Modern literary criticism uses the terms “intentional fallacy" or “genetic fallacy” to describe the error of attributing the personality of a fictional character to the creator of that character. I imagine that in the late 1800s, many readers simply assumed that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had created in the character, Sherlock Holmes, somewhat of an alter-ego—a rational mind addicted to the cool empiricism of Victorian England and a skeptic when it came to the paranormal.

Far from it. In at least three books—The New Revelation (1918), The Coming of the Fairies (1921) and The History of Spiritualism (1926)—and in his private life, Conan Doyle showed himself to be a believer in psychic phenomena, including spirit materializations and telekinesis, even attributing supernatural powers to master magician and debunker of the supernatural, Harry Houdini. Conan Doyle was almost obsessed with seances and was apparently convinced that these purported contacts with “the other side” put religion on a scientific basis. He even put some rather Thomistic words in the mouth of Holmes, his empirical master sleuth (in The Adventure of the Naval Treaty, 1893): “There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion...It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner...”.

Holmes’ creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, was, in fact, a defender of the Neapolitan medium, Eusapia Palladino, perhaps the most successful and studied medium of the turn of that century; she either produced remarkable psychic phenomena or was the greatest trickster of all. She even convinced such persons as Nobel laureate Pierre Curie and professional magician and debunker Howard Thurston, who said:

“I witnessed in person the table levitations of Madame Eusapia Palladino ... and am thoroughly convinced that the phenomena I saw were not due to fraud and were not performed by the aid of her feet, knees or hands....”

In the History of Spiritualism, Conan Doyle said this of Palladino:

“...Either bound to a seat or firmly held by the hands of the curious, she attracts to her the articles of furniture which surround her, lifts them up, holds them suspended in the air like Mahomet's coffin, and makes them come down again with undulatory movements, as if they were obeying her will...She raps or taps upon the walls, the ceiling, the floor, with fine rhythm and cadence. In response to the requests of the spectators, something like flashes of electricity shoot forth from her body, and envelop her or enwrap the spectators of these marvellous scenes...However the facts are to be explained, the possibility of the facts I am constrained to admit. There is no further room in my mind for doubt. Any person without invincible prejudice who had had the same experience would have come to the same broad conclusion, viz.: that things hitherto held impossible do actually occur...”

Eusapia Palladino was born in 1854 in a village near Bari. She was orphaned, received almost no education and was taken in as a nursemaid by a family in Naples. It was a household in which seances were held, an environment in which she is said to have demonstrated paranormal abilities, even such as to convince local skeptics from the university. Beginning in 1890 and for a period of some 20 year, she “performed” in various places in Europe, including Milan, Paris and Cambridge; in 1908 and 1910 she went to America and convinced the American Society of Psychical research that she was genuine, but not William Marriot, a professional conjurer, who declared that she was a fake. Almost all of these appearances were for—or at least in the presence of—jaded skeptics wise to the world of medium trickery and bent on exposing fraud. And so she showed off the typical seance manifestations of levitating tables, disembodied hands, audible voices, apparitions and channeling, convincing a number of unbelievers, but not others. Even her defenders admitted that she resorted to trickery occasionally when her own powers failed her.

Palladino died in May of 1918 after some years during which her powers were said to have decreased considerably. Her obituary in the New York Times noted merely that although “a number of her tricks had been exposed as frauds,” many former skeptics still remained convinced of her paranormal abilities. The paper noted that a document opened upon her death predicted that the Great War would end in September of 1918. She turned out to be two months off, but I don't know what that means.

I wandered the length of the street Eusapia Palladino lived on in Naples: via Benedetto Cairoli, off of via S. Antonio Abate in the San Lorenzo section of town between the main train station and the Botanical Gardens. I thought there might be some sort of plaque or other marker to indicate the house in which Europe's best-known spiritualist medium of the day had lived. There was not. I don't know what that means, either, but I'll keep trying—maybe find out where she is buried. The game is afoot!