The Witch of Napoli (32 page)

“
…not
only because they are reported by persons worthy of credence, even by scientists, but because I also have experimented.”
– Comments made by Dr. Enrico Morselli, Professor of Psychiatry at Genoa University, Italy, who studied Palladino and later wrote about his psychic experiments in his book
Psicologia e Spiritismo.

“It feels like a cat is climbing my right arm towards my shoulder… Somebody is tickling me…something just pulled my beard… I’m feeling a true hand, flesh and bones are felt, the skin of the hand, warm, mobile fingers are all
perceived….the
hand gives off a light…I can see her bust and arms while both her hands are held by … Absurd as the phenomenon of a materialized hand may seem, it seems to me to be very difficult to attribute the phenomena produced to deception, conscious or unconscious, or to a series of deceptions. It is inconceivable to suppose that an accomplice could have come into the room, which is small, and was locked and sealed during the progress of our experiments. We were making no noise, we could light up the room instantly. We must accept the evidence as we find it.”
– Comments made by various investigators who attended sittings with Palladino and experienced phantom touches and hand materializations.

“If all attempts to verify scientifically the intervention of another world should be definitely proved futile, this would be a terribly blow, a mortal blow to all of our hopes for another life.”–
One of the reasons Frederic W.H. Myers decided to help co-found England’s venerable Society for Psychical Research (the model for my fictional London Society for the Investigation of Mediums).

“It allows some ordinary moving of the feet such as is inevitable in a long sitting, but if a foot is completely taken off the plate, an electric bell will ring.”
– Renowned British physicist, inventor and psychic investigator Sir Oliver Lodge describes a device used to control a medium’s foot movements.

“With great intellectual reluctance, though without much personal doubt as to its justice, we the undersigned are of the opinion that we have witnessed in the presence of Alessandra Poverelli the action of some kinetic force, the nature and origin of which we cannot attempt to specify, through which, without the introduction of accomplices, apparatus, or mere manual dexterity, she is able to produce the movement of objects at a distance from her and unconnected to her in any apparent physical manner. “
– Conclusion reached by the Society for Psychical Research following its famous investigation of Eusapia Palladino in Naples in 1908.

Alvarado, Carlos. “Eusapia Palladino: An Autobiographical Essay.”
Journal of Scientific Exploration
, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 77–101 (2011)

Alvarado, Carlos: “Eusapia Palladino: A Short Bibliography.”
http://carlossalvarado.edublogs.org/page/13/

Blum, Deborah.
Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death
. Penguin Group. (2007)

Bottazzi, Filippo.
Mediumistic Phenomena: Observed in a Series of Sessions with Eusapia Palladino.
ICRL Press. (2011translation)

Carrington, Hereward.
Eusapia Palladino and Her Phenomena.
B. W. Dodge. (1909)

Carrington, Hereward.
The American Séances with Eusapia Palladino.
Kessinger Publishing LLC (2006) (Reprint)

Dingwall, Eric.
Very Peculiar People.
University Books, (1962)

Feilding, Everard.
Sittings with Eusapia Palladino & Other Stories.
University Books. (1963 reprint)

Feilding, E., Baggally, W. W., & Carrington, H. “Report on a series of sittings with Eusapia Palladino.”
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research
, 23, 309–569. (1909)

Flammarion, Camille.
Mysterious Psychic Forces: An Account of the Author’s Investigations in Psychical Research, Together with Those of Other European Savants.
Small, Maynard Publishers. (1907)

James, William. “An Estimate of Palladino.”
Cosmopolitan Magazine
, (1910)

Lodge, Oliver. “Experience of unusual physical phenomena occurring in the presence of an entranced person (Eusapia Paladino).”
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research,
6, 306–336, 346–360. (1894)

Lombroso, Cesare. “Eusapia Paladino and Spiritism
.” Annals of Psychical Science,
7, 167–180. (1908)

Lombroso, Cesare.
After Death – What? Spiritistic Phenomena and Their Interpretation.
Small, Maynard Publishers . (1909)

Morselli, Enrico
.
“Eusapia Paladino and the genuineness of her phenomena.”
Annals of Psychical Science,
5, 319–360, 399–421. (1907)

Palladino, Eusapia. “My Own Story.”
Cosmopolitan Magazine,
(1910)

“
Palladino Reported as Dead in Rome
”
(Obituary)
The New York Times,
May 18, 1918, p. 13.

