Eusapia Palladino was an Italian working girl, an orphan, who married a small shopkeeper of Naples. She remained throughout life almost entirely illiterate, but she came in time to earn "exorbitant fees" (Lombroso's daughter says) by her séances. She had begun to dabble in Spiritualism, and lift tables, at the age of thirteen, but she did little and was quite obscure until 1888, when Professor Chiaia, of Naples, took her up. He challenged Lombroso to study her, and in 1892 a group of Italian professors investigated her powers at Naples. That is the beginning of her public career, and her performances varied little. She sat with her back to the cabinet--unlike other mediums, she sat outside it--and her chief trick was to lift off the ground the light table in front of her while the professors controlled her hands and feet. It was the ghost of "John King" who did these things, she said; and we remember "John King" as a classic ghost of the early fraudulent mediums. He rapped on the table and raised it off the floor; he dragged furniture towards the medium, especially out of the cabinet behind her; he flung musical instruments on the table, and prodded and pulled the hair of the sitters; he made impressions of hands and faces in plaster; and he even brought very faint ghosts into the room at times. Lombroso and other professors regarded these things as genuine or due to an abnormal power of the medium (not to ghosts). In the end of his life, in fact, Lombroso announced that he had come to believe in the immortality of the mind, though he still regarded this as material. His daughter, Gina Ferrero, tells us that at this time he was a physical wreck, and his mental vitality was very low.[8] However, the professors of 1892 said that they did not detect fraud. The reader of their report may think otherwise. They put Eusapia, for instance, on a scale, and "John King" took seventeen pounds off her weight. Any person can perform that miracle by getting his toe to the floor while he is on the weighing machine; and the professors gravely note that, whenever they prevented Eusapia's dress from touching the floor, she could not reduce her weight! They note also that she cannot raise the table unless her dress is allowed to touch it. In the same year, 1892, Flammarion invited her to Paris. He says frankly that he caught her cheating more than once. One of her miracles was to depress the scale of a letter-balance by placing her hands on either side of it, at some distance from it. Flammarion found that she used a hair, stretched from hand to hand. His colleague, the astronomer Antoniadi, who was called in, said that it was "fraud from beginning to end."