Angelique Cotten, a fourteen-year-old girl, lived in the middle of the 19th century in the French village of Bouvigny, near the town of Perrier, Orne department. Small in stature, rather strong build, she was distinguished by excessive physical and mental lethargy, apathy, she could hardly speak.
On January 15, 1846, the girl was engaged, together with her three companions, in her usual work: knitting gloves from silk yarn. It was eight o'clock in the evening when the heavy oak table on one leg, on which Angelica's work lay, began to move and move, so that it could not be held in place.
Frightened by this, the girls fled with shouts of surprise: but they could not convince the assembled neighbors of the reality of what had happened.
Then, in the presence of witnesses, they resumed their work. Everything was calm. But as soon as Angelica also wanted to take her work in hand, the table moved again, swayed and, finally, toppled over. At the same time, he seemed to attract the girl to him, but as soon as she touched him, the table jumped further.
The witnesses to this scene now had no doubt that Angelica was bewitched.
She spent the night calmly, and in the morning she went back to work. The strange phenomenon repeated itself, weakly at first, but between eight and nine o'clock the movement of the table increased sharply. They had to separate the poor girl from the other workers, since they had a common table and it overturned again, despite all Angelica's efforts to keep it.
Her yarn was attached with studs to a chest, which weighed about seventy-five kilograms. But a mysterious force soon overcame this obstacle: the heavy chest was lifted and moved several times, although only a thin silk thread connected it with Angelica.
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From that moment on, the villagers had a strong opinion: all unanimously declared that the girl was possessed by the devil. Even the persons who damaged her were named. It was decided to escort Angelica to the monastery, where the evil spirit would be expelled from her.
However, the local priest, a sane person, opposed this intention. He wished, before doing anything, to be convinced of the amazing phenomena himself. The desire is quite legitimate. Angelica was seated in the same position, but the mysterious force showed itself weakly this time: the table moved back, but did not overturn, and the chair on which Angelica was sitting drove off in the opposite direction, rocking at the same time so that the girl could hardly resist falling.
Convinced of the reality of the amazing events, the priest nevertheless doubted the effectiveness of religious cleansing, considering this case a physical, and not a mental illness, requiring medical intervention. He reassured the girl's parents, calmed the panic in the village, explaining that this disease is undoubtedly rare, perhaps unknown, but in any case, the patient should be immediately shown to a doctor.
The next day, January 17, the previous phenomena were repeated, and their sphere of action even expanded: when Angelica's clothes were accidentally touched, the firewood stand, shovels, chimney tongs were thrown into the hearth, and the smut scattered; brushes, books and other small objects bounced sharply when touched by her clothes, especially the hem of her skirts.
The scissors, tied with a ribbon to her belt, were thrown away, and the ribbon was not torn and it was not clear how it was untied. It was the most incredible of the observed effects, but we saw it only twice, and once in the presence of a curé.
During the day, all these amazing phenomena were absent or almost absent, but each time they repeated in the evening, at a certain hour: there was an effect on objects of an unknown force without contact of these objects with Angelica, as well as her non-contact effect on people: one worker, sitting opposite Angelica, suddenly felt a strong blow to the knees, although the toes of their shoes did not touch.
Items that had bounced off the day before when Angelica touched them now behaved the same way only from the proximity of her clothes. But as in the previous days, these phenomena suddenly stopped, only to be repeated again in three and a half days.
On Wednesday, January 21, everything began to move around Angelica, who could not even sit down: her chair, which was being held by three strong men, was thrown, despite their resistance, many meters away at lightning speed. Any activity became impossible for her: if she began to sew, the needle pierced her fingers. She had to sit or kneel on the floor in the middle of the room.
To keep the tortured girl busy, she was given a basket of dry beans to sort through. But as soon as she plunged her fingers into the beans, she jumped and began to dance in the air, so Angelica had to give up this job.
The whole village came to see Angelica's parents to see the miracles.
The doctors from Mamera, a small town near the village of Bouvigny, were notified of what was happening, but did not want to come. Then a certain Monsieur Faremond, a man educated and respected in those parts, undertook to take Angelica to Mamer's doctors. But they did not show up for the meeting that Monsieur Faremont had appointed them.
Then the girl was taken to one of the ladies of the city, Madame Devillers, where the above phenomena continued. An hour later, two doctors finally condescended to Monsieur Faremond's requests and said that they agreed to examine Angelica. The experiments were carried out in the house of the pharmacist Monsieur Fromage, but were unsuccessful and did not convince the pundits of anything.
Monsieur Faremont conducted several experiments, trying to prove his hypothesis regarding the sources of the observed phenomena, which he did not hesitate to attribute to electricity. He left a detailed description of his observations and an account of the experiments that were carried out with Angelica in the presence of educated and respected residents of Mamera and other surrounding cities.
Written testimonies were also left by other participants in these sessions: an engineer from Mortagne Olivier, Dr. Verger, Dr. Lemonnier from Saint Maurice, Dr. Beaumont-Chardon from Mortagne, a pharmacist from Mortagne Coyu.