Starner, William.
Dolce Napoli
, Charing Cross Publishing (1878)

Schmicker, Michael.
Best Evidence
. (2nd Edition): iUniverse. (2002)

Wiseman, R. “The Feilding Report: A Reconsideration.” J
ournal of the Society for Psychical Research
, 58, 129–152. (1992)

Michael Schmicker is an investigative journalist and nationally-known writer on scientific anomalies and the paranormal. He is the co-author of
The Gift, ESP: The Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People
( St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, paperback, e-book (USA); Rider/ Random House (UK). His first book,
Best Evidence
, has emerged as a classic in the field of scientific anomalies reporting since its first publication in 2000. His writings also appear in three anthologies, including
The Universe Wants to Play
( Anomalist Books);
First of the Year 2009
(Transaction Publishers), edited by former
Village Voice
writer Benj DeMott; and
Even the Smallest Crab Has Teeth
(Travelers Tales).
The Listener
, is a brief memorial written to celebrate his late mother, who practiced an uncommon gift for healing by simply listening to others.

Michael began his writing career as a crime reporter for a suburban Dow-Jones newspaper in Connecticut, and worked as a freelance reporter in Southeast Asia for three years. He has also worked as a stringer for
Forbes
magazine, and Op-Ed contributor to
The Wall Street Journal Asia
. Michael has been a featured guest on national broadcast radio talk shows, including twice on Coast to Coast AM (560 stations in North America, with 3 million weekly listeners). He reviews books for the
Journal of Scientific Exploration
; serves on the Board of Advisers of the Rhine Research Center; and is a member of both the American Society for Psychical Research as well as England's venerable Society for Psychical Research.

He lives and writes in Honolulu, Hawaii, on a mountaintop overlooking Waikiki and Diamond Head crater.

Click
here
to visit his official author website.

Keep reading for an excerpt from
The Gift: ESP: The Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People,
Michael’s non-fiction investigation of the paranormal mysteries of precognition, clairvoyance and telepathy. Available at
Amazon.com
.

S
hortly after the shocking, Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist strike on the United States, my co-author Dr. Sally Rhine Feather, received a call from a well-educated, forty-year-old woman named Marie living in North Carolina. A few weeks before the attack, she and her husband had been vacationing in Washington, D.C. Their planned sightseeing itinerary had included all the usual stops, including the Pentagon, but the weather had been very hot and humid, the traffic heavy, so they skipped the Pentagon.

“When we exited the city, my husband was driving,” she wrote. “I was sitting next to him in the front. I was just trying to close my eyes to relax for a minute. Then he told me, ‘Well, when we come around the bend up ahead, you should get a good view of the Pentagon because our road goes right by it.’ It was one of the things we had said we wanted to do when we visited Washington. So I opened my eyes to look, and when I looked to the right, there it was. But it had huge billows of thick, black smoke pouring out of it, just huge clouds of smoke. I didn’t see fire, I saw smoke, like a bomb had gone off, billows and billows of black smoke going up in the sky.

“I yelled out and slammed my hands on the dashboard. My poor husband didn’t know what was happening. I mean, I really screamed out loud. His first thought was that we were going to be in an accident, and I was warning him he was going to hit someone. But it was pretty open space on the highway, and nobody was cutting in front of us or anything at that moment.”

