CHAPTER I

MEDIUMS: BLACK, WHITE, AND GREY


Mediums are the priests of the Spiritualist religion. They are the
indispensable channels of communication with the other world. They have,
not by anointing, but by birthright, the magical character which fits
them alone to perform the miracles of the new revelation. From them
alone, and through them alone, can one learn the conditions under which
manifestations may be expected. Were they to form a union or go on
strike, the life of the new religion would be more completely suspended
than the life of any other religion. They control the entire output of
evidence. They guard the gates of the beyond. They are the priests of
the new religion.

Now it will not be seriously disputed that during the last three
quarters of the century these mediums or priests have perpetrated more
fraud than was ever attributed to any priesthood before. A few weeks ago
Spiritualists held a meeting in commemoration of the "seventy-second
anniversary" of the birth of their religion. That takes us back to 1848,
the year in which Mrs. Fish, as I will tell later, astutely turned into
a profitable concern the power of her younger sisters to rap out
"spirit" communications with the joints of their toes. There have been
some quaint beginnings of religions, but the formation of that
fraudulent little American family-syndicate in 1848 is surely the
strangest that ever got "commemoration" in the annals of religion. And
from that day until ours there is hardly a single prominent medium who
has not been convicted of fraud. Any person who cares to run over Mr.
Podmore's history of the movement will see this. There is hardly a
medium named in the nineteenth century who does not eventually disappear
in an odour of sulphur.

Podmore was one of the best-informed and most conscientious
non-Spiritualists who ever wrote on Spiritualism. If one prefers the
verdict of the French astronomer Flammarion, who believes that mediums
do possess abnormal powers and has studied them for nearly sixty years,
this is what he says:--


It is the same with all mediums, male and female. I believe I have
had nearly all of them, from various parts of the world, at my
house during the last forty years. One may lay it down as a
principle that all professional mediums cheat, but they do not
cheat always.[1]


If you are inclined to think that this applies only to professional
mediums, whose need of money drives them into trickery, listen to this
further verdict, which M. Flammarion says he could support by "hundreds
of instances":--


I have seen unpaid mediums, men and women of the world, cheat
without the least scruple, out of sheer vanity, or from a still
less creditable motive--the love of deceiving. Spiritualist séances
have led to very useful and pleasant acquaintanceships, and to more
than one marriage. You must distrust both classes [paid and
unpaid].[2]


Listen to the verdict of another man who believes in the powers of
mediums, and who has studied them enthusiastically for thirty years, a
medical man with means and leisure--Baron von Schrenck-Notzing[3]:--


It is indisputable that nearly every professional medium (and many
private mediums) does part of his performances by fraud....
Conscious and unconscious fraud plays an immense part in this
field.... The entire method of the Spiritualist education of
mediums, with its ballast of unnecessary ideas, leads directly to
the facilitation of fraud.


If this is not enough, take another gentleman, Mr. Hereward Carrington,
who has studied mediums for two decades in various parts of the world,
and who also believes that they have genuine abnormal powers:--


Ninety-eight per cent. of the [physical] phenomena are
fraudulent.[4]


These are not men who have dismissed the phenomena as "all rot." They
believe in the reality of materializations or levitations. They are not
men who have been recently converted, in an emotional mood. They have
spent whole decades in the patient study of mediums. I could quote a
dozen more witnesses of that type; but the reader will be able to judge
for himself presently.

Some Spiritualists try to tone down this very grave blot on their
religion by distinguishing between the professional medium and the
unpaid. The men I have quoted warn us against this distinction. It is
quite absurd to think that money is the only incentive to cheat. The
history of the movement swarms with exposures of unpaid as well as paid
mediums. An unpaid medium who can display "wonderful powers" becomes at
once a centre of most flattering interest; and we shall see dozens of
cases of this vanity leading men and women of every social position into
fraud and misrepresentation, even in quite recent times. All that one
can say is that there is far less fraud among unpaid mediums. But there
are far less striking phenomena among unpaid mediums, as a rule, and so
this helps us very little. The "evidence" afforded by mediums like Mr.
Vale Owen, and the myriads of quite recent automatic writers and
artists, is absolutely worthless. What they do is too obviously human.

