The case of Miss Edmonds

I've been reading a book published in 2017 called Eusapia Paladino: Materialisations and Intellergetic Phenomena in Physical Mediumship, compiled and edited by Scott Dickerson. It's a collection of articles from the turn of the last century concerning the controversial Sicilian medium who, although she was known to cheat when she could, also almost certainly produced legitimate phenomena when she wanted to. You can read a review here. I haven't read far enough yet to find out what the title word "intellergetic" means, though I assume it has to do with phenomena that appear to be caused by an intelligent agency.

I find the book kind of boring so far; the opening essays focus too much (for my taste) on philosophical abstractions, without getting into specific cases. An exception to this is a lengthy passage from the lead essay "The Spiritistic and Spiritualistic Explanation of Mediumistic Phenomena," by Caesar de Vesme,  which originally appeared in the Annals of Psychical Science, July 1907. (The book gives the publication date as August 1907, but you can find the actual article online, in the July issue. Scroll down to the article directly below the Table of Contents; the embedded link in the Contents doesn't work.)

De Vesme recounts a case that was apparently quite familiar at the time, but which, like so many others from the period, has been largely forgotten today. It's worth resurrecting. In the excerpt that follows, I've broken up the second, very long paragraph into four shorter paragraphs for easier reading. Italics are in then original.

Everyone is, no doubt, acquainted with this case: Judge Edmonds had a daughter in whom mediumistic faculties were revealed by the spontaneous phenomena which occurred in her presence, which soon aroused her curiosity to such an extent that she began to frequent séances. When another personality manifested through her she sometimes spoke different languages of which she was ignorant.

One evening when a dozen persons were assembled in Mr. Edmonds' house, in New York, a Mr. Green, a New York artist, was present, accompanied by a man whom he introduced under the name of Mr. Evangelides, of Greece.

Soon a personality manifested through Miss Laura Edmonds, who spoke to him in English and communicated to him a large number of facts, tending to prove that the personality was that of a friend who had died in his home several years ago, a person of whose existence even no one present could ever have known. From time to time the young girl uttered words and entire phrases in Greek, which suggested to Mr. Evangelides to ask her if she could speak to him in Greek. He himself, as a matter of fact, spoke English with difficulty.

The conversation was carried on in Greek on the part of Evangelides, and alternately in Greek and in English on the part of Miss Laura. Now and then Evangelides seemed to be much affected.

The next day he resumed his conversation with Miss Laura after which he explained to those present that the invisible personality who seemed to be manifesting through the medium was one of his intimate friends, who had died in Greece, the brother of the Greek patriot, Mark Botzaris; this friend informed him of the death of one of his own sons, who had remained in Greece and was in excellent health at the time that his father left for America.

Evangelides returned several times to Mr. Edmonds' house, and, ten days after his first visit, he informed him that he had just received a letter announcing the death of his son; this letter must have been already posted when the first interview of Mr. Evangelides with Miss Laura took place.

"I should like," writes Judge Edmonds on this subject, "that some one should tell me how I should regard this fact. It is impossible to deny it, it is too obvious. I might as reasonably deny that the Sun shines on us … This happened in the presence of eight or ten persons, all educated, intelligent, reasonable, and all as capable as anyone of distinguishing between illusion and real fact."

Let us, however, make an effort in psychical acrobatism: Let us suppose that Evangelides had telepathically received tidings of the death of his son, and that this information had remained latent in his brain until the clairvoyance of Miss Laura Edmonds managed to evoke it, in connection with that which related to Mark Botzaris and all the rest. Still it would be illogical to attribute to the medium the gift of speaking the Greek language, and the knowledge of the death of the boy to two distinct causes. How came it that Miss Laura spoke Greek? The hypothesis that can explain this phenomenon has not yet been invented!

Mr. Edmonds informs us that his daughter had never heard a word of modern Greek up to that day. He adds that on other occasions she spoke as many as thirteen different languages, including Polish, Italian, Indian, whilst, in her normal state she only knew English and French – the other only so far as it can be learnt in school. And this J.W. Edmonds was not a nobody, far from it. He was President of the Supreme Court of Justice of New York, and President of the Senate of the United States. No one has ever thrown a doubt on the absolute integrity of his character; his writings prove his brilliant intelligence. There is, therefore, no more reason for refusing to give credence to his accounts, so well authenticated, than to those of the savants who experiment with Eusapia Paladino and others.

