Davey, after a little practice, succeeded in duplicating by mere sleight of hand many of the most impressive…
- Date of account
- Published 1908
- Source
- Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters
- Reference
- Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters · selected passage 143
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
Davey, after a little practice, succeeded in duplicating by mere sleight of hand many of the most impressive feats of the mediums; doing this, indeed, so well that some spiritists alleged that he was in reality a medium himself
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlyDavey, after a little practice, succeeded in duplicating by mere sleight of hand many of the most impressive feats of the mediums; doing this, indeed, so well that some spiritists alleged that he was in reality a medium himself. Hodgson, for his part, by clever analysis of the Davey performances and of the feats of Davey's mediumistic competitors, brought home to his colleagues in the Society for Psychical Research a lively sense of the folly of depending on the human eye as a detector of fraudulent spiritistic phenomena. His crowning triumph came with his exposure of Eusapia Paladino, the Italian medium who is still enjoying an undeserved popularity on the European continent.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis comes from historical psychical research. Methods, witness handling and standards of evidence differ from present-day research and should be assessed from the cited passage and edition.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThe passage can support a history of claims and recurring descriptions. It does not establish a paranormal mechanism, and competing psychological, social and physical explanations remain relevant.
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