We must remember, also, that the distinction between "paid" and "unpaid"
is not quite so plain as some think. Daniel Dunglas Home is always
described by Spiritualists as an unpaid medium, but I will show
presently that he lived in great comfort all his life on the strength of
his Spiritualist powers. Florence Cook, Sir William Crookes's famous
medium, is described as "unpaid," because she did not (at that time)
charge sitters; but she had a large annual allowance from a wealthy
Spiritualist precisely in order that she should not charge at the door.
To take a living medium, and one very strongly recommended to us by Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle under the name of "Eva C." (though it has been openly
acknowledged by her patrons on the continent for six years that her name
is Marthe Beraud): she has lived a luxurious life with people far above
her own station in life for fifteen years, in virtue of her supposed
abnormal powers.

The distinction is, in any case, useless. When Spiritualists try to
conciliate us to their wonderful stories by telling us that the medium
was "unpaid," they do not know the history of their own movement. The
most extraordinary frauds have been perpetrated, even in recent years,
by unpaid mediums, or ladies of good social position. Flammarion,
Maxwell, Ochorowicz, Carrington, and all other experienced investigators
give hundreds of cases. Not many years ago Professor Reichel, tired of
examining and exposing professional mediums, heard that the daughter of
a high official in Costa Rica was producing wonderful materializations.
He actually went to Costa Rica to study her, and he found that she was
tricking (dressing a servant girl as a ghost) in the crudest fashion, as
I will tell later. The daughter of an Italian chemist, Linda Gazerra
cheated scientific and professional men for three years (1908-11), but
was at last found to conceal her "ghosts" and "apports" in her false
hair and her underclothing. There is no such thing as a guarantee
against fraud in the character of the medium. Every case has to be
examined with unsparing rigour.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle meets the difficulty by cheerfully distinguishing
between white, black, and grey mediums: the entirely honest, the
entirely fraudulent, and those who have genuine powers, but cheat at
times when their powers flag and the sitters are impatient for
"manifestations." It is a familiar distinction. To some extent it is a
sound distinction. We all admit black mediums. The chronicle of
Spiritualism, short as it is, contains as sorry a collection of rogues,
male and female, as any human movement _could_ show in seventy years.
Politics is spotless by comparison. Even business can hold up its head.
For a "religion" the situation is remarkable.

Next, we all admit white mediums. We all know those myriads of innocent
folk, tender maidens and nervous spinsters, neuropathic clergymen and
even quite sober-looking professional men, who bring us reams and rivers
of inspiration through the planchette and the _ouija_ board and the
crystal and automatic writing. Bless them, they are as guileless,
generally, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself. I have seen them--seen men
and women of such social standing that one dare not breathe a
suspicion--stoop to trickery more than once in order to get
communications of "evidential value." But there are tens of thousands of
amateur mediums of this kind who are as honest as any of us. We all
admit it. It is sheer Spiritualistic nonsense to say that we dismiss the
whole movement as fraud. We do not question for a moment the honesty of
these myriads of amateur mediums. What we say is that the evidential
value of _their_ work would not convert a Kaffir to Spiritualism. Dr. J.
Maxwell, a distinguished French lawyer and doctor, who has been a close
investigator of these things for decades and believes in mediumistic
powers, says:--


I share M. Janet's opinion concerning the majority of Spiritualist
mediums. I have only found two interesting ones among them; the
hundred others whom I have observed have only given me automatic
phenomena, more or less conscious; nearly all were the puppets of
their imagination.[5]


No, Spiritualism does not rely at all on these innocent and useless
productions. Invariably, your Spiritualist opponent turns sooner or
later to the big, striking things, the "physical phenomena," the work of
the "powerful" mediums.

