1 Events at Millesimo Castle
Modern
Psychic Mysteries,
by Gwendolyn Kelley Hack, is a lengthy record of a series of séances which took
place in Italy in 1927-8. These were
arranged by Marquis Carlo Centurione Scotto, resident at the mediaeval
Millesimo Castle near Savona in northern Italy.
A medium himself, he participated in the séances in the hope of
contacting his son, the Marquis Vittorio dei Principi Centurione, who had died
in September 1926 while testing an aeroplane for a Schneider Cup race. Having read an Italian translation of H
Dennis Bradley’s 1924 book Towards the
Stars (Verso la Stelle), he had
attended séances with American medium George Valiantine at Bradley’s home in
Surrey, where he received what he considered strong evidence of Vittorio’s
survival.
Valiantine gave the Marquis an aluminium
trumpet, suggesting he attempt direct voice mediumship at home. This he did, and the resulting séances, with
himself and Signora Fabienne Rossi acting as mediums, were extremely
successful. Modern Psychic Mysteries (1929) is a compilation of séance reports
and commentary assembled by Mrs Hack, one of the sitters and herself a mental
medium as well as an artist.
Hack relied heavily on others’ accounts,
notably those of Professor Ernesto Bozzano, who also contributed a lengthy
preface. His favourable reports on the
sittings had already appeared in the Italian periodical Luce e Ombra. The structure
of the book is chaotic and often prolix and repetitive, but cumulatively it
provides a fascinating account, one that was to have far-reaching ramifications
beyond the Italian borders.
An extensive range of phenomena was said
to have occurred in the dark: the materialisation of hands and feet; the
levitation of the Marquis to a height of six feet while sitting in a heavy
chair; apports (bulky items that could not easily be concealed within the room)
and asports; antique weapons engaging in a noisy battle; the movement of
sometimes weighty and bulky objects; direct writing; the movement of a heavy
table; thuds and bangs; the playing of musical instruments as they
floated. On one occasion the sitters
were creating a favourable atmosphere by singing a fascist song when an
illuminated picture of Mussolini was transported from an adjoining room through
closed doors. Curiously, although it arrived
intact, a direct-voice trumpet fell on it, breaking the glass. Perhaps someone present was not a fan of Il Duce.
A flexatone (a ‘musical’ instrument only
recently patented) moved through the air while accompanying music playing on
the gramophone. The trumpet flew around,
the voices emanating from it speaking a range of languages: Latin, Spanish,
German plus five Italian dialects, in one of which a discarnate Eusapia
Palladino (died 1918) communicated.
During a session in July, the Marquis suffered terribly from the heat,
and when this problem was raised by the sitters a refreshing blast of icy air
swept through the room.
An entity identifying itself as Cristo
d'Angelo, claiming to have been a Sicilian shepherd, acted as control. He possessed a range of abilities, such as
reading the thoughts of people both during séances and on other occasions,
answering questions put mentally, reading messages in sealed envelopes,
providing a remote medical diagnosis of leukaemia, plus indicating a cure,
making a prediction of death (somewhat dubious ethically), and saying what was
happening to circle members when they were elsewhere.
Most famously, on 29 July 1928 the Marquis
was transported, or asported, from the locked séance room, necessitating a
two-and-a-half-hour search of the castle and grounds. He was eventually found after Mrs Hack
received an automatic message through her spirit guide Imperator supplying his
location: he was fast asleep on a pile of hay and oats in a granary within the
stables, the door locked from the outside.
Unfortunately, quite often information was
withheld by Hack on account of its private nature. This secrecy was of importance to those
concerned but unhelpful to the independent observer, who was prevented from
assessing it. However, enough is
presented to establish the phenomena as wide-ranging and dramatic. Hack was clearly convinced by them, yet it is
noticeable from the transcripts that despite the phenomena supporting a
paranormal explanation, there were many instances where direct questions were
deflected, or evasive answers provided, when there was no reason not to provide
the information requested.
Hack conceded that controls had been poor
but, working on the assumption she would have been able to detect fraud if it
occurred, defended the results on the grounds of the Marquis’s class and
amateur private status as a medium, and the impossibility of carrying out the
phenomena by fraudulent means in the dark.