Angelica's family, poor and narrow-minded, intended to capitalize on the girl's extraordinary abilities by transporting her from city to city and showing her to the public. The first session took place in Mortani.
The rumor about the arrival of the extraordinary girl quickly spread throughout the city. That same evening, more than one hundred and fifty people came to see her.
Unlike Mamera's doctors, who at first refused to examine Angelica Cotten, and Bellesma's doctors, who did not come for the session, although they were only one kilometer away, Mortan's doctors enthusiastically examined the “electric girl”.
It was at their insistence that Angelica's relatives decided to take her to Paris for the trial of the members of the French Academy. On February II, they arrived in the capital.
In the very first days upon arrival, they were visited by many scientists at the hotel where they were staying. Angelica was introduced to the scientific secretary of the academy Arago and Dr. Tangsh, who conducted a series of experiments with her on February 12, 1846, which lasted more than two hours.
During a public session held on February 17 at the Academy of Sciences, the academic secretary of the Academy Arago gave explanations about the tests that Dr. Tangshu subjected the girl to, and read a note on this matter given to him by the doctor and later included in the official report of the session. Here's this note:
“I watched the electric girl Angelica Cotten twice. The chair, which I was holding with all my strength with my leg and both hands, was thrown away when she sat down on it. The paper strip, which I put on my finger, was carried away many times by a gust of wind. The dining table is medium in size and quite heavy, and swayed and moved many times upon contact with Angelica's clothes.
A circle cut out of paper, placed vertically or horizontally, began to spin quickly from the energy emanating from the girl's wrist or elbow joint.
The large and heavy canapé on which I was sitting was thrown against the wall when a test subject wanted to sit next to me.
The chair, which was pressed to the floor by two strong men and on the half of which I was sitting, was torn out from under me when Angelica sat on the other half.
Curiously, every time the chair was thrown back, he pulled the girl's clothes along with him. In the first moment, she was attracted to him and only then came off. Two small balls of elderberry moved, attracted or repelled each other in the presence of the girl.
The strength of Angelica's emanations varied throughout the day. It grew between seven and nine o'clock in the evening. Perhaps it was somehow influenced by the dinner she ate at six o'clock.
Emanations came only from the front, from the wrist and the elbow of her arm.
Energy flowed out only from its left side; her left hand was warmer than her right, a soft pulsating heat emanated from her, as well as from the entire left half of her body when she made a quick movement. This hand was constantly trembling with unusual tension, and this tremor was transmitted at the touch of someone else's hand.
During the observation period, her pulse varied from one hundred and five to one hundred and twenty beats per minute and seemed to me irregular.
When she was isolated from the common soil, sitting on a chair so that her feet did not touch the floor, or when her feet were placed on the feet of the person sitting opposite, the incomprehensible phenomena ceased; the same result was when she sat in her own hands. Her electrical properties also disappeared if she had waxed parquet, rubberized cloth or a piece of glass under her feet.
During paroxysm, that is, the peak of her electrical activity, the girl could not touch any object with her left hand, so as not to immediately pull it away, as if from a burn; when her clothes touched furniture, she attracted these objects, moved and turned them over.
By pulling back her arm, she tried to avoid pain, as she was beaten by electric shocks: she complained of injections in the wrist and in the elbow. Once, trying to feel the pulse in the temporal artery, not finding it in my left hand, I put my hand on the back of her head - the girl with a cry recoiled from me.
I was convinced many times that in the region of the cerebellum, where the cervical muscles are attached to the skull, there is a point so sensitive that the girl does not allow her to touch it, supposedly all the sensations that her left hand experiences are transmitted to this point.
The electrical emanations of this child have the character of intermittent waves, emitted successively by different parts of her body, with the strongest impact that overturns the table occurs at the level of her pelvis.
Whatever the nature of this energy, it is felt like an air stream, a breath of cold air. I felt a distinctly brief breath on my hand, as if it were blowing on it with my lips.
This irregularity in the release of fluids can be explained by several reasons: first, the constant alertness of the girl, who now and then looks around, fearing that someone or something will touch her; secondly, her fear of the force, the source of which she is and which pushes her in the direction opposite to the nearest objects; and thirdly, the degree of her fatigue and concentration. When she is not thinking about anything or when her attention is scattered, the mysterious power manifests itself with the greatest intensity.
When she brought her finger closer to the north pole of the magnetized iron bar, she received a strong prick; the south pole had no effect on her. When the bar was replaced and she did not know where which pole was, she accurately identified them.
This girl is thirteen years old, she has not yet reached puberty, and I know from her mother that she has not yet had anything like menstruation. This girl is strong and healthy.
Her mind is poorly developed, in all respects she is what is called a "bumpkin"; nevertheless she can write and read. At home, she was engaged in the manufacture of ladies' gloves. The first unusual phenomena were noted a month ago.
