Brookfield: The Devil Made Me Do It
On 16 February 1981 in Brookfield, nineteen-year-old Arne Cheyenne Johnson stabbed his landlord Alan Bono to death. The defence, supported by Ed and Lorraine Warren, argued that Johnson was possessed by a demon passed to him from eleven-year-old David Glatzel — the first attempt in American legal history to enter possession as a defence. Judge Robert Callahan refused to admit it: it cannot be proved and the law has no such ground. Johnson was convicted of manslaughter. The boy's older brother Carl Glatzel later sued the Warrens, calling the whole affair an invention got up for a book contract.
Eusapia Palladino at Columbia
For twenty years the Neapolitan medium Eusapia Palladino lifted tables and materialised hands in front of the best scientists in Europe, and some of them went home convinced. Her method never varied: in the dark she substituted one hand or foot for another among the people controlling her, freeing a limb. The Cambridge sittings of 1895 showed it, and the matter was closed in New York in 1910, when investigators from Columbia University hired two conjurors. They took turns lying under the table and watched, in the dark, her foot come out of its shoe and brace against the leg. The report was printed in full and the American tour ended there.
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