Stanisława Tomczyk

Stanisława Janina Tomczyk (c 1885 – 2 April 1975) was a Polish spiritual medium in the early 20th century known for her alleged demonstrations of psychokinesis and psychic photography. Magicians and skeptics have dismissed Tomczyk as a fraud who performed her feats with the aid of a hidden thread.

Career

At the age of twenty, Tomczyk was arrested during a riot and jailed for ten days. The experience is said to have caused her hysteria and mental dissociation.

Ochorowicz experiments

Tomczyk was the subject of experiments conducted in 1908–9 at Wisła, in southern Poland, by the Polish psychologist Julian Ochorowicz. Reportedly he regularly hypnotized her for therapeutic purposes, and she claimed to be controlled by an entity, "Little Stasia" ("Stasia" being a diminutive of Tomczyk's given name, "Stanisława"), who said she was not the spirit of any dead person but was described as a naked girl, one foot high. Ochorowicz was convinced from the experiments that "Little Stasia" was a second personality of Tomczyk. He conducted psychokinesis experiments with Tomczyk in which she was alleged to have levitated objects without contact, stop the movement of a clock in a glass case, and influence the turn of a roulette wheel. She was also said to have produced psychic photographs. Ochorowicz reported the results of the experiments in Annales des Sciences Psychiques (January 1909–August 1912). The scientific community dismissed Ochorowicz's experiments as pseudoscientific based on poor experimental design and gullibility. The experiments were complete failures and Flournoy recalled how Tomczyk tried to perform certain complicated experiments "which were manifestly purely fraudulent". Professor Batelli believed that the movement of objects was fraudulently produced by a hidden hair or thread that was held between her hands.

Fraud

Magicians and skeptics suspected that the psychokinesis of objects Tomczyk was performing involved the use of a fine thread or hair, running between her hands to lift and suspend the objects in the air. This was confirmed when psychical researchers who tested Tomczyk occasionally observed the thread.

Tomczyk's levitation of a glass beaker was exposed and replicated in 1910 by the magician William S. Marriott by means of a hidden thread.

Personal life Her father was Eustachiusz Tomczyk. Tomczyk was a Catholic and lived at Hyde Park Mansions. In 1919, she married the psychical researcher Everard Feilding, secretary of the Society for Psychical Research.

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