Paris, February 15, 1846.
After reading this note, Arago told about what he saw himself when Angelica's parents brought her to the observatory. These were experiments with a sheet of paper, a table and a chair, similar to those described above.
After his story, Arago asked that a commission be formed to study these phenomena. The Academy of Sciences appointed such a commission of six people, including Arago himself.
The commission met the next day in the Botanical Garden, but the experiments carried out gave results unfavorable for the electrical properties of Angelica Cotten. Focusing on the study using physical devices of the presence of electricity in the girl's body, the commission paid little attention to the mechanical manifestations of mysterious energy, such as the independent movement of tables and chairs, which, in fact, amazed the inhabitants of the Orne department.
And physical devices scared Angelica and did not find free electricity in her, as in our cars or in electric fish, electric rays, for example.
Meanwhile, these primitive mechanical manifestations weakened day by day. Dr. Tangshu, who noted the high intensity of mechanical phenomena in the first days after Angelica's arrival in Paris, noted with amazement their attenuation until they completely disappeared. He himself hastened to declare this in a letter addressed to the President of the Academy of Sciences, warning of the inevitable puzzling questions.
This letter precedes the conclusions reached in the report of the commission, which conducted two sessions with Angelica Cotten and concluded that she did not have any unusual properties.
But a negative result obtained by an authoritative commission cannot cross out the testimonies of thousands of people confirming the reality of the unusual phenomena they saw in the Orne department, in Angelica's homeland. The possibility of being cheated by a girl with such mental disabilities can be completely ruled out. It remains to assume that the initially intense manifestations of unknown energy gradually weakened until they disappeared altogether.
One could suspect fraud if the case with Angelica Cotten was the only one in the history of science, but many similar facts are given in works on physiology.
They prove that the electrical properties common to some species of fish can sometimes appear for a while in humans as a pathology.
Without wishing to cite these published works, we will cite only the testimony of Dr. Pinault, a physician from the city of Pelouis, department of Cher, who observed a similar condition in a girl of the same age as Angelica, who lived in the city of Ayy, department of Indre-et-Loire.
This girl, named Honorine Sepon, thirteen and a half years old, belonged to a well-to-do peasant family and was apprenticed to a seamstress in Aya. One day, in early December 1857, when she was working next to her mistress, the table at which they were sitting suddenly shook violently for no apparent reason.
The frightened women drew back from him, but the table reached for Honorine, repeating all her movements; finally, he fell behind and rolled over. The same thing happened with all the objects that Honorine's clothes touched: chairs, tables, wooden beds, etc.
All these phenomena continued for two months every day, in the presence of many witnesses from all walks of life, when on February 10, 1858, Dr. Pino came to Ayia. He stated the following facts.
The girl was naturally endowed with a sharp mind, and her parents gave her a good upbringing. In the presence of the doctor, she sat down on a chair, placing another chair in front of her; touching it with the bottom edge of her skirt, she moved it across the parquet. Half an hour later, her petticoat puffed out and clung to the back of an empty chair, which began to spin slowly, crackling.
From that moment on, the chair, it seemed, began to carry out all Honorine's orders: it slid, whirling, on the parquet, tapped as many times as asked, rose on two legs and stood there, balancing; he tapped out a rhythm as Honorine sang, and eventually fell with a crash. When they brought a hand to her swollen skirt, she fell off, but after a moment she puffed up again, reached for a chair and adhered to it, as happens with electrified objects.
Throughout the session, which lasted two hours, the girl's arms and legs remained motionless and in plain sight, which excluded any possibility of fraud on her part, especially since both the doctor and everyone present watched the subject's movements with increased attention.
It seemed that the source of these phenomena is a very great force. The fabric of the swollen skirt became so hard that it resonated like cardboard when struck with a hard object. The furniture continued to move in the distance after it touched the skirt.
To understand, if possible, the nature of the mysterious power, Dr. Pinault used a simple device consisting of two elderberry balls suspended on silk threads. Near the girl's body, they should have become electrified and mutually attracted. But the result was negative: the balls remained motionless near Honorine's skirt, while the heavy wooden chair was lifted and turned over. The fabric of the skirt was from linen and cotton.
At first, the mysterious force appeared completely spontaneously, unexpectedly, its manifestations were involuntary, the frequency was even inconvenient for the girl. But gradually their frequency and intensity decreased. When Dr. Pino was studying this phenomenon, the effect of attraction suddenly ceased for thirteen days, and it took the girl's long efforts to concentrate her will to resume it.
Finally, these phenomena completely disappeared, and since then, nothing more unusual has happened to Honorine Shogun.
These observations once again confirm the truth and absence of fraud in the case of Angelica Koten: apparently, in both cases, there was a pathological state of the body, which just as suddenly disappeared as it arose.
This approach to the problem seems more reasonable than the explanation of the observed phenomena by supernatural reasons or than skepticism and indiscriminate denial of everything incomprehensible.