Now, which of these were ever "white"? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, when he
came to this important point, named four "snow-white" mediums. He
_could_, he added, name "ten or twelve living mediums"; but since he did
not, we still hunger for the names. The four spotless ones were Home,
Stainton Moses, Mrs. Piper, and Mrs. Everett--not a great record for
seventy years (since Home began in 1852). Mrs. Piper we will discuss
later, but I may say at once that a man for whom Sir Arthur has a great
respect as a psychic expert, Dr. Maxwell, speaks of Mrs. Piper's
"inaccuracies and falsehoods" with great disdain. Who Mrs. Ever_e_tt may
be I do not know. If Sir Arthur means the Mrs. Ever_i_tt of forty years
ago, I insist on transferring her to the flock of the _black_ sheep. In
later chapters we will examine the performances of Stainton Moses and
Home, and probably the reader will agree with me that these snow-white
lambs were two of the arch-impostors of the Spiritualist movement. But a
word of general interest may be inserted here.

The snow-white Daniel, whom Sir W. Barrett and Sir A. C. Doyle and all
other Spiritualists quote as one of the pillars of the movement, as a
spotless worker of the most prodigious miracles, was quite the most
successful and cynical adventurer in the history of Spiritualism. He was
no "paid adventurer," says Sir A. C. Doyle in his _New Revelation_ (p.
28), but "the nephew of the Earl of Home." To the general public that
statement suggests a cultivated and refined member of the British
aristocracy, above all suspicion of fraud. It is the precise opposite of
the truth. Even Daniel himself never pretended that he was more than a
son of a bastard son of the Earl of Home. He appears first as a
penniless adventurer in America at the age of fifteen, and he lived on
his Spiritualistic wits until he died. He married a wealthy Russian lady
in virtue of his pretensions, and his second marriage was based on the
same pretensions. It is true that he did not charge so much a sitter. He
had a more profitable way. He lived--apart from his wives and a few
lectures (supported by his followers)--on the generosity of his dupes
all his life.

In the Debate Sir A. C. Doyle tried to defend him against one grave
charge I brought against the white lamb. In 1866 a wealthy London widow,
Mrs. Lyon, asked Daniel to get her into touch with her dead husband. The
gifted medium did so at once, of course. For this he received a fee of
thirty pounds, nominally as a subscription to the Spiritual Athenæum, of
which he was paid secretary. Daniel stuck to the lady, and got immense
sums of money from her; and a London court of justice compelled him to
return the lot.

Now, Sir A. C. Doyle, who said several times in the Debate that _I_ did
not know what I was talking about, while _he_ had read "the literature
of my opponents as well as my own," asserts: "I have read the case very
carefully, and I believe that Home behaved in a perfectly natural and
honourable manner." He quotes Mr. Clodd (who has, apparently, been
misled by Podmore's too lenient account of the case), but I prefer to
deal with Sir Arthur's own assurance that he has "read the case very
carefully."

It was on in London, under Vice-Chancellor Gifford, from April 21 to May
1, 1868. Sir A. C. Doyle seems to regard Mrs. Lyon's affidavit as
waste-paper. She swears that Home brought a fictitious message from her
dead husband, ordering her to adopt Daniel and endow him, and she gave
him at once £26,000. She swears that, when Home's birthday came round,
another fictitious message ordered her to give Daniel a further fat
cheque, and she gave him £6,798. Sir A. C. Doyle may set aside all this
as "lies," because he is determined to have at least one snow-white
medium in the nineteenth century, and his cause cannot afford to lose
Home's miracles. But when he and other writers say that Home was
acquitted of dishonourable conduct, they are, if they have read
Gifford's decree, saying the exact opposite of the truth. It is enough
to mention that Vice-Chancellor Gifford decided that "the gifts and
deeds are _fraudulent_ and void," and he added:--


The system [Spiritualism], as presented by the evidence, is
mischievous nonsense--well calculated on the one hand to delude the
vain, the weak, the foolish, and the superstitious; and on the
other to assist the projects of _the needy and the adventurer_.
Beyond all doubt there is plain law enough and plain sense enough
to forbid and prevent the retention of _acquisitions such as these_
by any medium, whether with or without a strange gift.