She argued that ‘it is possible to conduct a whole series of metapsychic
experiments which give solid, scientific proof, without adopting any kind of
personal control of the mediums whatsoever.’
It is hardly surprising her critics disagreed.
However, while some may have thought the
Marquis had nothing to gain by cheating, not everybody was convinced the séances
provided reliable evidence. Critics
included Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Rudolf Lambert – and Theodore
Besterman, whose blistering review of Hack’s book in the SPR’s Journal (of which he was the editor)
caused veteran member Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to leave the SPR in high dudgeon.
2 Theodore Besterman reviews the book
Besterman dismisses Modern Psychic Mysteries as displaying ‘an almost complete lack of
understanding of what constitutes good evidence and adequate recording of
mediumistic sittings.’ For those readers
who find the 360 pages of Hack’s volume a slog, it is heartening to find
Besterman in agreement. He states that
‘In the present review I take into account only Signor Bozzano's reports. The
remainder of the book (with the exception of a few pages by Professor
Castellani) is too confused and ill-arranged to be seriously considered, apart
from being disfigured by scores of misprints and literal mistakes.’
He notes the lack of controls, with
sitters drawn from family and friends in the Marquis’s own home, poor
documentation of the séance room and progress of the sessions, doors and
windows that would make it hard to secure the environment, and the frequent playing
of the gramophone which could cover fraudulent activity. Bozzano’s claim that the trumpet whirled
about with precision is undermined by references to sitters being knocked on
the head, and air currents can be generated by the use of balloons. Besterman wonders how the flexatone was
introduced to the circle as Bozzano says no one had heard of it before (it would
perhaps be more accurate to say they claimed they had not) and it was difficult
to play.
Besterman grumpily thinks that as no
information is available on the instrument, and Bozzano fails to describe it
adequately, what he has to say about it is hard to evaluate. If Besterman had had access to YouTube in
1930, he would have found numerous videos describing its operation, allowing
him to conclude it is not a particularly difficult instrument from which to
coax sounds, though something tuneful might be more challenging. After exhibiting irritation at the lack of
measurements of apports, and pointing out that apports never occurred in the
absence of one of the sitters, Signora Rossi, he adds that despite claims of
size and weight, they were of sufficient dimensions to allow them to be
smuggled in under a woman’s dress.
His
conclusion is devastating:
‘All groups of people have of course the
unquestionable right to sit in circles for their own edification; but to put
forward such a book as this as a serious contribution to psychical research,
and to put it forward with such dogmatic claims of infallibility as Signor
Bozzano's, is to bring our subject into contempt and disrepute.’
3 The fallout of Besterman’s review
The result of the Besterman review was
Conan Doyle’s resignation from the SPR.
The October 2009 issue of Psypioneer
reprints Besterman’s review, remarking that while resignations from psychic
societies are not uncommon, this is the only known case of one resulting from a
book review, though it should be added that the review was not the sole
cause. Charles Higham in his biography
of Conan Doyle calls the controversy ‘one of the most tragic events’ in Conan
Doyle’s life.
Conan Doyle, who knew the Marquis through
his friendship with Bradley, circulated a statement to members, dated January
1930, which was printed in the March 1930 issue of the SPR’s Journal.
A reply by the SPR’s president and hon. secretaries, and another by
Besterman, followed. Conan Doyle’s
circular begins by reprinting a letter he had sent to the ‘Chairman of the
Council’ (i.e., the president) on 22 January 1930.
In it he attacks Besterman’s review, condemning
it for flinging around ‘misrepresentations’, ‘insulting innuendoes’, ‘insolence’
and ‘gratuitous offensiveness’, contrasting Bozzano’s ‘considered opinion’ with
Besterman’s general inexperience in psychical research, not to mention
non-participation in the séances (though of course the same applied to Conan Doyle). He stresses the unlikelihood of a man of the
Marquis's status, socially and politically, gathering together a group merely
to conduct fraud, completely fooling the company, including Bozzano. To paint such a scenario, he concludes, is
‘the limit of puerile perversity.’