When Marie saw the black smoke, it created such an intense, emotional feeling that she lost her breath. She was almost hyperventilating. Then suddenly, she felt like she was literally falling into the Pentagon itself – which was why, she explained to Dr. Feather, that she slammed her hands against the dashboard. She described the feeling as being on a roller coaster the second you crest the top and plunge forward and down. The combination of her vision and falling forward overwhelmed her. She described it as sensory overload.

“I truly felt like we were in danger, even though we were actually on the highway and a couple of miles away from the Pentagon. I thought it was on fire. My husband said the Pentagon was not on fire, and then I finally realized that in fact it wasn’t. And as fast as it had started, it stopped. It had all happened in a few seconds.”

Marie was understandably confused and shaken by the experience. A pretty woman with dark, curly hair, Marie holds a business degree. She has had psychic experiences most of her life, but this one was different. Seeing something that was not there had never happened to her before.

Two weeks later, Marie’s frightening precognitive visual hallucination came true. At 9:45
A.M.
on Sept. 11, 2001, just one hour after American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center, American Airlines Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon, killing 184 people and setting off fires that generated billows and billows of thick, black smoke.

Parapsychologists are still searching for a better term for what Marie experienced than an ESP “hallucination”. Hallucination is a negatively loaded term, connoting abnormal psychology. Both ordinary hallucinations and ESP hallucinations are characterized by the mistaken impression that the object or person perceived by one of the five senses is actually present there in physical reality. But the two types of hallucinations differ in several important ways. The ordinary hallucination produces fantasy, nonsense and verifiably false claims and usually occurs in people who are mentally or physically ill or in a drugged state. The ESP hallucination delivers accurate, factual information that can be subsequently checked out and verified and is experienced by sane, healthy, normal people like Marie.

Dr. Feather received dozens of calls and emails in the following weeks and months after Sept. 11, 2001 from people describing similar spontaneous precognitive experiences which seemed to foreshadow the terrible events of that day. Many came in vivid and dramatic dreams. Others reported during waking hours of getting strange intuitions or bodily feelings of something being terribly wrong, suggesting that they had some psychic awareness on an unconscious level of the approaching events. In a few cases, the experiences seemed so realistic that the people felt they were actually living through the events themselves.

Now let’s move backward sixty years to 1941.

Attack on Pearl Harbor

The two most dramatic disasters in the history of the United States are the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. and the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii that launched World War II. Sixty years separate Marie’s ESP experience from the following one, but the two precognitive experiences share some striking similarities. The story, found in the collection of 30,000 spontaneous ESP cases on file at the Rhine Research Center, was sent by a woman living in California in December 1941.

“It happened when I was in high school. I wasn’t feeling well, and I came home early. It was about 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon. I lay down on a couch in the living room and took a nap. This is what I dreamed:

“I was standing on a hill in the predawn darkness, shivering in the wind. I was looking at a large building below and ahead of me. An American flag was flying over it, and I knew it was a barracks. I knew there were men inside asleep. I even knew how many men there were, 400 and something. For some reason, I had a terrible premonition, and I shook more with fear than with cold. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I knew something awful was, and I wanted to cry out a warning, but I couldn’t.

“Then I heard a groaning sound, at first far off and then closer. I looked up, and there were squadrons of planes overhead. In a few seconds I knew why I had been afraid, because when they were directly over the building, they started dropping bombs, hundreds of them it seemed. The noise was deafening, and the flames leapt up at the dark sky. I could feel the ground shake under me but, most frightening of all, I could see inside that building. I could see the men caught in their beds, caught and ripped and burned and killed, and yet horrible as that was, that was not what caused the great feeling of panic that swept over me. The thing that was racing through my mind at that moment was a single thought, ‘But why? We are not at war!’ With that phrase playing in my brain over and over, I awoke, gasping with fear.

“I had never had a dream so vivid. I went into the kitchen where my mother was preparing dinner and told her about it. I wasn’t in the habit of telling my dreams to people, because they were always obviously silly things not worth telling, but for some reason this was different, and that night I told my Dad, too.