That is the official judgment which Spiritualists constantly represent
as acquitting Home of fraud! This man, scornfully lashed as a greedy
impostor from the British Bench, is the snow-white medium recommended to
the public by Sir A. C. Doyle, Sir W. Barrett, Sir W. Crookes, and Sir
O. Lodge. Sir Arthur adds in his _Vital Message_ (p. 55) that "the
genuineness of his psychic powers has never been seriously questioned."
That statement is hardly less astounding. Home's performances, which we
will examine in the third chapter, were regarded by the overwhelming
majority of the cultivated people of his time as trickery of the most
sordid description from beginning to end. Has Sir A. C. Doyle never
heard of Browning's "Sludge"? It expressed the opinion of nearly all
London.

As to Stainton Moses, the other lamb, an ex-minister who ran Home close
in sleight-of-hand and foot (in the dark), it is enough to say, with
Carrington, that "no test conditions were ever allowed to be imposed
upon this medium." Spiritualists ought to quote that whenever they quote
the miracles of Stainton Moses. His tricks were always performed--in
very bad light (if any)--before a few chosen friends, who had not the
least inclination to look for fraud. Home was never exposed, though he
was once caught, because he chose his sitters. But Stainton Moses chose
a far more exclusive circle of sitters, and never once had a critical
eye on him. We shall see that the tricks themselves brand him as a
fraud. He was not exposed; but it was the sitters who were lambs, not
Stainton Moses.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in effect, recommends two further mediums as
snow-white. One is Kathleen Goligher, of Belfast, whose performances
shall speak for her in our third chapter. The other is "Eva C.," whose
miracles will be examined in the second chapter. We shall see that she
was detected cheating over and over again. At the present juncture,
however, I would make only a few general remarks about this living
"lamb."

In a work which was published in 1914--in German by Baron von
Schrenck-Notzing, and in French by Mme. Bisson (they are not two
distinct books, as Sir A. C. Doyle says)--there are 150 photographs of
"materializations" with this medium. We shall see that they tell their
own story of crude imposture. In the introductory part of his book Baron
Schrenck describes the character of the lady (pp. 51-4). He says,
politely, that she has "moral sentiments only in the ego-centric sense"
(that is to say, none); that she "behaves improperly to herself"; that
she "lost her virginity before she was twenty"; and that she has "a
lively, erotic imagination" and an "exaggerated idea of her charms and
her influence on the male sex." That is bad enough for a snow-white
Vestal Virgin, a sacred portal of the new revelation. But worse was to
follow; and it was evident to me during the Debate that, while Sir A. C.
Doyle twitted me with knowing nothing about these matters, he was
himself quite ignorant of the developments of this case six years
before. The young woman's real name, Marthe Beraud, had been concealed
by Baron Schrenck, and her age mis-stated by six years, for a very good
reason--she is the "Marthe B." who was recommended to us in 1905 as a
wonderful medium by Sir Oliver Lodge, and who was detected and exposed
(in Algiers) in 1907! Baron Schrenck was forced to acknowledge her real
age and name in 1914.

Where, then, are the snow-whites? Does Sir A. C. Doyle want us to go
back to the pure early days of the movement? Take the Foxes, who began
the movement. In 1888 Margaretta Fox, who had married Captain Kane, the
Arctic explorer, and had been brought to some sense of her misconduct by
him, confessed (in the _New York Herald_, September 24) that the
movement was from the start a gross fraud, engineered for profit by her
elder sister, and that the whole Spiritualist movement of America was
steeped in fraud and immorality.