This is merely the opening salvo of a more
generalised attack on the SPR’s perceived bias against Spiritualism, or as
Conan Doyle puts it, ‘the Podmore, Dingwall, Besterman tradition of obtuse
negation,’ which he considers to be getting worse. He contrasts the SPR’s ‘unscientific’ and
‘anti-spiritualist’ approach with that of a ‘real psychical researcher’, Dennis
Bradley.
The SPR in his view had done no positive
work for a generation while hindering those who were carrying out research. He praises the ‘accurate reporting’ of the
Millesimo sittings, though as someone himself reliant on second-hand reports he
was not in a position to independently gauge how accurate they were. Having been dissatisfied with the SPR’s
direction for some time, Besterman’s review was the final straw, hence his
resignation and public protest.
The circular continues in an even more
intemperate vein, accusing the SPR, in the hands of a ‘small central body of
reactionaries,’ of being actively anti-spiritualist and having done no useful
work for many years while ‘hindering and belittling’ those who are conducting
‘real active psychical research.’
Besterman’s review is not an isolated incident: ‘This latest article of
Mr Besterman may be insignificant in itself, but it is a link in that long
chain of prejudice which comes down from Mr Podmore, Mrs Sedgwick [sic], and Mr
Dingwall, to the present day.’ To
understand why he considers this episode to be critical, he continues:
‘...these Millesimo sittings are on the
very highest possible level of psychical research, both from the point of view
of accurate reporting, variety of phenomena, and purity of mediumship.
Therefore, if they can be laughed out of court anything we can produce will be
treated with similar contempt.’
He wonders whether Besterman had even read
the book, enumerating what he judged a number of lapses in the review, having
missed Besterman’s statement that he had not bothered, but instead had relied
on Bozzano’s articles: not the best way to approach the production of a book
review it must be said. Besterman had
suggested that apports could be smuggled in under clothing, but Conan Doyle
points out that photographs are included, one of a lance six feet long, and
another a plant four and a half feet high.
He says that while Besterman was bemoaning
the lack of information on the flexatone, there is a description of it in the
book. Besterman, Conan Doyle concludes,
is a ‘slovenly critic.’ Finally, having
had enough and despairing of reform, he announces his departure and calls on
like-minded individuals to follow his example, recommending the British College
of Psychic Science (the organisation run by James Hewat McKenzie and Barbara
McKenzie) as a more congenial alternative.
The reply by the president, Sir Lawrence J
Jones, and the hon. secretaries, Eleanor Sidgwick and W H Salter, begins by
stating a wish to avoid entering the controversy on the grounds of Conan
Doyle’s lengthy membership, his eminence, and his ill health, but his circular,
with its call for mass resignation, required a response. This naturally consisted of a stout defence
of the Society, reminding readers of the work done in recent years, thereby contradicting
Conan Doyle’s claim that the SPR had carried out no constructive activities. The authors also pointed out that members
encompassed a broad range of views ‘from complete acceptance to total denial,’
and all contributions to its publications were the responsibility of their
authors; hence Besterman’s views were his own, though they were not impressed
by the claims made in the book either.
Besterman then makes his own reply, taking
issue with Conan Doyle’s defence of Bozzano’s ‘considered opinion’ and
stressing that what was at issue was not opinion but facts. He picks apart Conan Doyle’s allegations,
showing his review to have been misrepresented in its details, such as the size
of the apports and how the air current was produced, but still focusing on
Bozzano’s articles rather than Hack’s book more generally. Whereas Conan Doyle feels the sitters were
critical in their approach, Besterman believes them to have been the opposite.
The ‘Podmore, Dingwall, Besterman
tradition of obtuse negation’ he considers to be Conan Doyle’s invention,
though to rub salt in the wound, he adds how much he admires Frank Podmore’s
methods. Of the flexatone, he says his
review stated not that it had not been described but that it had not been
illustrated or adequately described.
