Everard Feilding

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The Honourable Everard Feilding (1867–1936) was an English barrister and psychical researcher, for many years an officer of the Society for Psychical Research (founded 1882). A younger son of the eighth Earl of Denbigh, schooled at Oscott and trained in the law at Cambridge, he gave much of his working life to a question the courts could not try: whether anything in the darkened séance survived strict control.

Feilding belonged to the investigating rather than the believing wing of the Society. He had come to it after a visit to Lourdes in 1892 left him unsatisfied, sat on its committees from the late 1890s, and served for years as one of its honorary secretaries. The temper he brought to the work was that of a cross-examiner — patient, unhurried, willing to watch a sitting fail and to walk away with nothing. He traveled widely to sit with mediums, several of whom he exposed; in 1905 he caught the materialization medium Christopher Chambers when a false mustache, meant to lend substance to a manifested face, turned up in the séance room. He was, by temperament and by record, hard to convince, which is what made the one occasion on which he was not easily able to explain a thing away so awkward to dismiss.

That occasion was a series of séances held at Naples in the winter of 1908 with the Italian physical medium Eusapia Palladino, conducted with Hereward Carrington and W. W. Baggally under conditions the three had designed to close the gaps through which she was known to cheat. The full course of those eleven sittings — the levitations and raps, the touches in the dark, the long history of Palladino’s detections before and after — belongs to her own record and is told there. Feilding’s distinctive place in it is narrower and more particular. Of the three investigators, Carrington and Baggally were practiced conjurers, chosen partly because they knew from the inside how a séance effect might be faked; Feilding was not. He was the lawyer of the party, and it fell to him to be its principal author. The long account that appeared in the Society’s Proceedings in 1909 — “Report on a series of sittings with Eusapia Palladino,” running to more than two hundred and fifty pages — was written mainly by him, so much so that it has been known ever since as the Feilding Report. Built on stenographic records kept so the sittings could be reconstructed move by move, it set down some four hundred and seventy recorded occurrences and concluded that a residue of what the three had observed resisted the explanations they could devise.

That this verdict came from a non-conjurer is the sharpened point of the trio’s joint conclusion, and the reason Feilding’s name, rather than another’s, is the one fixed to the document. Two of the three could speak to how the effects might be produced; the third could only attest, in a barrister’s careful prose, to what restraints had been in place and what had nonetheless seemed to happen inside them. The verdict was guarded, the work of practiced skeptics, and the case took it as nearly its strongest.

It has not worn cleanly. Palladino was caught in fraud before Naples and again afterward, in England and in the United States, and later assessment has largely read even the controlled sittings as a lesson in how trained observers may be deceived in the dark. The report drew an early and pointed answer from Frank Podmore, who held that it lapsed into vagueness at exactly the moments that mattered and that its sitters could not keep their accounts of whose hands and feet were held when straight. Feilding did not finally hold his ground against the doubt. In later years he conceded that the account had been incomplete at crucial junctures and allowed that some of what the sitters reported may have been hallucination — the candour of a man who could not settle the matter in his own mind, and would not pretend that he had.

He did not stop investigating. He examined the Polish medium Stanisława Tomczyk on the Society’s behalf and, in 1919, married her; he looked into the Abbé Vachère’s reportedly bleeding holy print in the years around the First World War, and ran experiments in thought-transference. The war itself took him out of the séance room and into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and British intelligence work in Egypt and Palestine, for which he was appointed OBE in 1919. His life also touched the wider esoteric world of the period: he is alleged by his biographers to have been a friend of Aleister Crowley and is named among the early members of Crowley’s order, though the sources hedge the connection and it should be held no more firmly than they hold it.

None of this made him a believer in the ordinary sense. He represents instead a recognizable figure of his generation — the educated skeptic who held that claims usually consigned to credulity or ridicule deserved, at least once, to be tested hard, and who was honest enough to record where the testing left him. He kept testing, and reported what he found, and left the harder question where he had found it: open.

→ Related: Eusapia Palladino · W W Baggally · Hereward Carrington · F W H Myers · Henry Sidgwick