Perhaps Sir A. C. Doyle would plead that this appalling outburst of
fraud, which poured over America from 1848 to 1888, was only the
occasion of the appearance of genuine mediums. Well, who are they? Take
the mediums who founded Spiritualism in England from 1852 onward. Was
Foster white? As early as 1863 the Spiritualist Judge, Edmonds, learned
"sickening details of his criminality." Was Colchester, who was detected
and exposed, white? What was the colour of the Holmes family, whose
darling spirit-control, "Katie King," got so much jewellery from poor
old R. D. Owen before she was found out? Are we to see no spots on the
egregious "Dr." Monck, who pretended that he was taken from his bed in
Bristol and put to bed in Swindon by spirit hands? Or in corpulent Mrs.
Guppy (an amateur who duped A. Russel Wallace for years), who swore that
she had been snatched from her table in her home at Ball's Pond, taken
across London (and through several solid walls) for three miles at sixty
miles an hour, and deposited on the table in a locked room? Was Charles
Williams white? He was, with Rita, detected by Spiritualists at
Amsterdam in 1878 with a whole ghost-making apparatus in his possession.
Were Bastian and Taylor white? They were similarly exposed at Arnheim in
1874. Was Florence Cook, the pupil of Herne (the transporter of Mrs.
Guppy at sixty miles an hour) and bewitcher of Sir W. Crookes, white? We
shall soon see. Was her friend and contemporary ghost-producer, Miss
Showers, never exposed? Or does Sir A. C. Doyle want us to believe in
Morse, or Eglinton, or Slade, or the Davenport brothers, or Mrs. Fay,
or Miss Davenport, or Duguid, or Fowler, or Hudson, or Miss Wood, or
Mme. Blavatsky?

These are not a few black sheep picked out of a troop of snowy fleeces.
They are the great mediums of the first forty years of the movement.
They are the men and women who converted Russel Wallace, and Crookes,
and Robert Owen, and Judge Edmunds, and Vice-Admiral Moore, and all the
other celebrities. They are the mediums whose exploits filled the
columns of the _Spiritualist_, the _Medium and Daybreak_, and the
_Banner of Light_. Cut these and Home and Moses out of the chronicle,
and you have precious little left on which to found a religion.

Spiritualists think that they lessen the reproach to some extent by the
"grey" theory. Some mediums have genuine powers, but a time comes when
the powers fail and, as the audience presses for a return on its money,
they resort to trickery. That is only another way of saying that a
medium is white until he is found out, which usually takes some years,
as the conditions (dictated by the mediums) are the best possible for
fraud and the worse possible for exposure.

But Sir A. C. Doyle is not fortunate in his example. Indeed, nearly
every statement he made in his debate with me was inaccurate. Eusapia
Palladino was a typical "grey," he says. "One cannot read her record,"
he assures us, "without feeling that for the first fifteen years of her
mediumship she was quite honest." An amazing statement! Her whole career
as a public medium lasted little more than fifteen years, and she
tricked from the very beginning of it. In his _New Revelation_ Sir
Arthur assures the public that she "was at least twice convicted of very
clumsy and foolish fraud" (p. 46).

Such statements are quite reckless. Eusapia Palladino tricked
habitually, on the confession of Morselli and Flammarion and her
greatest admirers, from the beginning of her public career. Eusapia
began her public career in 1888, but was little known until 1892. She
was exposed at Cambridge by the leading English Spiritualists in 1895,
only _three_ years after she had begun her performances on the great
European stage. Myers and Lodge reported that not one of her
performances (in 1895) was clearly genuine, and that her fraud was so
clever (Myers said) that it "must have needed long practice to bring it
to its present level of skill." Mr. Myers was quite right. She had
cheated from the start. Schiaparelli, the great Italian astronomer,
investigated her in 1892, and said that, as she refused all tests, he
remained agnostic. Antoniadi, the French astronomer, studied her at
Flammarion's house in 1898, and he found her performance "fraud from
beginning to end." Flammarion himself reports that she tried constantly
to get her hands free from control, and that she was caught lowering a
letter-scale by means of a hair. Thus her common tricks had begun as
early as 1898, 1895, and even 1892.

