: if genuine, it has powers of operating, it can exert force, and exhibit forms. A mere secretion from the mouth, which hangs down and does nothing, is of no interest.”

The events on the island persuaded Lodge that some element of the human mind was able to exist after the body had died. In his formal report to the society he wrote, “Any person without invincible prejudice who had had the same experience would come to the same broad conclusion, viz., that things hitherto held impossible do actually occur.”

Lodge became more and more committed to the exploration of the ether, where he believed the convergence of physical law and psychical phenomena might be found. “Whether there is any physical medium for telepathic communication, whether the ether of space serves for this also, and whether our continued existence is associated with that substance instead of with matter, we do not yet know for certain,” he wrote. “The departed seem to think it is so, and as far as my knowledge goes they may be right.”

Eusapia Palladino’s apparent powers had evoked once again Lodge’s lifelong vulnerability to distraction. Up to this point this flaw in his character had caused him no great harm.