Eusapia Paladino

The golden age of psychical research produced no greater experimental superstar than the Italian peasant Eusapia Paladino, whose purported physical phenomena--movement of distant objects, levitations, materialisations of human forms--were studied in controlled settings (in the light!) by eminent scientists throughout Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She was caught in crude trickery; but even renowned magician Howard Thurston came away convinced that her more spectacular results were beyond human power. This volume collects contemporaneous experimental reports, personal memoirs, eyewitness accounts, discussion of the premises of "spirit mediumship," and criticism by skeptics of the era, including members of the British Society for Psychical Research. LOST FOUNDATIONS OF PARAPSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHICAL RESEARCH endeavors to provide the interested public with authoritative investigative accounts from the period of research prior to the rise of the statistical approach to parapsychology championed by J.B. Rhine, coming to prominence in the later 1930's.