“Searching for Hitler’s DNA in Antarctica.” This is the bizarre headline that made the news a few months ago, launched by Russian news agency Ria Novosti and picked up by the world media after scientists were able to successfully drill into Antarctica’s Lake Vostok. The lake, a massive liquid reservoir cut off from daylight for fourteen million years and buried beneath two miles of ice, is the object of a years-long project to study its waters, which may house life-forms new to science. But what immediately caught the imagination was what seemed to be a revamping of the long-held myth that Adolf Hitler did not commit suicide in his Berlin bunker in May 1945 but was able to escape via submarine to a secret base at the South Pole.

Doubtful Death

Such an idea started circulating immediately after the end of the war. In 1952, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said: “We have been unable to unearth one bit of tangible evidence of Hitler’s death. Many people believe that Hitler escaped from Berlin.” Stalin’s top army officer, Marshall Gregory Zhukov, whose troops were the first to enter Berlin, flatly stated after a long thorough investigation in 1945: “We have found no corpse that could be Hitler’s.” The chief of the U.S. trial counsel at Nuremberg, Thomas J. Dodd, said: “No one can say he is dead.” Former Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes in his book Frankly Speaking stated that, after the war, at the Potsdam Conference of the Big Four, he met Stalin, who “left his chair, came over, and clinked his liquor glass with mine in a very friendly manner. I said to him: ‘Marshal Stalin, what is your theory about the death of Hitler?’ Stalin re­plied: ‘He is not dead. He escaped either to Spain or Argentina.’ ”

Hitler’s Berlin bunker, after the Soviet army destroyed it.

If so many Nazi officers and criminals, like Adolf Eichmann or Joseph Mengele, were able to escape undisturbed from defeated Germany, who’s to say that a diabolical mind like Hitler’s could not have set up a plan in order to simulate his own death? After all, it was known that, like many dictators, he used doubles in order to disorient his enemies. What if he had left the body of one such double in Berlin while he was fleeing to the South Pole?

It appears that in the early 1930s, the imaginations of Nazi hierarchs and maybe Hitler’s as well was captured by theories that the Earth was hollow inside and inhabited by a superior race. In particular, Madame Blavatsky’s esoteric theories had inspired the notorious Thule Society, the extremist right-wing German secret group that later reorganized and became the Nazi Party. Anxious to demonstrate the superiority of the Aryan race, theorists accepted legends of advanced civilizations living inside the Earth: such a superior breed had to be the Reich’s progenitor.

Nazis on Ice

Proof is lacking, but some claim that Hitler had ordered an expedition aiming to find the entrance to the inside of the Earth and that this had been located at the South Pole. Admiral Karl Doenitz referred to this during the Nuremberg trial when he stated: “The German submarine fleet has even now established an earthly paradise, an impregnable for­tress, for the Fuhrer, in whatever part of the world.” Although he did not specify where the exact location was, many believed it was Antarctica.

After the war, Nazi sympathizer Ernst Zundel claimed that Hitler and a trusted group of men had been able to escape aboard a ship in which they entered the Earth through a hole at the South Pole. Inside the Earth, Nazi scientists worked to build a new army with which to take over the world. An army that could count on revolutionary round, flying vehicles: UFOs.

Daring fantasies that, only fifty-five years after the end of the conflict, were dissolved after documents from the Russian secret service came out. The dictator had taken his life; Eva Braun and trusted propagandist Joseph Goeb­bels had as well. Following Hitler’s orders, the bodies had been burned. When the soviet army arrived they found the charred remains and could not recognize who they belonged to. Stolen by soldiers, the remains were subsequently examined with forensics, and their true identities were ascertained. The corpses were then buried and in 1970 Breznev ordered them ex­humed, incinerated, and dispersed in the waters of the Ehle, in order to prevent fanatics’ pilgrimages.

Legends Never Die

If all of this is clear, then why is it that the claim of a possible escape by Hitler can still make front-page news? Be­cause urban legends never really die, and with the new findings at Lake Vostok, someone unearthed a forgotten story. Some claim that according to German marine records, months after the Nazis surrendered to the Allies in 1945, a U-530 submarine reached Antarctica from Keil. There, the members of the crew did not build a fortress for the Fuhrer, but inside an ice cave they may have hidden some crates containing Third Reich relics and, even, DNA samples of Hitler and Eva Braun for cloning purposes. With their mission accomplished, the sailors reached Argentina and surrendered to Mar del Plata authorities.

However, notwithstanding sensational headlines in some newspapers, it appears highly unlikely that we will soon read about the finding in Lake Vostok of such a cave and its crates. And this silence, without a doubt, will represent further proof that the relics really exist, at least to those who love to see conspiracies everywhere.

Certainly great writers, from Oscar Wilde with The Picture of Dorian Gray to Stephen King with Rose Madder, have been able to tell extraordinary stories of scary and unsettling paintings. However, many believe that “haunted” paintings can exist in real life. Coming from a family that has always dealt with paintings—my grandfather is a painter, my father was an art collector, and together with their wives they have run a shop selling paintings for over fifty years—it is easy to understand why this is a subject that particularly fascinates me.

The Hands Resist Him

The Hands Resist Him painting by Bill Stoneham was sold on eBay as “cursed.”

In February 2000, a supposedly cursed painting was auctioned on eBay. It was titled The Hands Resist Him and was painted in 1972 by California artist Bill Stoneham. It depicted a young boy and a female doll standing in front of a glass paneled door against which many hands are pressed. The owners claimed that the characters in it came alive, sometimes leaving the painting and entering the room in which it was being displayed. It was sold for $1,025 to Perception Gallery in Grand Rapids, Mich­igan, which, when contacted some time later, stated that they had not noticed anything strange since buying the painting.

Luckily for Stoneham, the rumor caused by the story made the painting so popular that it was depicted in a short movie by A.D. Calvo (Sitter), as the CD cover art for Carnival Divine’s self-titled album, and was featured in the PC video game “Scratches.” Today, prints of it—and of its sequel, Resistance at the Threshold—are sold in different sizes.

Smiling Portrait

Portrait of Teresa Rovere. On the right, seen through a viewfinder, the face seems to smile; it’s just an illusion created by the shape of the lens.

In November 2005, the Italian TV show Voyager showed a painting owned by self-proclaimed psychic Gustavo Rol from Turin. It depicted a noble lady, Teresa Rovere, wearing nineteenth century garments and a somber frown. However, when the painting was seen through the viewfinder of a camera the mouth seemed to curl upward, forming a smile. Nothing could be seen with the naked eye and the film recorded through the camera did not show anything unusual. On the show, it was claimed that this was an unexplainable phenomenon, maybe an after-life paranormal experiment of the late Rol. In reality, it was a simple optical effect due to the round shape of the viewfinder, the lens of which tends to narrow and make rounder anything seen through it: thus, the coronet on Teresa’s hair seems to bend downward just like the mouth appears to bend upward, creating the illusion of a smile that in reality is not there.

Tears for Fears

One of the many replicas of the Crying Boy painting.

The most bizarre and enduring story of all is certainly the “Curse of the Crying Boy,” a story told in an article by David Clarke published in Fortean Times (July 2008). It all started on September 4, 1985, when British tabloid newspaper The Sun published an article titled “Blazing Curse of the Crying Boy.” It told of a couple who blamed a cheap painting of a child with big tears on his cheek for a fire that destroyed their house in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. The fire broke out from a pan in the kitchen and spread rapidly. However, the framed print of the Crying Boy re­mained on the wall unscathed.

What made this mundane episode national news was the statement of a local firefighter who said that he knew of numerous other cases where prints of the Crying Boy had turned up, undamaged, in the ruins of homes destroyed by fire. The Sun was soon inundated by letters telling of similar episodes and a background story for the painting was soon established. First of all, not all paintings were identical. They all were kitschy prints of crying kids, sold in tens of thousands of copies in branches of British department stores during the 1960s and 1970s.

A very rare image of Bruno Amadio painting a Crying Boy in his studio. (Photo © 2012 Massimo Polidoro)

The original painting that started the whole scare was signed G. Bra­golin, which The Sun claimed was “an Italian artist.” Others stated that Giovanni Bragolin was the pseudonym of a Spanish painter, Bruno Amodio, also known as “Franchot Seville.” Clarke reports that attempts to trace the man floundered as art historians said he did not appear to have a “coherent biography.” Roy Vickery, the secretary of a British Folklore Society, was quoted by The Sun to the effect that the original artist might have mistreated the child model in some way, adding: “All these fires could be the child’s curse, his way of getting revenge.”

