Urban Legends
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Ted Serios and the Thoughtographs

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added1967

From the early sixties the Chicago bellhop Ted Serios projected images straight onto Polaroid film: buildings, shopfronts, cars, blurred but recognisable. The Denver psychiatrist Jule Eisenbud gave him a book and ten years of research. In 1967 Charles Reynolds and David Eisendrath of Popular Photography sat in on a session and described the gizmo — a rolled paper tube Serios held against the lens and would not let anyone examine. A tube that size holds a lens and a transparency; the conjuror James Randi reproduced the whole body of work the same way.

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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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