meet the dog outside. The door was still locked and the furniture was upset, but oddly the dog had not barked. The phenomenon continued without the family being able to control or observe all that was occurring.22 On Saturday, 21 December, the phenomenon changed: the family heard raps, then Jeanne began crying because her long hair had just been cut. The priest said that the evidence was insufficient to conclude that it was due to the intervention of the devil. In the days that followed, the family also noted the disappearance/reappearance of a wallet emptied of its contents, either from the pants pocket of the father or from under the pillow of the mother. In addition to the events in the rooms of Part 1 of the house, plants were uprooted in the garden, and Jeanne and her 6-year-old brother claimed to have seen a cabinet autonomously open and empty itself of its contents.
A hairdresser from the town contacted the editor of the Messager de l’occulte. The journalist replied on 5 January 1902, speaking of mediumship and of a ‘fluid’ comparable to electricity. The remedy, he said, is to pierce the air with iron spikes. He directed towards the search for the presence of one or several mediums. And more specifically, he indicated the need to focus research on ‘a girl about to be nubile’ because ‘it was noted that, almost always, it was so in haunted houses’.23 The theory of the naughty little girl expressed in its self-fulfilling logic. The hairdresser’s answer gave details confirming the suspicion. He said that the parents ‘already suspected that it came from the girl, without guessing the cause’.24 During this time, Jeanne seemed to wither and lose her appetite. A doctor advised that she be hospitalized, which, in addition, would also allow an assessment of her influence on the phenomenon. She manifested, in the hospital, some hysteria and somnambulism, but refused to be hypnotized. During the eight days she remained there, no occurrences were reported at the family house; however, they resumed on her return. Unsurprisingly, Jeanne was then identified as a medium and brought to a professional female somnambulist. The somnambulist prompted her to scan a glass filled with water placed on a white plate and consequently was able to see a wicked woman who had allegedly put a curse on Jeanne’s family. Mrs A immediately made the connection with the history of a witch she had molested because she believed she was responsible for the long agony of her own mother. The family, via the raps on the wall, interrogated ‘the spirits’ using the formula of two raps for ‘yes’, three for ‘no’. The origin of the raps was uncertain because Jeanne’s bed was very close to the partition wall where the knocks were heard. Still, the ‘spirits’ supported the theory of a spell being used against her. The girl even succeeded in recognizing the ‘witch’ among a group of women in a picture.
Subsequently, the phenomenon changed again and took on a more symbolic twist. The grandfather, coming one night to his room, found all the candles lit and, on his bed, a crown and crosses made with dried herbs.25 Various objects disappeared and were found in surprising places. Jeanne felt stung in different places of her body and there were pins, forks and nails in her bedclothes. Her mother decided to crouch in her bed, and the bed begun to shake furiously. The grandfather was called to the rescue and, following the advice of the occult journalist, slayed the air with his sword … but seemingly in vain. The professional somnambulist suggested that the spell be thwarted by the burning of a live cat. The family executed the ritual, and Grasset describes the resulting scene thus:
At this moment they hear, outside, a great ride, a thunderous noise. They look themselves with astonishment; but, on the recommendation of the somnambulist, nobody leaves. Raps are heard loudly on the door and on the wall; they expected to see ‘the old woman’ appear when, suddenly, Jeanne, who was lying down, pushes a scream. She feels tight at her throat, cries, struggles horribly. She is right in the middle of a hysteria crisis.26
Grasset enforced his own interpretation of hysteria without examining any of the rooms for alternative explanations. Jeanne’s crisis, which lasted several hours and repeated every evening, encouraged her parents to hospitalize her again on 20 February 1902. This time, it was at St Eloi Hospital in Montpellier, in the Department of Medical Clinic of Drs Calmette and Grasset. The story stops here as Grasset wrote that there have been no more extraordinary phenomena in the house in the absence of Jeanne. He subsequently produced a medical description attesting Jeanne’s hysteria, verified by her variable and transient anaesthesia and other phenomena:27
Big three hysterical crisis occurred in the service, small crises of ball with convulsive movements, conjunctival and pharyngeal anesthesia, bilateral ovarie with feeling of strangulation when pressing, variable and transient anesthesia with possible use of uncollected sensations (with the left hand anesthetized, she appreciates the shape of objects and recognize them), allochiria, tunnel vision with color blindness, dermographism.28
This vocabulary has the effect of reducing the unexplained phenomena that occurred around Jeanne to a mere medical case, thereby restoring ‘normality’. Added to the observations made at the hospital, Jeanne is further described as stealing objects, confabulating stories and simulating raps. Grasset extrapolated these two orders of facts: ‘The obvious first impression is that there are a mixture of juggling or hoax, of hysteria or neurosis, and, finally, or gullibility or stupidity.’29 He followed to the letter Janet, who, in his medical thesis,30 concluded that ‘most of the mediums, if not all, have nervous phenomena and are neurotic when they are not downright hysterical’.31 Grasset determined that Family A wanted to scare away buyers of the house, thus giving an explanation about this gigantic fraudulent operation. Bad handling of the situation made the phenomenon elusive, which is seen when it occurred less when controls were more strictly enforced. As such, Grasset’s theory was justified when it was concluded that systematic cheating produced this ‘haunted house’; and he designated Jeanne as mainly responsible for that, completely missing the analysis of the family dynamics:
Jeanne is the lead actress: this is certain. First, she has a detestable character, and we have seen the phenomena reappear in hospital: small knocks, wallet stolen […] But here it did not last long and we made her confess juggling.32
Grasset can be seen to have made biased assumptions and neglected more detailed and nuanced explanations. According to him, the possibility of being able to produce phenomena fraudulently was sufficient to explain all of what occurred at the house, though occultists Gaston Méry and Papus would later question the validity of this reasoning.33
However, Grasset defended the scientific focus of his observations by saying that Jeanne’s hysteria was not feigned and that the fraud was involuntary and, therefore, unconscious. He relied on an article by Ochorowicz34 that proposed the same interpretation of some recurrent frauds by the medium Eusapia Palladino.35 More importantly, the assumption of unconscious fraud is an additional demonstration of the reality of the subconscious psychism. Grasset was above all the theorist of a double psychism model involving a polygon with a higher centre (consciousness) and lower centres explaining automatisms, unconscious acts, hallucinations and so on. Every time Jeanne was likely to have produced the phenomenon, Grasset stated with aplomb that although she did it, she did so unconsciously. Then, he summarized the history of spiritualism established by Janet to generalize his findings. In his view