The hysteria grew so wide that the South Yorkshire Fire Service issued a statement dismissing the connection between the fires and the prints. It explained that the most recent blaze was started by an electric heater left too close to a bed. “Fires are not started by pictures or coincidence,” stated Chief Divisional Officer Mick Riley, “but by careless acts and omissions. The reason why this picture has not always been destroyed in the fire is because it is printed on high-density hardboard, which is very difficult to ignite.” A bonfire of 2,500 copies of such paintings was even staged by The Sun in an attempt to milk every last drop of sensationalism from the news story. After that, the number of tabloid stories began to fade, but the “curse” transformed itself on the Internet into a modern urban legend.

The Legend of El Diablo

Today many people claim that if you treat the paintings well they bring good luck, while others say that if you hang close together the paintings of a crying boy and of a crying girl the house will be protected by any possible danger.

In the end, “a well respected re­searcher into occult matters, a retired schoolmaster from Devon named George Mallory,” was said in the Clarke article to have discovered the origins of the paintings. Mallory had been able to trace the actual artist who had painted the original, Franchot Seville (it was him, then, who used as pseudonyms both Bruno Amodio and G. Bragolin). Seville ex­plained that in 1969 he had found a little street boy wandering around Madrid. The child never spoke and had very sad eyes. Seville decided to paint him, and a Catholic priest, looking at the painting, identified him as Don Bonillo, a child who had run away after seeing his parents die in a blaze. The priest then warned Seville to stay away from Bonillo for wherever he went mysterious fires would break out: the villagers even called him “El Diablo” because of this. Seville ignored him and adopted the boy, using him as his constant model. The paintings sold well but when the studio was destroyed by a fire, the painter accused the child of arson. Bonillo ran away and was never seen again. Only many years later the victim of a car crash was identified as nineteen-year-old Don Bonillo.

In fact, no one named George Mallory, Franchot Seville, or Don Bonillo ever existed. But it doesn’t matter, the legend of the curse of the Crying Boy is alive and well, just like the paintings that would not die.

The Real Life Painter

In the winter of 2009, I was finally able, by chance, to trace the real artist who had painted the Crying Boy series. He was Italian and his name was Bruno Amadio (not “Amodio”). His neighbor Antonio Casellato of Tre­base­leghe, near Padua, read an article I wrote about this story in an Italian magazine and sent me a letter. “I knew Amadio very well. I lived in the house next to him for ten years and after his death I have bought his home and all that was in it.”

I called Casellato and learned more about Amadio. “He was a marvelous person, always smiling and kind,” Casellato told me.

He was a true artist and taught at the Academy of Venice. His painting style was of very high quality. I own many of his paintings and they are beautiful. That’s why I am sorry that he is remembered just for the Crying Boys. That was something that he painted just because it sold well [today original copies of Crying Boys can reach $3,500]: as good as an artist may be, it is very rare that he can live in affluence. So, since they kept asking him for those paintings from all over the world, he obliged and painted them. But he did so reluctantly, that’s why he used a pseudonym, “Bragolin.” Do you want to know were that name came from? His uncle, who had worked in vaudeville, used it and had given him permission to adopt it.

In 1981, at age seventy-three, Ama­dio died of disease of the esophagus and the legends broke out. “Some time ago,” added Casellato, “a Swedish journalist came here. He was interested in filming a documentary. He was convinced that Amadio had been a poor child and that he always painted the same subject in the hope to save other children from poverty. He went away depressed when I told him the truth. That’s all; I just wanted to say that Bruno Amadio was a real person and not the fictional character of some unlikely urban legend.”

A “non-crying boy” painting by Amadio: Pumpkins. (Photo © 2012: Massimo Polidoro)

What are lacking, however, are credible photos of the creatures that should be flying these UFOs—the actual aliens or extraterrestrials. It appears there are no more than fifty such photos shot in the past eighty years, but once you take out those plainly fake and the more suspicious looking ones all you are left with are about ten photos. These are, essentially, “mug shots” of wanted extraterrestrials. Here is my personal list of the best (or worst) photos of aliens.

10. High Bridge, New Jersey (August 2, 1956)

Howard Menger was a well-known American contactee who claimed he had met extraterrestrials throughout his whole life. He detailed in his books his chats with friendly Adamski-like Venusian “space brothers” who also gave him a wife and took him on their bases on the Moon and on Venus. This is one of the photos that he took of his ET friends; interestingly, in his photos the aliens are always dark shapes illuminated from behind. They almost look like Menger’s mother or wife coming out in the porch at night with a flashlight in hand, calling for that weird Howard, always lost in his UFO dreams.

9. Lossiemouth, Scotland (1954)

Cedric Allingham was an amateur ornithologist who was looking for birds in the North of Scotland when he saw a flying saucer descend to the earth. One of the occupants exited the spaceship and walked up to him. The alien told him he was coming from Mars and, after a little chat, left. Precisely in that moment, Cedric took this picture. Well, yes, the beanpole here looks more like a janitor or a plumber than an extraterrestrial. However, it was later suspected that Cedric Allingham never existed and that the photo was circulated by Patrick Moore, an astronomer well known for his pranks.

8. Carp, Ontario, Canada (August 15, 1991)

The photo of this alien “entity” was supposedly taken along with the film of a UFO landing. The fact that nobody knows who took the photo or the film, both sent by an unknown person calling him or herself “Guardian” to Tom Theofanous, a Canadian UFOlo­gist, does not help in taking the photo seriously. Other messages sent by “Guardian” describing a “conspiracy between the Chinese and Grey Aliens planning to take over the world” did little to increase its credibility.

7. Alaska (1930s)

This seems to be the most ancient of the lot, even if it was seen for the first time in 2003. The anonymous source claims that his grandfather took the picture seventy years before in Alaska and gave it to him the day before he died. Nothing is known about the photographer, the location, or the date of the photo. Some thought that since the little man seems to be leaning on one side it might actually be a dummy. What is more suspicious, however, is the fact that with the original source “conveniently” dead exactly one day after his revelation (isn’t that a little too trite?), all possibilities of verifying the story are defunct.

6. Falkville, Alabama (October 17, 1973)

That night, police chief Jeff Greenhaw received a phone call from an excited lady who said that she had witnessed a “spaceship” land in an open field not far from the town proper. The sheriff took off with a camera and found a “tinfoil alien” who consented to be photographed but then ran away. The ridicule that the whole story brought on the sheriff’s office cost Greenhaw his job as well as his wife. Some think that he may have encountered someone wearing a fireman’s as­bestos suit; others, however, think that the being in the suit was a friend of Greenhaw and that the whole thing was an attempt to get famous that went terribly wrong.

5. Ilkley Moor, England (December 1, 1987)

Taken by ex-policeman Philip Spencer, the photo seems to show an alien examining the bleak moor. Too bad the picture is taken from so far away and is so out of focus it is devoid of any discernible detail. But wait, Spencer also has a story that he was later able to remember (thanks to regressive hypnosis) about him being abducted by the aliens, taken on a spaceship, brought to space, shown a couple of movies about the destruction of Earth, and then returned to the moor. Unfortunately, no photos of the spaceship or close-ups of the aliens were taken.

4. Wiesbaden, Germany (April, 1950)

This picture, undoubtedly one of the best, was found in 1977 among the documents made public by the FBI on request of the UFO Information Net­work. The photo seems to show an alien, with an odd breathing tube in its mouth, being escorted by two uniformed agents. Presumably the alien was captured alive after falling to the ground with his spaceship. A great photo! Too bad that in 1981 German journalist Klaus Webner discovered that it was actually an April Fool’s hoax made by photographer Hans Scheffler, who airbrushed an image of his five-year-old son Peter holding hands with two real soldiers. The photo had been published in the German newspaper Wies­badener Tagblatt on April 1, 1950, and was later revealed to be a joke.

3. Cologne, Germany (April 1, 1950)

This is even better, but the day on which it was taken clearly gives away its true origin. Published by German photo magazine Neue Illustrierte, it was a crude photomontage part of a page devoted to the Aztec Saucer Crash hoax of 1948, the same episode (Ros­well was still not popular back then) that inspired the Wiesbaden hoax. Incredibly, some uninformed UFOlogists still take both pictures as real proof of aliens.

2. South of Laredo, TX (July 7, 1948)

This one, purportedly showing the remains of a large headed alien (known among UFO buffs as “Tomato Man”), has often been shown as proof that aliens actually crashed with their UFOs on Earth. A more careful examination, however, reveals that the picture displays the remains of a human pilot perished in a plane crash. The human nature of the body is clearly revealed by the frames of a pair of eyeglasses near the right shoulder, while the earthly origin of the vehicle is shown by a close scrutiny of the structural remains: conductor cables, a six-sided hex nut, tubular piping, angle iron, and many welded areas all look man-made, and the welds conform to standard procedures of the time.