What's most interesting in this account is that Laura Edmonds was reportedly able to converse in Greek at least part of the time, even though she had no knowledge of the language. The additional claim that she conversed in other languages is also interesting, though not substantiated by any details.

The super-psi hypothesis seems strained to its limits, or more accurately beyond its limits, by this kind of phenomenon. Laboratory studies of ESP have not, as far as I know, produced any cases in which telepathy or clairvoyance resulted in the spontaneous acquisition of a new language.

Comments

[Paul]

Very interesting, thanks Michael.

[Art]

\\"produced legitimate phenomena when she wanted to." - MP//
----------------

Or "when it happened it happened." Perhaps it wasn't up to her? Maybe she wasn't the one making it happen? And sometimes (to her surprise) she produced legitimate phenomena, but it may not have been her making it happen? I'm not sure how much control we have over this kind of stuff when it happens? I believe it happens but the actual phenomena may originate someplace else?

Reminds me of something that happened to me. A while back I became fascinated by these large round brightly colored fish from Hawaii called Opah. Opah swim with tuna fish and are very brightly colored, sort of an iridescent salmon sort of color. Anyways I wanted to go to Hawaii and catch an Opah and eat it (because I am obsessed with food, especially meat and seafood) so I had posted pictures on Facebook of Opah. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampris_guttatus

Well a couple of months after I posted those pictures a huge box of frozen Opah fillets appeared at our local United Grocery Outlet, which is a very cheap store, that was selling these 5 oz Opah fillets for 50¢/each? What are the chances of those specific kinds of fillets appearing at a cheap grocery store in Middle Tennessee? Why here? I had never seen that kind of fish sold anywhere before and believe me I check out the fish counters of stores pretty thoroughly! It was almost like I conjured them up?

Sometimes in life some really strange things happen? Like the time I dreamed that somebody gave me two huge bass and I saw them in my dream laying on the concrete floor of a barn.... and about two years later one of our neighbors called me up and told me he and his friends had gone fishing and caught a whole bunch of Striped Bass and did I want a couple? I went over there and there were two huge striped bass laying on the floor of his garage and it looked exactly like the dream I had?

Weird stuff like this happens to me quite frequently? But it's not like I can make it happen? When it happens it happens and I don't know if I had anything to do with making it happen or not? Almost like the Universe trying to show me something?

[Art]

Dr. David Bohm was a fairly famous (for several different reasons) that wrote a textbook about quantum physics. He also wrote another book called "Wholeness and the Implicate Order" having to to with the implicate and explicate universe. His idea was that there is another hidden universe that we aren't privy to from which our universe originates. In other words, a holographic universe. The implications of this implicate and explicate universe are is that everything that is here originates from there. It is Bohm's explanation for non locality.

What this has to do with Eusapia Paladino is that the things that she was able to conjure up may have been transported here from this other deeper hidden reality. My personal opinion is that Eusapia more than likely had very little to do with it and it was always part of the plan from the beginning.

"At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously."
http://www.earthportals.com/hologram.html

[David Collins]

"From time to time, the young girl uttered words and entire phrases in Greek, which suggested to Mr. Evangelides to ask her if she could speak to him in Greek." Maybe she genuinely did speak words and phrases in Greek. Or maybe she was uttering gibberish which suggested to Mr. Evangelides that the manifested personality was speaking something like Greek.

It wouldn't bother me if it all happened as Mr. Evangelides and the other witnesses believe it did. We live in a weird universe where weird stuff happens. But, in this case, I will stick to the hypothesis that Mr. Evangelides interpreted the young lady's gibberish as Greek spoken by his deceased friend.

[Michael Prescott]

We would still be left with the puzzle of how Laura knew that Evangelides' son was dead, something Evangelides himself didn’t know. And how she knew anything about his deceased friend, the purported communicator. Perhaps cold reading (unconscious or otherwise) could account for the second issue, but not for the first.