(While an illustration of this novel instrument would have been useful,
there is in fact enough description for the reader to obtain a fairly clear
idea of how it worked, but probably not enough to appreciate that it was
simpler to play than claimed.) Besterman’s
firm defence of his review, contradicting Sir Arthur’s condemnation point by
point, was not designed to mollify his stern critic.
The Daily
Express picked up on the controversy and published an article on 19 March
1930. The journalist sought a comment
from Besterman who said that just six members had followed Sir Arthur’s exit,
and only two of them had specifically referred to the dispute. After reprinting extracts from Conan Doyle’s
letter and the SPR response, Conan Doyle tells the journalist that he is ‘not
at all bitter about the matter,’ though he clearly was, concluding ‘We want
more experiments and knowledge, and to secure that I think it is necessary for
the society to have more sympathetic people in the seats of the
governors.’ In other words, people with
views similar to his own.
Elizabeth Savage, in a blog post on the
Cambridge University Library Special Collections website concerning Conan
Doyle’s resignation, alludes to the private debate the letter generated between
the SPR’s officers. In public they tried
to make light of the affair by calling it ‘a very trivial matter,’ expressing
confidence in the management of the SPR and noting the differing views on
Spiritualism within the Society but an atmosphere of tolerance. While trying to minimise the impact, they
were right to be wary of the negative publicity the controversy would generate.
The May 1930 number of the Spiritualist International Psychic Gazette blared:
‘’The Crisis in the Society for Psychical Research. Hearty Support for Sir A.
Conan Doyle.’ Salter had the task of
defending the Society, and he claimed the SPR had in fact received a number of
letters from ‘prominent Spiritualists’ disapproving of Sir Arthur’s action and
defending the SPR’s methods. If the
claim was true, they were doubtless outweighed by the volume of criticism,
which the International Psychic Gazette was
happy to share. It was clear the
dissatisfaction ran deeper than anger at Besterman, as a number of other
comments critical of the SPR were made by correspondents. Added to the members who resigned in support
of Conan Doyle, a number said they had either resigned some time earlier, or
did not intend to renew their membership, thus leaving without submitting a
resignation.
Conan Doyle includes the teleportation in The Edge of the Unknown (1930), in which
he compares the Marquis’s passage through solid objects and reassembly on the
other side to Houdini’s abilities as an escapologist, not though because he saw
the Marquis as fraudulent but because he considered Houdini to possess psychic
abilities. He calls the witnesses to the
teleportation ‘first-class’, and continues to take Hack’s description at face
value; he does not consider that ‘several locked doors’ might present little
difficulty to the building’s owner.
Nandor Fodor in the Encyclopaedia
of Psychic Science (1933) dedicates a column to the Marquis, beginning by
calling him ‘a medium of the Italian nobility’ and referring to his ancient
lineage, thereby hinting he is above reproach.
In the lengthy section devoted to transportation, Fodor describes the
Marquis’s as ‘the best authenticated recent case.’
4 Later discussion
The SPR found an ally in Harry Price, who
covers what he calls ‘The Conan Doyle uproar’ in his Fifty Years of Psychical Research (1939). Though he does not name Besterman, his
sympathies, he says, are entirely with the SPR, and the book ‘deserved all that
was said about it.' He adds he had taken
a similar stance in a review he had written for an American monthly, ‘but in
more polite language.’ By ‘American
monthly’ Price presumably meant the ‘International Notes’ he contributed to the
American Society for Psychical
Research’s Journal, of which he was the Foreign Research
Officer. In the January 1930 issue he
spends a couple of paragraphs on the book, criticising it for lacking an index
(a significant issue given the unhelpful manner of the book’s organisation),
adding ‘the book is full of errors of description and of fact,’ though he does
not delve into details. He concludes
that ‘the method of presenting that information to the reader leaves much to be
desired.’