"_Our_ hands are clean," Sir A. C. Doyle retorted to my charge of fraud.
That is precisely what they are not. Spiritualists have from the
beginning covered up fraud with the mantle of ingenious theories, like
this "grey" theory. Fifty years ago (1873) a Mr. Volckmann, a
Spiritualist, grasped "Katie King," the pretty ghost who had duped
Professor Crookes for months. He at once found that he had hold of the
medium, Florence Cook; but the other Spiritualists present tore him off,
and put out the feeble light; so Florence Cook continued for seven
years longer to dupe Spiritualists, until she was caught again in just
the same way in 1880. From the earliest days of materializations there
were such exposures, and the Spiritualists condoned everything. The
medium, they said, when the identity of ghost and medium was too solidly
proved, had acted the part of ghost unconsciously, in a state of trance.
The ghosts had economized, using the medium's body instead of making
one. Some even said that the ghost and medium coalesced again (to save
the medium's life!) when a wicked sceptic seized the phantom. Some said,
when gauzy stuff, such as any draper sells, or a curl of false hair, was
found in the cabinet, that the spirits had forgotten to "dematerialize"
it. Some laid the blame on "wicked spirits" who got snow-white mediums
into trouble. Some learnedly proved that thoughts of fraud in the mind
of sceptics present had telepathically influenced the entranced medium!

These things are past, Sir A. C. Doyle may say. Not in the least. In the
decade before the War exposures were as frequent as in the palmy days of
the middle of the nineteenth century, and Spiritualist excuses were just
as bad. Craddock, the most famous materializing medium in England, who
had duped the most cultivated Spiritualists of London for years, was
caught and fined £10 and costs at London in 1906. Marthe Beraud, the
next sensation of the Spiritualist world, was caught in 1907, and had to
be transformed into "Eva C." Miller, the wonderful San Francisco maker
of ghosts, was exposed in France in 1908. Frau Abend, the marvel of
Berlin and the pet of the German Spiritualist aristocracy, was exposed
and arrested in 1909. Bailey, the pride of the Australian
Spiritualists, was unmasked in France in 1910. Ofelia Corralès, the next
nine days' wonder, passed among the black sheep in 1911; and Lucia
Sordi, the chief medium of Italy, was exposed in the same year. In 1912
Linda Gazerra, the refined Italian lady who had duped scientific men and
the Spiritualist world for three years, came to the same inevitable end;
and Mrs. Ebba Wriedt, the famous American direct-voice medium, met her
disaster in Norway. In 1913 it was the turn of Carancini; in 1914 of
Marthe Beraud in her new incarnation, "Eva C."

We will consider the trickery of these people in detail later. This mere
list of names, of more than national repute, gathered from one single
periodical (the German _Psychische Studien_), shows how the mischievous
readiness of Spiritualists to find excuses, and their equally
mischievous readiness to admit "phenomena" where real control is
impossible, make the movement as rich in impostors to-day as it was half
a century ago. It must be understood that behind each of these leading
mediums--men and women of international interest--are thousands of
obscurer men and women who cheat less cultivated and less critical folk,
and are never detected. It is therefore useless to divide mediums into
professional and amateur, or into black, white, and grey. You take a
very grave risk with every one of them. You need a close familiarity
with all the varieties of fraud, and these we will now carefully
examine. We will then consider more patiently and courteously what
phenomena remain in the Spiritualist world which are reasonably free
from the suspicion of fraud.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Les forces naturelles inconnues_ (1907), p. 18.

[2] Same work, p. 213.

[3] _Materialisations-phänomene_ (1914), pp. 22, 28, and 29.

[4] _Personal Experiences in Spiritualism_ (1913), p. ix.

[5] _Metapsychical Phenomena_ (1905), p. 46.