1. Solway Firth, England (May 24, 1964)

This is probably the most in­triguing photo of them all. Jim Tem­ple­ton, a retired fireman, was taking pictures of his daughter on the Solway Marshes in Cumbria, north of Eng­land, but when he had them developed he found that behind the girl was a big, tall fellow in what looked like a white “spaceman” suit. He was quite sure that there was no one there when he took the photo. The case quickly became an international affair and so far no one has been able to explain the photo. Templeton, who later said he received a visit from two “men in black” who claimed to be from the government, was also known for his practical jokes. Could the photo be one of those jokes? Or maybe someone in the processing lab, knowing Jim’s penchant for tricks, decided to tamper with the film and play one on him? But then, perhaps because the image immediately re­ceived world-wide fame and Temple­ton’s daughter was bullied and had to be taken out of school for a while, it became embarrassing for Jim or anybody else to confess the hoax? We don’t know and will never know now that Jim Templeton is dead. There are many other instances, however, in which phenomena that started as jokes quickly got out of hand: think of the Fox sisters tricking their parents with an apple bumped on the floor and inadvertently starting Spiritualism, or the two little girls in Cottingley who photographed “fairies” (that were thought to be real by none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and waited sixty years before confessing. Maybe things went the same way with the Solway Spaceman. It would have been typical. A typical case of UFOolery.

Ford claimed that on February 8, 1928, he went into a trance and, talking in the voice of “Fletcher,” his spirit guide, he said that a woman identifying herself as the mother of Harry Houdini was anxious to speak. The spirit stated that her son, Harry, had hoped for years to receive one particular word from her, the word forgive, and added that “his wife knew the word, and no one else in all the world knew it.”

Forgive was, presumably, the last word uttered by Houdini’s mother on her deathbed and did probably refer to one of Houdini’s brothers, Leopold, who had been “guilty” of marrying Sadie, the ex-wife of Nathan, another Houdini brother. To the magician, this behavior had appeared morally inexcusable and led to the “removal” of Leopold from his life. He could have not forgiven his brother unless his mother told him to; however, her death came before the matter could be discussed.

On learning of Ford’s message, Bess promptly wrote the following to Ford:

Strange that the word forgive is the word Houdini awaited in vain all of his life. It was indeed the message for which he always secretly hoped, and if had been given to him while he was still alive, it would I know have changed the entire course of his life—but it came too late. Aside from this there are one or two trivial inaccuracies—Houdini’s mother called him Ehrich—there was nothing in the message which could be contradicted. I might also say that this is the first message which I have received which has an appearance of truth.

A poster for Houdini's campaign against fraudulent mediums.

Ford’s supporters announced that Bess’s letter confirmed the authenticity of the message, since the word forgive could only be known by Houdini, his mother, and his wife. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, typically, considered the message genuine and “an outstanding case.” The public, however, remained skeptical. The press, in fact, reported that the keyword had already appeared in print nearly a year before, on March 13, 1927, in the Brooklyn Eagle. In an interview she had given to the paper, Bess had specified that any authentic communication purporting to come from Houdini would have included the word forgive. Further­more, it was not true, as the “spirit” of Houdini’s mother had said, that “no one else in all the world” besides her, Houdini, and Bess knew of the word; at the time of her death, in fact, her magician son was touring Europe with his wife. The son who was at Mrs. Hou­dini’s deathbed was Theodore.

A few months later, on January 5, 1929, Ford announced that he had received the tenth and final code word of a message from Houdini. The following day, accompanied by members of his church, Ford went to Payson Avenue, where Bess had moved after Houdini’s death. They found Bess lying on a couch, suffering from a fall down a flight of stairs—probably provoked by a drinking habit she had developed. In an account written for the New York Evening Graphic before Ford’s visit, Bess was described as being in a “semidelirium,” calling for Hou­dini to return. She blacked out from time to time and was “under constant care of physicians.” It was in this state, then, that Ford’s message was read to her; it stated: “Rosabelle, answer, tell, pray-answer, look, tell, answer-answer, tell.”

A séance was fixed for January 8, shortly after noon. Ford went into a trance and began speaking through what he claimed was Houdini’s voice. The voice repeated the message and then said: “Thank you, sweetheart, now take off your wedding ring and tell them what ‘Rosabelle’ means.” Bess, lying on a sofa, took off her ring and began to sing: “Rosabelle, sweet Rosabelle, I love you more than I can tell. Over me you cast a spell. I love you, my sweet Rosabelle.”

A portrait of Houdini with his wife, Bess. photo: http://houdinihimself.com

Ford, still speaking as Houdini, ex­plained that “Rosabelle” was the song sung by his wife in their early days. The other code letters in the message formed the word “believe.” Before leaving, the purported voice of Houdini said: “Spare no time or money to undo my attitude of doubt while on earth. Now that I have found my way back, I can come often sweetheart. Give yourself to placing the truth before all those who have lost the faith and want to take hold again. Believe me, life is continuous. Tell the world there is no death. I will be close to you. I expect to use this instrument [Ford] many times in the future. Tell the world, sweetheart, that Harry Houdini lives and will prove it a thousand times.”

The secret code was the one used by Houdini and Bess when, in the early days of their career, they used to present in their show a telepathy act similar to others of the time. The code consisted of ten units with each unit standing for a digit and each digit, in turn, representing the position in the alphabet of a letter in the coded message:

Pray = 1 = A

Answer = 2 = B

Say = 3 = C

Now = 4 = D

Tell = 5 = E

Please = 6 = F

Speak = 7 = G

Quickly = 8 = H

Look = 9 = I

Be quick = 10 or 0 = J

Double-digit letters were indicated by combinations of the code words. For example, the fourteenth word, N, would be signaled by the phrase “pray (1), now (4).” In Ford’s message the nine words following “Rosabelle” formed the word Believe in this manner: Answer (B), tell (E), pray-answer (L), look (I), tell (E), answer-answer (V), tell (E).

Ford’s group insisted that Bess issue another statement. It was written on Bess’s personal stationery but by someone else, as the handwriting reveals. She was then asked to sign it. It read: “Regardless of any statements made to the contrary, I wish to declare that the message in its entirety and in the agreed-upon sequence, given to me by Arthur Ford is the correct message pre-arranged between Mr. Houdini and myself.”

Not everybody was convinced, however. Magician, mentalist, and friend of Houdini Joseph Dunninger went to Bess’s house and reminded her that the “secret code” had not been secret since its publication, the previous year, on page 105 of Houdini, His Life Story, the authorized biography written by Harold Kellock and based on Bess’s “recollections and documents.”

“I have seen it stated in the papers,” Doyle would later write to Kellock on this point, “that this accounts for Ford getting a posthumous message. This, however, I am sure you realize, is not correct. It was not the cipher that formed the test, but it was the message which was written in the cipher, and Ford could not have got that out of your book.”

The medium Arthur Ford at the bed of a sick Beatrice Houdini. She can be seen in the bed with her head bandaged.

Bess, however, had stated to the New York World on January 9: “I had no idea what combination of words Harry would use and when he sent ‘believe’ it was a surprise.” Also, the fact that Houdini had had four lines of the song “Rosabelle” engraved inside Bess’s wide gold wedding ring was hardly a secret.

“The Message is a Hoax!”

Two days after the séance, the notorious scandal-sheet, the New York Evening Graphic, headlined: “HOUDINI MESSAGE A BIG HOAX!—‘Séance’ Prearranged by ‘Medium’ and Widow.” The allegation was that Bess herself had given Ford the code in order to promote a lecture tour that the two were supposed to do together. The news caused an uproar, and Bess, still ill, wrote a moving letter to Walter Winchell, a columnist of the Evening Graphic:

This letter is not for publicity, I do not need publicity. I want to let Hou­dini’s old friends know that I did not betray his trust. I am writing this personally because I wish to tell you emphatically that I was no party to any fraud.

Now regarding the séance: For two years I have been praying to receive the message from my husband; for two years every day I have received messages from all parts of the world. Had I wanted a publicity stunt I could no doubt have chosen any of these sensational messages. When I repudiated these messages no one said a word, excepting the writers who said I did not have the nerve to admit the truth.

When the real message, the message that Houdini and I agreed upon, came to me and I accepted it as the truth, I was greeted with jeers. Why? Those who denounce the whole thing as a fraud claim that I had given Mr. Arthur Ford the message. If Mr. Ford said this I brand him a liar. Mr. Ford has stoutly denied saying this ugly thing, and knowing the reporter as well as I do I prefer to believe Mr. Ford. Others say the message has been common property and known to them for some time. Why do they tell me this now, when they know my heart was hungry for the true words from my husband? The many stories told about me I have no way to tell the world the truth of or the untruth, for I have no paper at my beck and call; everyone has a different opinion of how the message was obtained. With all these different tales I would not even argue. However, when anyone ac­cuses me of giving the words that my husband and I labored so long to convince ourselves of the truth of communication, then I will fight and fight until the breath leaves my body.