Fodor’s Encyclopedia of Psychic Science puts the number of resignations
following Conan Doyle’s at 84. The figure is repeated in a potted biography
taken from the encyclopaedia included in a 1948 Lily Dale reprint of Conan
Doyle’s What Does Spiritualism Actually Teach and Stand For? Mauskopf & McVaugh (1980) put the figure
at 77. That both might actually be an
underestimate (and Besterman’s six simply a number he plucked out of the air to
demonstrate the futility of Conan Doyle’s act) can be gauged by figures
provided by Price in Fifty Years showing,
whether or not directly attributable to Conan Doyle’s actions, the period saw a
dramatic decline in SPR membership, though this had begun prior to his
resignation. As Price put it in 1939:
‘The Doyle resignation was rather in the
nature of a test as to whether members approved of the way in which the Society
was managed. There were resignations. In 1920, there were 1,305 members and
associates; in 1931, the number had fallen to 954. In 1932, the number was 809.
The latest figures, just published, show a grand total of 699 members and
associates. Excluding subscribing libraries, the number is 636.’
The comments in the International Psychic Gazette expressed by members supporting Conan
Doyle alluded to a dissatisfaction with the direction the SPR had taken, and it
appears this unhappiness was shared, for whatever reason, by other members; such
certainly is the implication of Price’s figures. It should be borne in mind, however. that the
economic situation in the 1930s was not favourable, and many may have left for
financial reasons rather than because they disliked what they read in the Journal and Proceedings. While it is
clear Conan Doyle’s resignation acted as a catalyst, it is not possible to put
a figure on the number who followed his example as a direct result of his act.
Following the Psypioneer reprint of Besterman’s review is an article on the
Marquis’s transportation by Masimo Biondi (2009). An editorial note prefacing Biondi’s article states
there had been no further discussion of the matter in the SPR publications
since 1930. For some reason, Biondi gets
the date of the Marquis’s famous transportation wrong, giving it as 18 July
1929 instead of 29 July 1928.
After noting Bozzano’s exaggerated claim
for the flexatone’s difficulty, Biondi draws attention to a letter written in
1945 by Count Piero Bon – who was present at a number of the séances, including
the one in which the Marquis asported – to leading Spiritualist Gastone De
Boni. De Boni (whom Luca Gasperini
(2011) calls Bozzano’s ‘disciple’) had inherited Bozzano’s library and papers
on the latter’s death in 1943.
According to this letter, Bon and Mrs Hack
visited the castle the day after the Marquis’s disappearance and were shown
into the séance room to wait for him.
Bon spotted a patch of light shining through a tapestry from a concealed
door which had been left open, and when the Marquis came into the room he was
furious about it. Bon says the sitters
were unaware of the door’s existence behind the wall covering.
Crucially, the door led to the dining room
and was close to the sofa on which the Marquis had been sitting. Bon later checked the tapestry and found the
door could easily be opened, and a table by the sofa had been moved as if it
had been pushed by someone (i.e., the Marquis) moving past it in the dark. The Marquis was wearing felt slippers, a
detail not in Hack's book. Thus, Bon
concluded, not only could the Marquis have left the room unnoticed, but apports
could easily be introduced and removed later, constituting ‘a vile deception.’
Biondi comes down on Besterman’s side in
the dispute with Conan Doyle over Bozzano’s reports, concluding the Marquis’s
vanishing was merely a deception. Biondi
adds that Bon did not make this information public; neither did De Boni, a
curious omission, especially as he wrote a book which discussed events at the
castle. Biondi shows a photograph of the
outside of Millesimo Castle, taken probably in the 1970s but showing a
structure little changed since the 1920s.
It is striking how close the séance room and the room where the sleeping
Marquis was found are. Once away from
the other sitters, he could have crept down to his hiding place quickly and
with little fear of detection.
It is surprising the hidden door was not
known about by sitters, as a cursory inspection of the room should have
revealed it. Perhaps such an inspection
would have been considered impolite.
Bozzano was supposed to check the room before each séance, but he may
not have thought to look behind the hangings, though a failure to do so makes
one wonder what else he might have failed to observe.
Hack does not refer to the discovery in Modern Psychic Mysteries, though
according to Bon she was present, and neither of them seems to have told
Bozzano this key piece of information, or if they did he suppressed it. On the other hand, Besterman deduces in his
review that the room had doors on three sides and a window on the fourth,
already offering plentiful possibilities for cheating, so it is possible other
sitters, including Hack, did know about the door but assumed the Marquis would
not lower himself to use it. Hack’s
mediumistic information providing the information that the Marquis was asleep
in the granary may perhaps indicate she was conspiring with him, in which case
she would already have known about the door when she and Bon saw the light
through the tapestry.