Also, we’re told that after Evangelides took note of the scattered "Greek" words and phrases, he asked Laura if she could speak to him in Greek. The rest of the conversation, reportedly, was conducted with Evangelides speaking Greek exclusively and Laura speaking Greek about half the time. This indicates that Laura could understand Evangelides when he conversed in Greek, and that her own conversation consisted of more than just garbled words and phrases. After all, it would be hard to have a dialogue if you can’t understand the other person’s language and are speaking gibberish 50% of the time.

[Art]

Idiot savants are picking up information from somewhere. There is no way they are doing calculations and figuring out "the hard way" some of the things they automatically know.

We live in a conscious universe and that universal consciousness permeates the entire universe. We have to let go of the whole idea of separateness which when we talk makes it sound like the separateness that we experience in our daily lives is all there is. There is something amazing and mind boggling happening and we aren't normally privy to it but sometimes, every once in a while, people are able to tap into that reservoir of knowledge and "dial" into it and receive very specific information that they have no normal means of obtaining.

When we talk about God we make it sound like we are separate from God but I highly suspicion that we are always connected to it, and just like information in holographic film, it exists everywhere at once and nothing is separate from anything else, each piece contains the whole, and everything interpenetrates everything.

Like I keep saying the physics of the place we are going is very different from the physics we normally experience here, but when we get there it will seem completely normal and not strange and in fact it will feel like home.

Many near death experiencers say they had access to all information and simply by thinking about a subject they suddenly knew all about it. That information came as a bolus of information like it was downloaded into their consciousness "all at once" and they knew all about a subject simply by thinking about it.

[Victoria]

Michael, I wanted to make sure you’ve seen this article, given your interest in the Shakespeare Authorship debate:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/03/19/magazine/how-college-dropout-new-hampshire-found-shakespeare-secret-all-phds-missed/

The article does not broach the authorship issue, but the research it discusses has some obvious implications.

[Michael Prescott]

Thanks, Victoria. McCarthy makes some interesting points. There’s s book about his work coming out next month, called "North by Shakespeare." Written by an independent journalist, it details McCarthy's investigations and the hostile response of the academic community. I read an advance copy and found it quite interesting, though I’m not necessarily convinced that North was the court poet behind Shakespeare's works. (McCarthy does believe this, though in an attempt to gain academic acceptance he has muted his views, as the upcoming book documents.)

[Victoria]

After I posted it, I realized that I had missed the last of the article where the journalist does mention the authorship controversy, but with performative condemnation as a “conspiracy theory” and McCarthy disavows it in turn.

I’m not surprised to read your indication that he does in fact accept alternative authorship as legitimate given that he is using precisely the same analytical techniques as the anti-Stratfordians and has implicitly exposed the limitations of the Academy orthodoxy.

[Abd Lomax]

You admit that Palladino did cheat. It makes no sense that she was also a little bit genuine that violates Occam's razor.

In dark rooms people are easily duped and the conditions are perfect for suggestion. This is why mediums do not conduct seances in broad daylight outside in front of thousands in a supermarket. It's always in dark or darkened room where the atmosphere is perfect and darknened conditions for deception.

Palladino was caught in fraud by trained magicians. Only magicians are trained to detect fraud, not regular science sitters or scientists, especially not a judge.

There is a Wikipedia page that completely destroys Palladino's paranormal defenders with 75 references.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eusapia_Palladino

I have not seen any Palladino defender attempt to refute that page. The typical response is that it is "biased" sources written by skeptics but this makes no sense. There were countless trained observers skilling in conjuring who caught Palladino in fraud. There is no reason to believe she had genuine paranormal powers. It's all on the wiki page.

[Abd Lomax]

I would also point out that Judge Edmonds was not a reliable source for anything paranormal.

There is a some commentary about Judge Edmonds in Joseph McCabe's book "Spiritualism; a popular history from 1847" from page 35, the next few pages contains information about his daughter.

https://archive.org/details/spiritualismpopu00mccarich/page/34/mode/2up

Judge Edmonds became a medium himself. He had suffered a personal loss. He had a the will to believe. You can also do some deeper research.

It turns out Judge Edmonds was William Mumlers biggest advocate and defender. We all know that William Mumler was fraudulant. Only Michael E. Tymn I believe is still claiming Mumler was genuine. Mumler was a famous "spirit photographer".