If anyone claims I gave the code, I can only repeat they lie. Why should I want to cheat myself? I do not need publicity. I have no intention of going on the stage or, as some paper said, on a lecture tour. My husband made it possible for me to live in the greatest comfort. I do not need to earn money. I have gotten the message I have been waiting for from my husband, how, if not by spiritual aid, I do not know.

And now, after I told the world that I have received the true message, everyone seems to have known of the code, yet never told me. They left it to Mr. Ford to tell me, and I am accused of giving the words. It is all so confusing. In conclusion, may I say that God and Houdini and I know that I did not betray my trust. For the rest of the world I really ought not to care a hang, but somehow I do, therefore this letter. Forgive its length.

Sincerely yours,

Beatrice Houdini

When it became known that Ford was using a copy of Bess’s signed statement in some of his advertisements, Bernard M.L. Ernst, Houdini’s and then Bess’s lawyer, saw the possibility of a lawsuit against Ford. In reply, Bess wrote to him:

I wish to say that I did sign the letter. . . . I did not say that I believed that the message came through spiritual aid or that I believed in spiritualism. I did say the words I heard were the words I expected to hear, etc. . . . I had a copy of the original letter I wrote to him somewhere but I am too ill to look for it and I really don’t care. I never said I believed the letter came from Houdini. I never said I believed in spiritualism and I still say the same. I don’t care what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Will Goldston say or do. I don’t and never did believe the message genuine nor did I believe in spiritualism. I will write you clearly later if you will just give me a chance to get well. I don’t care what you do to or about Mr. Ford.

The cover of a 1928 booklet detailing Houdini's spirit exposés.

Ernst didn’t bring Ford to court, but the medium was, nonetheless, expelled from the United Spiritualist League of New York. At least for a short while; shortly afterward he was reinstated “on the ground of insufficient proof” as to his possible fraud.

Bess disavowed Ford’s message countless times. “There was a time,” she told an interviewer later in her life, “when I wanted intensely to hear from Harry. I was ill, both physically and mentally, and such was my eagerness that spiritualists were able to prey upon my mind and make me believe that they had really heard from him.”

On March 19, 1930, Bess also asked Ernst to issue a statement reading thus: “For three years she had sought to penetrate beyond the grave and communicate with her husband, but had now renounced faith in such a possibility: she denied that any of the mediums presented the clew [clue] by which she was to recognize a legitimate message.”

And so Houdini, who for a little while had appeared to have returned from the afterlife, was finally let to rest in the only inescapable prison that was able to hold him: death.

Massimo Polidoro examines the icon that had wept while Father Avondios looks on.

Tears and a Strange Potato

“It was around 4:30 PM and we were cleaning up the church right before the Vespers,” said Archbishop Avondios. “Suddenly, somebody noticed that the painting with the Madonna in our church was weeping. The same way as it did last year.” In April 2010, the same thing allegedly happened, and it is said that there had been another weeping in 2008.

“A miracle? We don’t use that word,” said Avondios. “But something has happened. And it is not a trick.”

A few days after the event, an Italian television show devoted to the paranormal, Mistero, called me asking if CICAP, the Italian skeptics committee, was interested in investigating the case. Of course we were. After obtaining permission from the Archbishop, I went to the little church in Via San Gregorio. The place is quite unique, since the Orthodox Church has been established inside the only remaining building of what was once the Lazzeretto, the place where those suffering from the plague were brought between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. The building was once a huge square, but in the following centuries, when the city grew much larger, it was torn down in order to allow for the construction of roads and houses in what is now part of downtown—one of the busiest quarters of Milano.

Father Avondios was there waiting for me, and he was quite willing to help. However, before visiting the church and looking at the painting, we had to wait for the television crew to arrive. So he told me that there was at least one prodigious event that had already taken place since the latest weeping. He introduced me to a woman named Nechita from Eastern Europe who told me that until some weeks before she seemed unable to become pregnant. However, after visiting the icon and praying to the Madonna, the happy event took place and she was now with child.

A close-up of the sliced potato in its water box.

As further proof that something miraculous was going on, she showed me a curious relic. In a plastic box filled with water were two slices of a potato. While cooking at home, Nechita saw a strange dried-up shape that resembled a little tree inside a potato she had cut open. She took it as a sign and decided to keep the slices. Furthermore, although the potato had been cut awhile ago, it had not become dark: it still was clean and white, as if it would keep fresh forever. “We have asked around and nobody has ever seen anything like that,” said Nechita. “I am sure that is part of the miracle.” I photographed the slices just before the television crew arrived.

Tiny Drops of Something

We finally entered the cramped room that served as the main church hall, where dozens of sacred paintings, icons, reliquaries, and candles were kept and where women were allowed inside only with their head covered by a shawl. It contained a painting of the Madonna with baby Jesus and two little angels crowning her—a classic orthodox icon, probably not more than fifty years old, with gold and red as the prevailing colors and writing in cyrillic inside it.

The picture had now been put in a case with a glass cover over it in order to preserve it, whereas when the weeping occurred it was left in the open and people could touch it (and they constantly did, as a few films available on the web clearly show). For this occasion, while the cameras were rolling, Father Avondios promptly opened the case and took the painting out for us to see up close. There were traces of some liquid, which had oozed and had now dried up, starting at the eyes of both the Madonna and Jesus and trailing down. “You see?” asked Father Avondios. “There still are little drops of tears. It is still weeping.”

Father Avondios showing the sliced potato with tree shaped signs.

It was not actually “weeping,” but as I looked closely at the painting I could see that there were in fact tiny little drops of something that still hadn’t dried. By running some new cotton swabs on the painting, I was able to capture some of those traces. The idea was to take them to the lab in order to see if some kind of analysis was possible. Father Avondios, a quite young Archbishop with a nice eastern accent and a good sense of humor, was quite helpful. He even took off some splinters from behind the painting with a knife in case we needed to examine those as well.

For the moment that was all I could do. Later I gave the samples to my good friend and colleague Luigi Garlaschelli, a chemist at the University of Pavia, and he checked with their labs to determine what sort of analysis was possible.

A Partial Solution to the Mystery

While that was going on in Pavia, I was interested in checking on the mysterious potato slices. I reached the Agronomy Department at the Regione Piemonte in Turin, where I knew some people who had been crucial in solving a previous “vegetable mystery.” I had been shown some apples on whose surfaces odd drawings and dark wavy lines had appeared—bizarre but not uncommon. In fact, it turned out that the apples were suffering from an infection due to poor preservation. I got a similar answer in the case of the strange “tree” in the potato slices. It was a well-known form of plant disease called “empty heart,” which is caused by imbalances in nutrients and water. As for the potato remaining preserved, the agronomists explained to me that it is a natural reaction to the fact that the slices were kept under water. Oxygen is what turns a potato or a fruit dark, and the lack of it can only slow down the decaying process.

In a few weeks, Garlaschelli had the results from the Mass Spectrometry Labs in Pavia. It turned out that the substance found on the painting was some kind of vegetable oil. The suspicion that the painting itself had produced the oil was immediately discarded because a) oil paint is made with mineral oil because vegetable oils are easily perishable and b) if it was a natural transudation it would have taken place all over the painting and certainly not only around the eyes of the Madonna and her baby.

What conclusions can be drawn? The most logical one is that the oil came from outside the painting and it was either made to appear by some supernatural (and unproven) means or somebody put it there—it is now impossible to guess who and why. There were many people freely moving around the church area while I was there, and—as shown by various news clips—the painting had been left without a glass cover before our arrival, so anybody who wished could reach and touch it.

Father Avondios wrote to me later: “We have always been and will be very careful in our statements and in declaring true an event or an apparition, independently from the results of the analysis. I have always been open and curious, and that’s why I allowed for the tests to be performed. We will still worship and respect the icon of the Madonna not because of a supposed miracle but as an instrument of devotion to the Mother of our Lord.”

During our investigation, the police department had concluded work on another weeping Madonna case. This one was a print of a Madonna owned by a couple in Messina, Sicily, that they swore had wept blood. The house had since then been visited by thousands of pilgrims. Finally, the police were able to determine that the blood was human and that the DNA belonged to one of the owners. Now the couple risks charges of “abuse of popular credulity,” something that Italian law still considers a crime.

The Origins of Spirit Photography

The practice of spirit photography was officially born in 1862 when William H. Mumler, a Boston photographer, discovered that in a picture he had taken of himself there also appeared the image of his dead cousin. Photographic techniques were still at a rudimentary stage: the first working photographic process, the daguerreotype, had been developed only twenty-two years earlier by Louis-Jacque-Mandé Daguerre. Therefore photography was a relatively young art when Mumler announced that he had been able to capture a ghost on film. The public rushed enthusiastically to his studio to get pictures of dead relatives.

