objects seemed to follow strange laws, more or less similar to contemporary representations of electrical energy. The adolescent Angélique seemed to have developed a phobia of touch, which implicitly gave a psychological path for her experiences of repulsive actions. Quickly becoming an object of observation, the young girl was put into the hands of the medical profession and of the Academy of Sciences. A committee was appointed, which quickly curtailed the enthusiasm, through experiments, on 9 March 1846, that were unfavourable to the reality of Angélique’s ‘electrical properties’.9 The girl was immediately sent back home and even suspected of voluntarily producing, by skilful and hidden manoeuvres of her feet and hands, the sudden and violent movements of the chairs on which she sat. Her case remained an isolated one in France, but a year later in America two teenagers quickly became the focus of a more infamous case in the spread of spiritualism.10
3. The Case of Jeanne
At the crossroads of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the emerging field of psychology developed critical tools to explain somnambulistic states, behavioural automatisms and double consciousness. Several psychopathologists relied on teenagers to demonstrate the mechanisms behind the occult and the dangers it represents. Carl Gustav Jung examined his young cousin, the medium Hélène Preiswerk, in his medical thesis11; Théodore Flournoy became famous for his study of the young medium Catherine Elise Muller, who began creating convincing stories of past or extraterrestrial lives during her trance.12 Young mediums who exposed their gifts in front of scientists were often accused of hysteria, melancholia, neurasthenia or other clinical aberrations applied in response (such as ‘mythomania’, by Dupré, applied on Marthe Béraud13). Dr Joseph Grasset, a physician in the south of France, and faithful reader of the psychologist Pierre Janet,14 proposed his theory of the polygon and psychic disintegration of 15-year-old Jeanne at the epicentre of the case of a haunted house. He proposed to use this case as the starting point for a comprehensive study of spiritualism in science.15 Indeed, Flournoy wrote, in the Archives de psychologie, that this case was ‘a beautiful illustration of the English theory explaining Poltergeists by the hypothesis of the naughty little girl’.16 These researchers support the deep movement of modernization of psychology that fought against the marvellous in order to demarcate this discipline as a legitimate science. This movement was led by Janet, who, since his experiments of hypnotizing at a distance in 1885–87, never stopped treating all psychical research with a condescending scepticism.17 In 1902, he gave a presentation at the Institut général psychologique on Meb, a young woman who fraudulently produced ‘apports’ (material objects produced out of the air), so as to suggest that hysteria was the best hypothesis to explain this kind of phenomena.18
Grasset’s tale is titled ‘Story of a Haunted House’.19 In a medium-sized town in the South of France, troubling events occurred to an unnamed family, ‘Family A’, that consisted of a couple, their six children and the paternal grandfather. Each of the protagonists is the subject of a short clinical description, and Jeanne, the eldest daughter, is immediately presented as being hysterical with a detestable morality. Grasset also produced a plan of their home (see Figure 2.1) and attempted to describe quite accurately the ostensible phenomena (based probably on the detailed testimony of the mother). Family A rented Part 2 of the house, which was on wasteland, but the owner of the house also allowed them to live in Part 1 of the house free of charge. In Part 1, the entry was through a kitchen, which connected to the bedroom of 20-year-old Jean (the eldest son), itself communicating with the grandfather’s bedroom. There are no other openings in the room that opened onto the street. Shortly before the events began, there had been talk of the sale of Part 1 of the house in the future, which would force the family to move. Grasset suggested that this element acted as a trigger.20 The first phenomena happened in the grandfather’s bedroom, which is noted as occurring on 4 December 1901. That same morning, Jeanne had searched the bed linens after the departure of Jean and his grandfather to work and noticed nothing. It was not until that afternoon that the mother of Family A discovered ‘the upset bed, the mess of blankets on the floor, the mattress folded at the foot of the bed’.21 Jeanne, and later her grandfather, denied being responsible for the mess, and the grandfather was quick to interpret the events in a paranormal way, speaking of a visit from his late son and daughter, who, respectively, died 6 and 14 years earlier, and consequently recommended attending masses. Jean was thought to have been the possible prankster behind this.
Figure 2.1The house inhabited by Family A.
Source: Renaud Evrard, ‘Montrer la violence intérieure: Figures cinématographiques de l’adolescente hantée’, in L’adolescente vue par le cinema, ed. S. Dupont and H. Paris (Paris: Erès, 2013), 13; © 2015, Renaud Evrard. Used with permission.
However, unsure of a definite attribution of blame, the mother decided to conduct an investigation. The next morning, she accompanied Jeanne into the bedroom of her grandfather after he had left and once again found that the bedding was thrown in the middle of the room. The grandfather was confronted but vehemently denied these alleged facts and Jean concurred. The next day, 6 December, the grandfather called his stepdaughter to show her that everything was in order. Everyone then went about their business, when suddenly the grandfather found that his bedding has been disturbed. The same routine happened three times during the same day, with the room being put into disorder without anyone being seen entering it. The grandfather, alarmed, asked to sleep in another bedroom.
On 7 December, the same phenomenon of spontaneous disorder occurred. Jeanne, accompanied by her mother, stated that she had seen a skeleton on a mattress move on the terrace. The family fled the house and sought refuge with neighbours. Rumours spread in the neighbourhood and beyond, even reaching the city. The father mobilized friends to increase the level of surveillance and catch the pranksters. On 8 December, the phenomenon continued. Having locked the door that communicated between Jean’s room and that of the grandfather, the father and his friends found it smashed, the lock broken away and the two rooms turned upside down. Grasset then summarized the story by saying that the same phenomenon took place on 9 and 10 December, despite the intervention of a priest called to ‘ward off the spell’. On Wednesday, 11 December, on the advice of a neighbour from Paris, they decided to set a trap for the prankster by tying the bedding to the wood of the bed, affixing stamps everywhere and sprinkling sawdust on the floor. Thus, both rooms where the phenomenon occurred were well prepared, but nothing happened either on Thursday or on Friday. Mrs A then decided to remove the trap and each man was reinstated in his room. Two days later, on Sunday, 15 December, everything was upset again, and so the sawdust was once more sprinkled on the floor. The next day, mattresses and blankets were dragged into the kitchen, but no footsteps were visible in the wood dust. New precautions were taken: a lock was installed at the entrance of the house (kitchen) and an
