Caught Repeatedly, and Never Explained Away

Palladino's record is the reason she is impossible to dismiss and impossible to accept. She was investigated at Cambridge in 1895 by the Society for Psychical Research and was detected freeing a hand and a foot from the controllers holding her, after which the society's leadership regarded the matter as closed. She was tested in Naples, Warsaw, Paris and Genoa by scientists including physiologists and physicists, several of whom reported effects they could not account for. She sat in New York in 1909 and 1910 and was caught again, this time by investigators who had planted a man under the table to watch her feet. She was, in short, a proven cheat, and she cheated in a specific and consistent way, by working a limb loose from the person holding it, which is a method any competent controller should have been able to block.

The awkward fact is that the investigators who blocked it most carefully did not thereby obtain a null result. That combination, reliable fraud plus a residue that tightening did not remove, is the reason her case was argued for thirty years and is still argued. It is worth adding that she never claimed to be in control of what happened. She told investigators to hold her tightly and warned them that she would cheat if they let her, which several of them recorded at the time and which is either candour or an unusually effective piece of stagecraft.