The fundamental technique used by every spirit photographer simply involved taking a picture of the client. It was only in the developing process that one or more extras in the form of ghostly faces were added to the photograph. Usually, the clients would recognize in these images a dead relative or friend.

When it was discovered that some of Mumler’s most famous pictures contained extras resembling people still quite alive, even believers became suspicious. One of Mumler’s most touching photos, displayed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle during his lectures, was later shown to be a fake. It showed a crowd of mourners at the London Cenotaph on Armistice Day; above the crowd was a fog of spirit faces—those of fallen heroes, it was supposed. However, it turned out that some of the spirits were faces of living football players, and one belonged to the living African boxer Battling Siki.

Mumler’s trick was to use double exposures, a technique almost unheard of in those days, by which he had been able to superimpose faces from other pictures onto the pictures belonging to his clients. He was accused of fraud and taken to court; at the trial, however, he was acquitted. Mumler later died in poverty in 1884.

The Case of the Crewe Circle

At the turn of the century, one of the most famous spirit photographers was William Hope (1863–1933), a member of the Crewe Circle—a group of spiritualists from Crewe, England, whose members appeared to be able to register the faces of spirits on photographic plates simply by holding the plates in their hands. It was further claimed that the plates could be furnished by Hope’s clients themselves. Even Conan Doyle obtained a picture made in this fashion resembling his dead sister.

However, in February 1922, psychic researcher Harry Price (1881–1948) of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), along with a magician named Seymour, conducted an investigation into the methods of the Crewe Circle. Along with fellow SPR researcher Eric J. Dingwall and magician William S. Marriott, they devised a plan that consisted of presenting Hope with a set of glass negatives that had been secretly marked with X-rays. The trap worked: when Hope returned the plates, the one containing the “extra” spirit image showed no sign of the markings; this meant that Hope had switched a prepared plate for the secretly marked one. “In the above case,” began the Price accusation that appeared in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, “it can, we think, hardly be denied that Mr William Hope has been found guilty of deliberately substituting his own plates for those of a sitter…. It implies that the medium brings to the sitting a duplicate slide and faked plates for fraudulent purposes.”

Spiritualists denounced the report as part of a conspiracy against Hope, and Conan Doyle, who was then vice president of the Society for the Study of Supernormal Pictures, took up the defenses of the Crewe Circle. He begged Price to reconsider his position, hoping to settle the controversy “in some honorable fashion.” Conan Doyle wrote, “It makes an open sore in the movement.” Price, however, refused to recant his report, so Conan Doyle started working on a pamphlet on spirit photography detailing his side of the affair. He talked about the case to Houdini in a letter he wrote on April 13, 1922:

I have written a book on Psychic Photography with special reference to the Crewe Circle. The evidence in their favor is overwhelming, tho’ what happened on a special occasion with 2 amateur conjurers, out for a stunt, and a third (Dingwall) behind them is more than I can say. We find that another test was independably [sic] carried out about the same time, when the Kodak Co. marked a plate. The mark was found by them all right afterwards, and also an extra. Our opponents talk of one failure and omit the great series of successes. However, truth wins and there’s lots of time.

Houdini was not impressed. He had tried to get an audience with Hope in December 1921 but was informed that the medium’s engagements would keep him busy for months. Houdini then asked fellow British magician DeVega (Alexander Stewart, 1891–1971) if he would sit for a photograph with Hope. During the sitting, DeVega was sure that the slide he had loaded had been changed for another one and told Houdini. His skepticism toward Hope, then, seemed to be justified. Conan Doyle, however, was still convinced that Hope’s spirit photos were genuine, as he reported to Houdini in his letter dated August 6:

We seem to have knocked the bottom out of the Hope “exposure.” The plates were marked by X-rays and we find by experiment that X-ray marks disappear on a 20-second exposure, which was the exact time given. Our time is continually wasted over nonsense of this sort, but I suppose it has to be done.

Belief Never Dies

Famous photo of Mary Todd Lincoln with the “spirit” of her husband, President Abraham Lincoln. (William H Mumler from Wikimedia Commons)

Conan Doyle’s letter worried Houdini because he had already started to talk publicly about the “unmasking” of the Crewe Circle. The magician then contacted Harry Price, who at the time was experimenting to see whether X-ray markings really disappear on exposure. At first the results seemed to confirm Conan Doyle’s theory; however, further experimentation proved that X-rays do not disappear with prolonged exposure, thus proving that the plates had been switched. Meanwhile, Conan Doyle continued working on his pamphlet The Case for Spirit Photography, which he eventually privately published in the early twenties.

However, having lost one possible explanation for the disappearing marking, the spiritualists had to account for it in another way. One possible solution was that the investigators did not actually give Hope the marked plate in an attempt to frame him, and this is what Conan Doyle suggests to Houdini in his letter of October 29:

The Hope case is more intricate than any Holmes case I ever invented. I am sure now that there was trickery on the part of the investigators and that the marked plates were not in the packet when taken to the dark room. One of them was returned by post anonymously undeveloped to the S.P.R. Now, since Hope and the College people knew nothing of the test, until four months later, how could they return an undeveloped plate, for how could they pick it out as a marked one, since the marking only shows on development? Clearly it was done by one of the Conspirators, and he could not have picked it out of all the other plates in the dark room, even if he had access to it. It is clear to me therefore that it never went to the dark room at all, but was taken out before. My pamphlet is ready but I hold it back in the hope of learning who the rascal was.

After receiving this letter, but without revealing his source, Houdini wrote to Harry Price on November 18 asking whether these allegations were true: “There is a rumor afloat here that the Crewe circle were ‘framed.’ There is talk about an undeveloped negative being sent back anonymously. Have they any reason at all to claim that they were ‘framed’?”

Actually, the return of the undeveloped plate could also be explained by Price’s hypothesis of fraud: if Hope had switched the marked plate for a previously exposed one, he would still possess the plate that Price had originally brought. The controversy between Conan Doyle and Price would resurface again during the following months, and Houdini would find himself right in the middle of the two opposing parties.

Price, for example, reprinted the results of his experiments with the Crewe Circle in the booklet Cold Light on Spiritualistic Phenomena because, he explained in the booklet’s preface, “the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research is printed only for circulation among its Members and Associates.” The booklet caused quite a stir among spiritualists, and Conan Doyle entreated Price for years to take it out of circulation: “I do feel strongly that the popular sixpenny pamphlet designed to ruin a man who had 17 years of fine psychic work behind him is wrong . . . my belief is that you yourself did not write it. However so long as your name is on [it] we can only go for you.” In his autobiography, Confessions of a Ghost Hunter, Price recalled, “Arthur Conan Doyle and his friends . . . abused me for years for exposing Hope.”

As for the magician Marriott (see also my column “William S. Marriott’s Gambols with the Ghosts,” SI, March/April 2003), he was able to score a point with Conan Doyle. In 1921 a journalist named James Douglas had a photo of himself taken by William Hope that, when developed, showed the presence of a spirit extra. Douglas was so impressed by the phenomenon that he issued a public challenge to anyone who could duplicate the feat without using psychic powers. Marriott accepted the challenge and performed not only in front of Douglas but Conan Doyle as well. He produced a picture of Douglas and Conan Doyle with a young woman and a picture of Conan Doyle with little fairies dancing in front of him. He then explained in detail how he had manipulated the photos, and Conan Doyle felt compelled to write a public statement: “Mr. Marriott has clearly proved one point, which is that a trained conjurer can, under the close inspection of three pairs of critical eyes, put a false image upon a plate. We must unreservedly admit it.”

This episode, however, did not convince the believers even though the saga came to an end in 1932 when Fred Barlow, a former friend and supporter of Hope’s work and former secretary of the Society for the Study of Supernormal Pictures, gave a joint lecture along with Major W. Rampling-Rose to the SPR to present findings gleaned from an extensive series of tests on the methods Hope used to produce his spirit photos. The two, who presented their case in depth in Volume 41 of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, concluded that the “spirit extras” that appeared in Hope’s photographs were produced fraudulently. It was only Hope’s death at Salford hospital during the publication of the report that ultimately ended the debate. The believers would soon start to find extras of his face in the spirit photographs of others.

The case of William Hope and his Crewe Circle deserves to be remembered today because it shows that it is practically impossible (and futile) to try to convince someone who wants to believe even in the face of quite convincing contrary evidence.

The psychic then attempts to cause the hands on the TV host’s watch to move backward by way of his “psychic powers.” While doing this, he invites the viewers to concentrate on their own watches, which the psychic is also trying to fix. Suddenly, on the host’s watch we see that the time has gone back two hours! Now is the time to check if something has happened in the homes of the viewers: they are invited to call the TV station and tell about their experiences. The phones in the studio’s offices start ringing with miracles being reported with each call: a watch, stopped for many years, now runs perfectly; another one has jumped ahead one hour; a Rolex watch, whose whole inside mechanism needed to be replaced at an estimated cost of nearly $1,000, now works perfectly. Over twenty-four more phone calls from people reporting to have seen their broken watches being fixed follow!