If you search on Google books for Judge Edmonds and Mumler we get this article called "The Mumler Swindle" from 1869, part of which reads:

"Mumler's great advocate, the Ex-judge Edmonds, is certainly a singularly credulous man, and may therefore be an honest one. The ease with which he has been deceived by spirit drawings and photographs and the unquestioning simplicity and eagerness with which he takes
up all new so called manifestations, are
well known in New York." (The Illustrated Photographer, 1869.)

Edmonds had been deceived by many mediums. He is not a reliable source for anything. You need to do proper background checks on seance sitters. They are always easily duped apart from experienced conjurors or trained magicians.

Do you still think Edmonds is reliable Prescott?

[Michael Prescott]

I do think Palladino had legitimate abilities, even though she was known to cheat when she could. Feilding's book "Sittings with Eusapia Palladino" and Braude's "The Limits of Influence" are the best sources of into on Eusapia that I know.

I don’t find Wikipedia reliable on paranormal issues or on controversial topics generally.

It’s actually quite common for psychics and mediums to be of the "mixed" type — i.e., cheating sometimes but not always. Of course, it’s unfortunate that anyone cheats. But the pressure of performing on demand can lead people to take shortcuts. There’s no connection between psychic or mediumistic powers and high moral standards — in fact, such persons often seem to have "trickster" personalities (and the trickster archetype is frequently associated with paranormal or occult powers in folklore).

Palladino herself clearly fit the trickster mold. A Neapolitan peasant, she was an eccentric character who seemed to enjoy seeing how much she could get away with. Nevertheless, when pressed to produce genuine phenomena under conditions that precluded fakery, she could do it. See the two books I mentioned.

I can see Edmonds being fooled by spirit photography. In the early days of photography, people were quite unsophisticated about photographic illusions — look at the special effects in early silent films, like the movies of Georges Méliès. It’s harder to understand how the judge and his visitor could be fooled by his own daughter when she was apparently conversing in a foreign language. But it did happen a long time ago, so there will always be room for doubt.

[Dee]

Not entirely related, but I feel like the past 10 years or so people have become more materialistic and it's only getting worse. As soon as the marketers found they could stick a mini-TV screen in front of everyone's faces they found they could plug almost everyone into the matrix and people would stop caring about anything else but buying useless garbage that is designed to break and being outraged over the latest trendy thing to be outraged over. All the people studying parapsychology are getting older and when they're gone there's going to be no one to replace them and then the total conversion of the people to bourgeois materialism will be complete.

[Abd Lomax]

Michael the problem I have that I touched on before is the light issue.

I have read "Sittings with Eusapia Palladino & Other Studies" by Everard Feilding and "The American Seances with Eusapia Palladino" by Hereward Carrington. Both admit many of the seances were conducted in darkness, but also some of them semi dark. They say some of them were conducted in "full light" but this is not quite accurate because the medium remained in darkness.

On page 26 of Carrington's book he talks about Palladino levitating a table in full light from a "candle - power electric lamp". The problem is he never describes where the candles or lamp are positioned. They are not on the ground under the table. It is always on top. Palladino always wore a black dress, never a white one. The furniture that was apparently "levitated" was always black.

Arthur Conan Doyle says the Palladino seances in full light consisted of an oil lamp and two candles. I recommend you put up an "oil lamp" on Google images. They are quite dim.

"Full light" for these early psychical researchers and spiritualists was a single oil lamp and maybe a few candles. It is not "full light". If can remember correctly Daniel Dunglas Home did the same thing. Why not conduct the seances in broad-daylight outside or at least in the afternoon with pure sun from all the windows open? It doesn't happen because the medium needs the darkness to practice deception.

The Carrington and Feilding reports are not reliable in regard to details about the light.

The most simplest explanation is that Palladino was a fraud and she performed all the phenomena herself by freeing her arm or foot. That was the position of Stanley L. Krebs who sat with Palladino.

His paper was published in the Society for Psychical Research 1910 on trick-methods of Palladino major and minor.

https://archive.org/details/journalofsociety14sociuoft/page/296/mode/2up?view=theater

Check his conclusions on page 318.