Besterman highlights the presence of
Signora Rossi coinciding with the occurrence of apports, meaning she could be
responsible for their introduction, while Conan Doyle in turn dismisses the
idea of bulky objects being smuggled in under a modern short dress (a
reasonable defence, even if it was a longer evening dress), but there was no
need to secrete them under clothing if they could be brought in through a door. Either way, she may have been assisting the
Marquis in fraud. And it is worth
bearing in mind that just before the Marquis’s disappearance he was holding
Signora Rossi’s hand before – he said – he lost consciousness. She could have told the company she was still
holding his hand while he was making his way to the granary.
It is worth remembering when assessing his
accusation of fraud that Bon, a political opponent of the Marquis (who was
active in fascist politics), was privately reporting an event which had
occurred 16 years earlier. His claim
should consequently be treated with caution, but the passing of objects through
it into and out of the séance room by ordinary means, however achieved, seems a
more parsimonious explanation than their paranormal materialisation and dematerialisation.
Biondi surmises that Besterman did not touch
on the Marquis’s vanishing because he did not consider anything Bozzano said to
have any value (his review merely picked out a few incidents at random), but
Biondi adds: ‘However, generations of spiritualists, in Italy and abroad,
judged the “Centurione’s vanishing” as a wonderful and beautiful mediumistic
phenomenon, one of the most important ones of the whole history of mediumship.’
Yet Gasperini in his biographical sketch
of Bozzano indicates his unscientific approach, because when he attended the séances
he was ‘already profoundly convinced of the reality of the facts to which he
would have attested, and of the authenticity of the mediums.’ Further, the participants’ class told in
their favour, Hack and Bozzano assuming that members of the aristocracy and
their guests would not fabricate evidence.
The Marquis clearly considered that as an
aristocrat and gentleman, his word was effectively his bond. With his public profile as a senator, he
would have had much to lose by being exposed as a fraud. On the other hand, this assumption militated
against the imposition of rigorous controls, and the temptation to allow the
benefit of the doubt in questionable situations, which would have worked in his
favour and minimised the risk of exposure.
In a review of Brian Inglis’s 1984 survey Science and Parascience in the SPR Journal, Carlos Alvarado (1985) says
that Besterman’s review of Hack’s book ‘presents several good criticisms,
although it can be said that Besterman overdoes his points and presents them in
too harsh a style.’ It should be added
that while it may be thought Besterman’s criticisms had some merit, they would
have carried greater weight not only if he had tempered his language, but had
actually read the book. Inglis in Science and Parascience accurately
describes Besterman as belonging to the ‘High-and-Dry’ element of the SPR,
impatient with those who did not share his views.
The controversy, and resulting publicity,
did Modern Psychic Mysteries no
harm. In the August 1930 issue of the
American Society for Psychical Research’s Psychic
Research, Price mentions in passing the controversy within the SPR, but
mainly focuses on the claim that the book had brought latent interest in psychic
research in Italy into the open. John
Lewis, the editor of the International
Psychic Gazette was invited to visit Hack in Italy in 1934, and calls Modern
Psychic Mysteries ‘Mrs Hack’s famous book.’
This was surely a degree of fame it would not have achieved without the
fallout from Besterman’s review.
(Incidentally, Besterman’s Polish origin is referred to more than once
in the Gazette, injecting a racist
element into the defence of the sittings he critiqued.)
As for Sir Arthur, after he died the brief
notice in the October 1930 issue of the SPR’s Journal was as generous as could be expected in the circumstances:
‘We regret to record the death on 7 July
(after the July issue of the Journal had gone to Press) of Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle, who became a Member of the Society in 1893. Sir Arthur resigned his
membership a few months ago in circumstances known to our readers; at this time
we wish only to pay a tribute to the manifest sincerity and enthusiasm
invariably shown by him in respect of any cause that he had at heart.’
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