But that’s not all: dozens of other people call to say that their spoons, forks, and keys have bent; a glass of water has begun to boil; a TV set has gone off; and much, much more (see table 1 for a description of the phenomena reported by TV viewers during this hour of broadcasting).

The episode just described really took place in 1992 when, as a guest on a popular Italian TV show, L’Istruttoria (The Inquest), I had a chance to test a theory I was rather curious about. With the complicity of the show’s host, I intended to pose as a psychic and duplicate a demonstration that, during the 1970s, had made famous a man who claimed to possess real psychic powers: Israel’s Uri Geller.

For a few years, Geller had been able to convince people (including scientists) that he could bend keys and forks, guess drawings in sealed envelopes, and predict future events with the power of his mind. After various investigators showed that his claims had no scientific basis (Randi 1975; Marks and Kamman 1980; Gardner 1981), his career as a psychic superstar faded.

One of the most convincing performances of this charismatic character was, in fact, his apparent ability to cause strange phenomena to happen directly inside the houses of TV viewers. After this phenomenon regularly occurred (as dozens of phone callers could testify each time), the most obvious conclusion for most of the audience was that the phenomenon had to be real because Geller could not possibly have had so many stooges faking support for his claim.

The paranormal, however, most likely has nothing to do with this demonstration; the explanation in fact could lie more easily in an interesting effect of mass suggestion. It was not the first time I posed as a psychic to test this theory. In 1989, in fact, James “The Amazing” Randi asked me to claim psychic powers on a radio show in order to later demonstrate, during the Exploring Psychic Powers Live! TV show, how anyone could duplicate this phenomenon just by the clever use of suggestion. I did as Randi instructed and went on the radio show and claimed that as I was talking incredible things would start to happen in the houses of the listeners.

After only five minutes or so, about twenty people called reporting the strangest things: a television set had turned on all by itself; a cat was behaving strangely; a picture had fallen from the wall; a bulb in a lamp had exploded; a book on spiritualism had fallen from the table; the whole computer network of a lawyer’s office had gone down; and much more.

There was nothing extraordinary about those things. They happen often but nobody pays much attention them or thinks that they must be related to some psychic phenomenon; however, after the listeners had been alerted by me to watch for unusual phenomena, almost any event that occurred while I was talking could easily be interpreted as evidence for my claims by the most suggestible people.

Let’s try, then, to understand the psychological conditions that can generate and enhance a similar belief in some listeners.

Persuasion in Action

We are obviously dealing with some of the major principles of persuasion, including the reciprocity principle, the authority factor, the motivation and coherence principle, the shortage principle, the sympathy principle, and the social confirmation principle. Robert B. Cialdini has summarized these principles very clearly. According to Cialdini, these principles come into play almost automatically and therefore are easily exploited by those who know how they work. Let’s see how these principles apply to the situations described above.

First of all, the “psychic” sets the stage: he presents himself to the public as a believable person. In my case, at the beginning of the radio broadcast, the host told his listeners that some Italian universities were conducting experiments on my powers; on TV, I was able to demonstrate my claimed powers by bending and breaking a spoon, correctly guessing a drawing sealed in an envelope, and making some radish seeds germinate in my hand. In other words, I had offered something solid to the viewers: convincing demonstrations of extraordinary powers. The reciprocity principle, which states that we have to reciprocate when we’re given something, was then activated. In this case, in exchange for my demonstration the TV viewer might have felt more obligated to give what I had to say more attention.

Furthermore, in both cases my claims were not doubted by the hosts: both expressed their belief in their reality and pretended they were very puzzled. This way, I was benefitting from the authority factor, a principle whose strength has been clearly shown by Stanley Milgram. Owing to the sense of compliance toward authority, which is profoundly infused in human beings, some spectators may well have surrendered to the judgment of the hosts and undertaken the same attitude of wonder that the hosts exhibited toward my claims. At this point, the message we wanted to get through—namely, that I had real psychic powers—was already appearing as a consistent hypothesis by a considerable number of the viewers.

For the persuasion to be effective, however, the spectators had to feel motivated to participate in the experiment—and what better motivation than the possibility of personally living an extraordinary experience and coming face-to-face with the supernatural? This persuasion was especially effective because I was constantly repeating that these phenomena didn’t happen all the time and didn’t happen to just anyone: only the few “chosen” ones could live this wonderful experience. This is the shortage principle: an experience appears more attractive if its availability appears to be limited.

Also, the fact that I had an unassuming attitude (and that I apologized various times in case the demonstration failed) helped to make me more likeable: without acknowledging it, the spectators were wishing for everything to go well and were ready to act their part toward achieving this aim.

At this point, the spectators were ready to interpret anything happening in their houses (no matter how prosaic) as proof of the reality of my psychic powers. There was still one more very important persuasive factor that played a role as soon as the phone calls started arriving: the social confirmation principle. “If so many people call to say that their cat is behaving strangely or that their watches are working again,” some spectators may have wondered, “maybe I should call in to say that the light went off for a few seconds!”

The illusion created by the number of phone calls coming in was that all the spectators tuned into that same channel were personally experiencing some spectacular demonstration of psychic phenomena—a fact that inevitably nourished further phone calls and could have very well resulted in headlines on the following day’s newspapers had we not revealed the experiment. In reality, the small percentage of spectators calling was enough to quickly jam the switchboard of the TV station for a few hours.

Conclusion

Considering the complexity of the world in which we live, it is natural that people, in making their decisions, do not take advantage of all the available data but rely only on some isolated and representative item. This “economy” strategy to proceed by shortcuts inevitably leads us to make inferences on the basis of incomplete data; consequently, wrong decisions are often made. As Cialdini (1984) wrote: “We need simple, reliable, and effective rules of conduct. But if the tricks of the sharks undermine their functionality, we loose faith in these rules; we then use them less, and we find ourselves ill equipped in facing the burden of decisions that today’s life places upon us. We can’t surrender to this without fighting. The stakes are too high” (217).

References

Cialdini, Robert. B. 1984. Influence: How and Why People Agree to Things. New York: William Morrow and Company.

Gardner, Martin. 1981. Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Harris, Ben. 1985. Gellerism Revealed. Calgary: Hades International.

Harris, Richard Jackson. 2009. A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication, fifth edition. London: Routledge.

Marks, D., and R. Kamman. 1980. The Psychology of the Psychic. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Pratkanis, Anthony. Age of Propaganda. New York: A.H. Freeman and Company.

Randi, James. 1975. The Magic of Uri Geller. New York: Ballantine. Reprinted as The Truth About Uri Geller (1983). Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Project Alpha magicians Steve Shaw (with fork), Michael Edwards, and James Randi were featured on the cover of the Summer 1983 SI.

Fourteen years ago, I was astonished to read a brief article in the January 1997 (vol. 61, no. 846) Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (JSPR) written by parapsychologist Alexander Imich, a retired chemist and president of the Anomalous Phenomena Research Center in New York. His article, titled “Joe A. Nuzum, A Little-Known Psychic,” describes Nuzum as being “of the D.D. Home¹ class.” The article consisted of a long list of miracles that Nuzum appeared to have performed over the years. However, my astonishment was due not to the impressiveness of the list but rather to the following facts: 1) the conditions under which these presumed miracles took place were not described in the article; 2) all of the “phenomena” described belonged to the classic conjurers’ and fakirs’ repertoire; 3) it appeared that no magician was ever present at any of Nuzum’s demonstrations; and 4) there was no reference to the fact that Nuzum himself was a magician.

Banachek and Project Alpha

Banachek

Today Nuzum, though still claiming on his website to have “mastered many mind-over-matter studies,” runs a magic shop in Pennsylvania. I contacted mentalist and friend Banachek who, under his real name of Steve Shaw, was one of the celebrated alumni of Project Alpha (in which young magicians fooled scientists into thinking they had extrasensory perception [ESP]). Steve confirmed to me that he was a friend of Nuzum at the time of Project Alpha. They lived in the same town, had been friends for at least five years, and used to exchange tricks and ideas on magic. However, it appears that Nuzum—who had specialized in escapology at the time—was impressed by the press coverage that Steve had been able to gather while pretending to be a psychic, and he wanted to achieve the same result.

Nuzum started to perform mentalism tricks, most of which were pretty standard purchased items, and with these he convinced psychiatrist Berthold Schwartz that he was the real thing.

Schwartz had already been “amazed” by Steve during Project Alpha, and he continued to believe that Steve really had psychic powers even after the hoax was revealed. When Steve tried to explain to him via letters that Nuzum was a colleague and was just performing conjuring tricks, Schwartz refused to listen.

