Ada Besinnet

Ada Maud Besinnet Roche (1890–1936), also known as Ada Bessinet, was an American spiritualist medium. Career

Besinnet was known for materializing 'phantom' faces, producing voices and 'psychic' lights in her séances. Psychical researchers were convinced that all her phenomena were fraudulent, but some suggested she may have been in a dissociated state.

Besinnet refused to sit with the magician Harry Houdini. She had been exposed as a fraud by an undercover magician, Fulton Oursler. During the séance, he heard the medium leave her chair, moved his shoe over the seat, and discovered she was not there. In his exposure, Oursler wrote that Besinnet had easily performed the phenomenon herself by getting up and moving around the room and making noises. He had studied ventriloquism and stated all the voices were her own. As for the faces and lights, he suggested they were masks and observed a flashlight and, on another occasion, a rag in her hand.

Besinnet was also caught cheating by psychical researcher James Hewat McKenzie. In response, Besinnet claimed she was unconscious in her séances and had no knowledge of the events that took place. Hereward Carrington, who investigated Besinnet, wrote that "my own sittings with this medium left me entirely unconvinced of their genuineness."

James H. Hyslop of the American Society for Psychical Research concluded after attending 70 sittings that Besinnet was responsible for all the phenomena during the séances. Still, her trance control was a "secondary personality."