"All the phenomena are produced in a space or area that is within reach of the arm and leg of the medium, still further lengthened by
the use of flower-stand as a "researcher" and a shoe edge as a fulcrum for levitations. Personally I do not believe Eusapia Palladino
has any extraordinary psychic or telekinetic power. Her whole performance seems to me, on the basis of what I saw and felt, to be the deception of the two senses, sight and touch, assisted by intentional suggestions."

Dr Krebs also talks about Palladino's black dress and how the cabinet was always painted black. He says "why then had the cabinet
the be painted, and painted black? The answer
is simple, namely: to render the sleeves
of her black dress unseen when she thrust
her arm inside."

Lastly, I am sure you are aware but Everard Feilding held an additional series of seances with Palladino without Carrington in 1910 with an experienced magician William S. Marriott. She was caught in outright fraud. Now you can read this paper in the SPR journal but the PSI encylopedia entry for Palladino does not cite or mention this paper.

Prof Stephen Braude does not mention the Feilding report from 1910 either.

The paper is Everard Feilding; William S. Marriott. (1910). Report on Further Series of Sittings with Eusapia Palladino at Naples. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 15: 20–32. It's found on the Wikipedia page linked in full. The PSI encyclopedia does not mention Krebs either.

In summary the Palladino seances were not conducted in we would associated these-days with "full light" and her difficult phenomena can be explained with the likely explanation of fraud.

I am 77 years old and would like there to be life after death but I have studied this field for a decade now and it appears there is no evidence from seances at least. Maybe there is better evidence from different research but I am not convinced about mediumship. I believe it is impossible to contact the dead.

[Michael Prescott]

I wouldn't consider Palladino or Home to be evidence of communication with the dead. Their phenomena, if genuine, were more likely to be the result of PK (psychokinesis). They believed in spirits, but this may have just been a way of rationalizing their talents or dissociating themselves from abilities they found frightening.

Mental mediumship, on the other hand, provides good evidence for contact with the departed. If you've studied Mrs. Piper, Gladys Osborne-Leonard, or Eileen Garrett, you should have come across some very strong cases, like the book and newspaper tests, the Bobby Newlove case, and the R-101 episode. The "cross correspondences," which involved a variety of different mediums, are also quite strong, as are some recent cases like the Jacqui Poole murder.

Anyway, I'm not really trying to convince you. I've found that when it comes to a person's basic worldview, there are insuperable barriers to persuasion. This applies to my own worldview (and biases) as well as anyone else's, of course.

[Art]

\\"I've found that when it comes to a person's basic worldview, there are insuperable barriers to persuasion." - Michael Prescott//
------------------------

Yes, I agree. A word or phrase I've learned in the last few years is "confirmation bias." I'm not sure where I heard it first - it may have been on this blog or some other message board somewhere but it is something else like the word "consilience" (which I definitely first learned on this blog) that has changed my whole perception of life and how we are as people.

Sort of like when Jehovah's Witness or Mormon's come knocking on our door thinking they might convert me? There are insuperable barriers to that happening! It doesn't take me long to start mentioning the holographic universe, near death experiences, and deathbed visions... and then they quickly try and escape as gracefully as possible. LOL!

Confirmation bias: "Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values.[1] People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

consilience: "In science and history, consilience (also convergence of evidence or concordance of evidence) is the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can "converge" on strong conclusions. That is, when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence is significantly so on its own. Most established scientific knowledge is supported by a convergence of evidence." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience

[Jamie]

Abd Lomax is quite biased when it comes to miracles or spiritualism, he's been kicked off various paranormal forums. I am not saying we should not read his posts because he says some interesting things but he is a Muslim so he thinks that spiritualism contradicts the Quran.

You can also Google "Abd Lomax". RationalWiki is not always the best source but this Lomax guy has a history of associating with alt-right individuals https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Abd_ul-Rahman_Lomax

I agree with him that Palladino was a fraud but as Michael says there is some strong evidence from mental mediumship. Unfortunately Abd dismisses all of it because it contradicts the Quran.

[Michael Prescott]

I looked at the Rational Wiki write-up. This line amused me:

//One of his favorite methods of attack is to 'weaponize' Google searches, so if someone searches for a name Lomax's blog will show up with ad hominem and lies written about them.//

I have no idea if Lomax does this, but Rational Wiki does it all the time. For them to complain about it shows a remarkable lack of self-awareness!