Steve told me:

There is a big difference between what Joe Nuzum is doing and what I did. My fiasco was an experiment. For years parapsychologists had lamented that the only reason there was no scientifically documented evidence under proper scientific controls was because of the lack of proper funding to perform such controls. We had countered and believed that this was not the case and the lack of such documentation lay in the parapsychologists’ pro-biased beliefs when they entered such experiments. MacDonald Douglass gave a half a million dollars to study . . . Psychokinetic Metal Bending, PKMB, to Washington University. Here was our chance to prove our point.

I went in not to take advantage, not to gain anything, not to take money, trips and vacations (unlike Joe), but simply to prove a valid point. I went in knowing full well that I was going to expose the fraud I was perpetrating. It became very hard at times. These were good people, with good hearts, who became my friends. It was very hard knowing I was going to have to hurt these people who had become a personal part of my life. Had I known they would mean so much to me, maybe I would have done things a little different, I certainly would have kept my distance emotionally.

On the other hand, I should have read the signs in Joe Nuzum. I should have known that he certainly would not have cared about hurting other people or lying to them; in retrospect I should have known that Joe would have had no problem using people for his own benefit.

Project Alpha was designed to show how competent magicians can complete the same tasks as self-proclaimed psychics. It appears, however, that some experts still don’t believe the phenomena aren’t genuine.

A “Challenge” Met

Because my comments (along with those of James Randi) were published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Imich decided to give us a reply (JSPR 61[848], July 1997). However, his words regarding our doubts, I regret to say, were quite disappointing. As usually happens in such cases, our real question was avoided.

As Randi and I had pointed out in our letters, the fact that the effects presented by Nuzum looked as if they were taken directly from a magic catalog should have raised flags. We did not insist, as Imich implied, that Nuzum’s effects were necessarily done by trickery. But they at least may have been done in such a way. What is the real question, then? Given the highly suspect nature of Nuzum’s demonstrations, it was for Imich of the utmost importance to ascertain that they were not the result of trickery. The only way to do this was to ask a competent magician to participate in the tests. Randi, Steve, or I would have loved to attend such demonstrations, but the suggestion was ignored.

Surprisingly, however, Imich wrote:

The crusaders against the paranormal usually do not tackle difficult cases. They prefer to deal with events easier to criticize. Mr. Randi, too, does not mention the “Gray’s Anatomy case,” an event out of the range of magical technique and much more difficult to discredit. I have challenged Mr. Polidoro to repeat this event, but I am not sure if he himself is a magician.

Aside from the fact that this was the first time I had heard of such a “challenge” (and the fact that Imich did not appear to have any qualification to judge whether an event is “out of the range of magical technique” or not), what most surprised me about this accusation was that in my letter I suggested a possible explanation for just one of the effects described by Imich, the “Gray’s Anatomy case”!

I wrote, in fact:

Mr Imich, for example, describes an effect by Nuzum he witnessed, in which the corner of a selected page of a book appeared inside an envelope. A simple suggestion: Mr Imich could invite Nuzum to perform the same phenomenon again, but asking him, this time, never to touch the book (not even to take it [off] of the shelf). It would be interesting to see if the same phenomenon will manifest again (provided, of course, that both book and page are chosen at random by the experimenter, and not “suggested” by Nuzum . . .).

Apparently Imich overlooked these lines in my letter.

Remembering this episode today, however, gives me the chance to also stress once more that it is not the duty of the critic to reproduce a claimed miracle. As should be widely known by now (but is apparently not to many researchers), the burden of proof always rests on the claimant. In this particular case, I would have considered it quite impressive if Nuzum could perform his miracle with a book provided by me. I would have made sure not to let him get anywhere near the book before the test, a precaution that Imich did not take. Quoting from his notes (JSPR, 61[846]: 336): “He took from my book-shelf a volume of Gray’s Anatomy and [he] opened it at page 354” (emphasis added).

In a postscript to his article, Imich added that a report about “the latest, never-previously-described paranormal events produced by Joe Nuzum” was in preparation. Fourteen years later, some are still waiting for some reliable proof of at least one real phenomenon produced by this self-proclaimed psychic. However, we stopped holding our breaths a long time ago.

Note

1. Victorian British medium Daniel D. Home, sometimes referred to as a super-psychic, was supposedly capable of moving objects, levitating, and producing all manner of supernatural phenomena at will.↑

Everyone knows the tragic tale of Victor Frankenstein, the man who, in the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, succeeded in bringing back to life a corpse, only to immediately lose control over it. But the human dream of creating artificial life goes far beyond the creature that terrified Victorians.

This dream belongs to the Roman poet Ovid, whose short story "Metamorphosis," dating back to 8 ce, tells the story of Pygmalion, King of Cyprus, who modeled a female statue in ivory. He called her Galatea and fell in love with her, considering the statue to be well above any flesh and blood woman. Pygmalion ended up praying to Aphrodite to let him marry the being he had created, and the Goddess relented. Ovid tells how Pygmalion saw his statue slowly coming to life, breathing, and opening her eyes.

With his story, Ovid meant to underscore the devotion of the artist to the product of his work, which can go as far as identifying oneself in it. Ovid did not imagine that he was writing the prototype of many modern science-fiction tales!

Creatures without Control

Much older than Ovid's Galatea, however, is the figure of the golem, a sort of giant created by magic in Jewish mythology who first appears in the Bible. Jews link the word gelem ("raw material"), which appears in the Old Testament (Psalm 139:16), to the figure of Adam before life was infused into him.

In classic tradition, the golem is a strong and obedient creature made of clay that a rabbi can activate for servitude just by writing on his forehead a word meaning "God is truth." By erasing one of the letters of this word, the word that remains means "God is dead," and the golem stops.

In a version of this tale set in seventeenth-century Poland, of which traces can be found in a letter dated 1674, a golem became an unstoppable menace for his master. The master, Rabbi Elija Ba'al Schem from Chelm, asked the golem to take off his shoes; when it kneeled down, the clever Rabbi wiped the word life from the creature's forehead. The golem then died, but he fell upon the rabbi and killed him.

The most famous version of the story, however, dates from the eighteenth century and is set in Prague's ghetto. Here, the golem--created by beloved Rabbi Jehuda Löw Ben Bezalel at the beginning of the seventeenth century--was a defender of the Jewish people from persecutions and anti-
Semitic pogroms. The rabbi, however, lost control over the golem, and it began to destroy everything it met. Once the rabbi regained control over the situation, he decided to deactivate the golem and hide it in the attic of Prague's Old-New Synagogue, in the heart of the old Jewish quarter, where--according to the legend--his body still rests today. (Czech investigator Ivan Mackerle went searching for the golem's body in the roof space of the synagogue but couldn't find anything useful; his interesting report can be found in Fortean Times 238, July 2008).

Androids and Humunculus

Other examples of artificial creatures with human-like features can be found in Greek mythology as well. Cadmus, founder of Thebes, buried dragon's teeth, which transformed into soldiers. Hephaestus, god of metalwork, created mechanical slaves, ranging from girls made of gold and with a sentient mind to three-legged tables that could move by themselves.

Inuit legends tell of the Tupilaq, an avenging monster created by a wizard to hunt and kill an enemy. But the Tupilaq can be a double-edged sword, for a victim who knows magic can stop the creature and turn it back on its creator.

In the fourteenth century, philosopher, theologian, and scholar Saint Albertus Magnus was the first to use the word android to define living beings created by man through alchemy. According to legend, Albertus was able to build a real android made of metal, wood, wax, and glass. He gave it the power of speech and used it as a servant at the Dominican monastery of Cologne.

It was in the Middle Ages that technology allowed people to not only imagine but to build the first mechanical automatons, which were mainly moving dolls used to embellish bell towers and churches. Even Leonardo da Vinci showed interest in the subject; project plans dating to about 1495 show a mechanical knight in armor. In da Vinci's plans, the figure should have been able to stand up; move his arms, head, and jaw; and emit sounds from his mouth due to a complex percussion mechanism hidden in his chest. It is possible that the mechanical knight was just an idea da Vinci drew up for Duke Ludovico Sforza, for whom he worked at the time, to liven up parties at the Sforzesco Castle in Milan. Nobody knows if it was ever built.

It was only in the eighteenth century that automatons became sophisticated figurines able to write, dance, do magic tricks, perform acrobatics, and play chess and musical instruments. However, even then they were just mechanical creatures controlled by man without a will of their own--unlike the homunculus, which according to alchemical tradition was a real human being created in vitro. Paracelsus, the Renaissance alchemist, went so far as to write a recipe for creating a homunculus. The recipe began with a man's semen, which was left resting for forty days in a vial kept warm by a horse stomach and fed with human blood. After forty weeks the contents of the vial would supposedly transform into a real boy--complete and perfect but smaller than a human baby and, like the golem, lacking a soul.

