Eva Carrière Séance Fraud Photos 1911

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Eva Carrière
  • Carrière's psychic performances were investigated by Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mystery series. He believed that her performances were genuine and that she was not engaged in any deception.
  • Another famous psychic investigator of the time, Harry Houdini, observed one of her séances and asserted that they were fraudulent. Houdini was never convinced by Carrière and likened her performance to a magician's trick, the Hindu needle trick.
  • The physician-psychical researcher Gustav Geley investigated Carrière and wrote she was a genuine psychic but never-published photographs were discovered after Geley's death which revealed fraudulent activity from the psychic's companion, Juliette Bisson, such as wires seen running from Carrière's head supporting fake ectoplasm.
  • Another physician-psychical researcher, Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, investigated Carrière and believed the ectoplasm she produced was genuine. The psychiatrist Mathilde Ludendorff wrote that the experiments of Schrenck-Notzing were unscientific and that he had been duped by tricks of Carrière. In the Schrenck-Notzing psychic sessions with Carrière the scientific controls were scarce and there was evidence that she had freed her hands in the séance room.
  • According to historian Ruth Brandon, Juliette Bisson and Carrière were in a sexual relationship together, and they worked in collaboration with each other to fake the ectoplasm and eroticize their male audience. Ruth Brandon wrote that Carrière produced some of her effects by regurgitation, hiding her ectoplasm in the séance cabinet and using her secret accomplice Juliette Bisson.
  • In 1920, anthropologist Eric Dingwall and physician-psychical researcher V. J. Woolley tested Carrière in London. They found no evidence of psychic phenomena, discovered that her ectoplasm was made from chewed paper, and said "the séances proved negative".

Carrière has been described as "perverse and neurotic". She was well known for running around the séance room naked indulging in sexual activities with her audience. Her companion Juliette Bisson would, during the course of the séance sittings with Schrenck-Notzing, introduce her finger into Eva's vagina to ensure no "ectoplasm" had been loaded there beforehand to fool the investigators, and she would also strip nude at the end of a séance and demanded another full-on gynecological exam. The psychic sessions of Carrière with Schrenck-Notzing have been described as pornographic. The photographs that were taken during the séances show Carrière in the nude emerging from her cabinet and others revealing fake ectoplasm strings hanging from her breasts. Another photograph revealed ectoplasm in the shape of a deflated and disembodied penis.


 
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