W. W. Baggally

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William Wortley Baggally (c. 1848–1928) was a British psychical researcher and amateur conjurer, a member of the Society for Psychical Research best remembered as one of the three investigators who examined the Italian physical medium Eusapia Palladino at Naples in 1908. He belongs to the generation of inquirers who tried to bring the claims of the seance room under controlled observation, neither dismissing them in advance nor crediting them without test.

The Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882, set out to study reported phenomena — telepathy, apparitions, the productions of physical mediums — by methods borrowed from experimental science. Baggally joined it in 1896, drawn by the question of survival after death and dissatisfied with the loose evidentiary standards of the spiritualism of the day. He worked within the Society’s program from a particular vantage: a practicing conjurer who had studied the trick methods of mediums, he knew from the inside how dark-room effects are produced, and he counted that knowledge as the proper equipment for a sitter. Much of what passed for spirit agency, he and his colleagues held, could be reproduced by ordinary trickery in the dark; the task of the investigator was to remove the conditions under which trickery could operate and see what, if anything, remained.

That conviction made the conjurer the qualified observer — the man who, knowing how he might be deceived, was the hardest to deceive. Most of Baggally’s casework ran in the debunking direction. He sat with and tested a long line of mediums, among them William Eglinton, Cecil Husk, Mary Showers, Etta Wriedt, and the stage telepathists Julius and Mrs. Zancig, and found in most of them the ordinary machinery of fraud. It is against that habitual skepticism that his part in the Palladino affair stands out.

The Naples sittings of 1908 were his most consequential work. With the Hon. Everard Feilding and the American researcher Hereward Carrington, Baggally formed a committee of three to examine Palladino, a medium already long suspected of fraud and already caught at it more than once. All three were experienced in detecting fraudulent mediums; two of them, Baggally and Carrington, were also practiced conjurers, chosen with that competence in mind. Across eleven sittings at the Hotel Victoria in November and December — held under the committee’s own precautions — Baggally’s contribution was the conjurer’s control: physically holding the medium’s hands and feet, fixing the conditions under which deception could operate, and logging each session in close detail. The full narrative of what passed in that room belongs to Palladino’s own record; from Baggally’s side the work was the discipline of the controls and the verdict he was willing to sign. Their report, published in 1909 in the Society’s Proceedings (vol. 23) and long known as the Feilding Report, concluded that under their conditions certain movements and contacts had occurred which the investigators could not explain as trickery.

The finding settled nothing. Later sittings elsewhere exposed Palladino in plain deception, and the affair remains a standing case of how difficult such testimony is to fix. What the report records is not a verdict on the unseen but the limit of three careful observers’ ability to account for what they saw — and Baggally, the fraud-hunter, let a cautious “could not explain it as fraud” stand against his own default suspicion, which is precisely what makes his signature on it interesting.

He set down his method at length in Telepathy, Genuine and Fraudulent (Methuen, London, 1917; American edition 1918), which carried a preface by Sir Oliver Lodge. Lodge called him “a careful, conscientious, and exceptionally skilled and critical investigator,” adding that it would be difficult to find anyone more competent by training and capacity to examine such subtle and elusive phenomena. The book sorts authentic telepathy from its fraudulent imitations — the codes, confederates, and stage tricks of the impostor — and describes the controls (blindfolds, screens, separation) by which the two may be told apart; in it Baggally records that his own experiences had convinced him the telepathic faculty does exist.

Baggally’s name survives chiefly through that episode and the wider literature of psychical research. He stands for a stance more than a doctrine — the investigator who approached the marvelous as something to be watched closely rather than believed or scorned, and who treated his own expertise in deception as the first safeguard against it.

→ Related: Eusapia Palladino · Hereward Carrington · Everard Feilding