Frankenstein and Pinocchio

At the start of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing. Taking inspiration both from the experiments of Luigi Galvani (who used electrical arcs to induce movement in a corpse) and from the golem story, in 1818 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley anonymously published her celebrated gothic novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. It's the story of a Swiss scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who, shocked by the death of his mother, cultivates an impossible dream: creating an intelligent human being with perfect health and a long life. Frankenstein's illicit studies, which include dissecting corpses stolen from cemeteries, allow him to obtain the knowledge necessary to turn his dream into reality. But the creature, deformed and with superhuman strength, escapes his creator.

Even more so than the golem, then, the figure of Frankenstein (a name often misapplied to the monster itself) became a real modern myth, drawing his mythical power from the fear that technological progress can escape man's control. It is no surprise, then, that many consider Frankenstein the first true science-fiction novel.

Throughout the 1800s, there were stories and novels telling of unusual mechanical or artificial creatures. In "Sandman" (1815), writer E.T.A. Hoffmann told the story of a love between a man and a mechanical doll. The Steam Man of the Prairies (1815), a dime novel by Edward S. Ellis, is about a big mechanical steam man used to carry coaches across prairies.

Luis Senarens, known as the "American Jules Verne," in 1885 imagined the first mechanical man activated by electricity in his book Frank Reade and His Electric Man. The following year, Frenchman Mathias Villiers de l'Isle-Adam first used the word android in a novel, L'Eve Future, in which he imagined inventor Thomas Edison creating an almost perfect artificial woman.

Even in my country of Italy, the subject has fascinated our literati. Ippolito Nievo, in his 1860 novel Storia Filosofica dei Secoli Futuri (Philosophical History of Future Centuries), imagined that in the future there would be "man-machines," which he labeled an invention "that surpasses anything man has ever imagined." Much more modestly, but with a genial stroke of fantasy that still warms the hearts of children today, Carlo Collodi imagined in 1883 that a block of wood could take on life and transform into a boy, Pinocchio. It's true that Pinocchio is a fairy tale, but the story contains all of the fundamental elements of future tales about androids (including Steven Spielberg's sci-fi movie A.I.: Artificial Intelligence).

Robots and Androids

It wasn't until 1921 that the very first true robots made their appearance in the three-part drama by Czech author Karel Čapek titled R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). These robots (more properly androids because they have human features) are the product of Rossum's factory and are used as low-cost laborers. The dream of the owner of the factory is to free the human race from slavery and physical work, but the effects are catastrophic. Humanity reacts by embracing all sorts of vices and idleness, allowing robots to take control and aim for inevitable human extinction.

But if R.U.R. was the first to introduce the word robot, the most famous android of the 1920s certainly is femme-bot Maria from Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1927). The complex plot devised by Lang, set in a disquieting future world with strong class separation, sees Maria as an evil creature who creates dissent among the masses in revolt.

Although certainly the most famous, Lang's robot was not the first mechanical android in cinema. That medal goes to magician Harry Houdini, who in 1919 introduced one such creature in his cliffhanger serial for the cinema titled The Master Mystery. Here, the robot, called Automaton, is at the service of a criminal gang against whom Houdini, star of the series, has to fight. By the end of his adventures, Houdini is able to destroy the armor of the robot and discover--hidden inside the robot--the boss of the gang. It was, then, a half robot. Or perhaps it could have been called a cyborg: a cybernetic organism made of both artificial and biological parts.

From the 1930s on, the idea of the automaton, the robot, or the replicant artificially created by man has become very popular and is constantly seen in sci-fi novels and films. From the many books about robots by Isaac Asimov to movies like Westworld, Star Wars, Terminator, Blade Runner, Alien, RoboCop, Star Trek, and so on, the subject has never lost its appeal. It will certainly continue to fascinate people, at least until the day when robots become so common that nobody takes notice of them anymore. If such a day ever comes, that is.

At CICAP, the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, every year we receive a few dozen requests from people claiming to possess some kind of psychic power. Many disappear after we ask for more details. Of those who remain, we almost always find that they are sincere and honest people who really believe they possess the powers they claim. Very rarely does someone try to deceive or cheat us.

Some time ago, we received a letter from a woman, R.G., who claimed she can peer inside sealed boxes with some sort of X-ray vision and describe what is inside with a 60 to 70 percent rate of success. She wanted us to test and verify her powers. In letters and phone calls she explained that we could use any kind of box and any object we liked.

We gladly accepted her proposal and invited her to the University of Pavia, where, with the help of colleagues such as chemist Luigi Garlaschelli and physicist Adalberto Piazzoli, we have often tested psychics.

Once in Pavia, she agreed that the testing situation was ideal, that the people there were not hostile, and that she was confident she would succeed. It is very important to establish this beforehand to prevent excuses if the test fails. She read the protocol for the experiment that we had prepared in advance according to her claims, and she signed it.

No ‘Fitting’ Allowed

We had previously selected twelve objects, each one different from the others in shape, color, and material. These objects were taken to a different room from the one where the test was taking place and randomly numbered from 1 to 12. An experimenter then chose a random number, picked up the corresponding object, wrapped it in paper in order to avoid any clues from sound (the psychic confirmed beforehand that paper didn’t block her visions), put it in a wooden box kept firm by two rubber bands, and finally brought the box within view of R.G. (The experimenter who placed the objects inside the box had to stay away from R.G. in order to avoid any involuntary nonverbal communication.) This procedure took place for each object, and each object was chosen only once.

When R.G. saw the box for the first time, she asked us to remove the rubber bands around it because they could confuse her images. We agreed on the condition that nobody could touch or get close to the box after it was placed on a table.

We then gave R.G. a list of the twelve objects in order to help her decide. She had to concentrate on the box and then indicate on the list the object that best matched her visions. This was done to av­oid “fitting” a general description to more than one object; her vision could match one, and only one, object on the list. If she wished, she could switch one guess for another before the end of the test.

The correct answers would be given only at the end of the session. As usual, we videotaped the whole test.

‘I See Something Square....’

Sitting six feet away from the box with her husband beside her, R.G. concentrated for a few seconds and then described her perceptions: “I see something square... a bit thick... something dark... straight...” She then pointed to the rubber stamp on the list.

The test went on until she reached the last object: “It’s something rigid,” she said. “Straight but... not a cube. It has only one color... looks like a pen, a tube... could be the key.”

At the end of the test, we compared R.G.’s guesses to a list of the objects in the order in which they were presented. Out of twelve objects, she got only one match—exactly what one would expect by chance.

R.G. tried to justify her unsuccessful performance by saying that the conditions (to which she had previously agreed) were not the ones she was accustomed to. She then tried to accommodate her descriptions to the objects actually presented. For example, the object that she had indicated was a key turned out to be a mirror. “Well, I was right after all,” she said. “It was something straight, not a cube and only had one color.” The lady seemed to have forgotten that she also had said the object looked “like a pen, a tube.”

There’s No Place Like Home

We had designed our protocol on the basis of what R.G. said she could do (and in conditions under which she said she could succeed). We had tried to accommodate her needs. However, the failure bothered her, and she insisted that this was not the procedure she used at home. Usually, she said, she needed two series of objects: one for the test, the other to be kept in front of her so that she could compare her visions with a replica of the actual object and not with a word on a list. This was the first time she said something of the kind to us.

So, even though the official test was over, we agreed to perform an informal trial. We looked for twelve double objects in the laboratory and proceeded as before. Again, the result was quite clear: one hit in twelve trials.

Still, R.G. was unconvinced and repeated that, at home, she would usually get six or seven objects out of ten and proceeded to indicate two more differences with our test. At home, her husband could use the same object more than once, and this gave her more freedom of choice. Furthermore, she needed some encouragement; she needed to know if she was right or wrong immediately after her guess.

Some of us were against the idea of performing a new test and changing the protocol again. However, after clearly stating on camera that the test was not to be considered a proper, scientific test and that it was done only as another informal trial, in view of future tests, we decided to try.

Since this demonstration proved to be very quick to prepare, we did twenty-eight trials with a choice of the same seven objects for each trial. R.G. was right on six cases. Even this demonstration was not considered significant (in order to have a minimum of significance, p=0.02, with seven objects and twenty-eight trials, nine to ten hits are re­quired).

At the end of our meeting, we suggested that R.G. repeat the test as we had performed it that day at home. This way, we thought, maybe she would realize that once the possibility of adapting one’s “visions” to the correct object in the box is ruled out, the results can be only random (unless she really possessed psychic powers, obviously). We said that we would invite her back if, following this procedure, she could still obtain a 60 to 70 percent success rate.

A few years have passed now, but we have never heard from her again.