Mr. Podmore, reviewing the case, says, 'The phenomena described are quite
inexplicable by ordinary mechanical means.[3] Yet he elsewhere[4] suggests
that Rose herself, 'as the instrument of mysterious agencies, or simply as
a half-witted girl, gifted with abnormal cunning and love of mischief, may
have been directly responsible for all that took place.' That is to say, a
half-witted girl could do (barring 'mysterious agencies') 'what is quite
inexplicable by ordinary mechanical means,' while, according to the
policeman, she was not even present on some occasions. But it is not easy
to make out, in the evidence of White, the other witness, whether this
girl Rose was present or not when the jar flew circuitously out of the
cupboard, a thing easily worked by a half-witted girl. Such discrepancies
are common in all evidence to the most ordinary events. In any case a
half-witted girl, in Mr. Podmore's theory, can do what 'is quite
inexplicable by ordinary mechanical means.' There is not the shadow of
evidence that the girl Rose had the inestimable advantage of being
'half-witted;' she is described by Mr. Podmore as 'the child of an
imbecile mother.' The phenomena began, in an isolated case (the tilted
table), _before_ Rose entered the house. She was admitted in kindness,
acted as a maid, and her interest was _not_ to break the crockery
and upset furniture. The troubles, which began before the girl's arrival,
were apparently active when she was not present, and, if she _was_
present, she could not have caused them 'by ordinary mechanical means,'
while of extraordinary mechanical means there was confessedly no trace.
The disturbances ceased after she was dismissed--nothing else connects her
with them.
Mr. Podmore's attempt at a normal explanation by fraud, therefore, is
of no weight. He has to exaggerate the value, as disproof, of such
discrepancies as occur in all human evidence on all subjects. He has to
lay stress on the interval of five weeks between the events and the
collection of testimony by himself. But contemporary accounts appeared in
the local newspapers, and he does not compare the contemporary with the
later evidence, as we have done. There is one discrepancy which looks as
if a witness, not here cited, came to think he had seen what he heard
talked about. Finally, after abandoning the idea that mechanical means can
possibly have produced the effect, Mr. Podmore falls back on the cunning
of a half-witted girl whom nothing shows to have been half-witted. The
alternative is that the girl was 'the instrument of mysterious agencies.'
So much for the hypothesis of a fraud, which has been identical in results
from China to Peru and from Greenland to the Cape.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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