Eusapia Palladino

Eusapia Palladino (alternate spelling: Paladino; 21 January 1854 – 16 May 1918) was an Italian Spiritualist medium.

In Italy, France, Germany, Poland and Russia, Palladino seemed to display extraordinary powers in the dark: levitating and elongating herself, "apporting" flowers, materializing the dead, producing spirit hands and faces in wet clay, levitating tables, playing musical instruments under the table without contact, communicating with the dead through her spirit guide John King, and other related phenomena. It was expensive to watch one of her performances.

Many Europeans, including some Nobel laureates, regarded Palladino as a genuine Spiritualist medium, claiming that she did not employ the standard deceptions used by fraudulent mediums. As late as 1926, eight years after her death, Arthur Conan Doyle in his History of Spiritualism praised the psychic phenomena and spirit materializations that she had produced.

In the United States, she was described as a medium who resorted to trickery when her alleged talents failed her.

Her Warsaw séances at the turn of 1893–94 inspired several colorful scenes in the historical novel Pharaoh, which Bolesław Prus began writing in 1894.