Stanislava Tomchik phenomenon

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, a woman named Stanislava Tomchik lived in Poland who allegedly possessed a very wide range of superpowers.

Stanislava Tomchik was able to use the power of thought to move various objects and levitate in the air to stop the rotation of the roulette wheel, clock movement, and other wonders.

Initially, her fame spread to the Vistula, a city in southern Poland, but quickly spread beyond its borders and soon Tomczyk was known throughout Europe.

It happened when the famous Polish psychologist Julian Okhorovich believed in her superpowers and decided to test her in a series of experiments to check how strong Stanislava Tomchik was.

Okhorovich began by subjecting Tomczyk to hypnosis sessions, and during these sessions, she claimed to be in constant contact with a certain spirit, which sometimes completely takes over her body. She called this spirit “Little Stasya” and assured them that he was not a ghost of a person, but was some other supernatural being.

Sometimes during these hypnosis sessions, Ohorovich could communicate directly with this spirit and he turned out to be very mischievous, not particularly vicious or threatening, he rather behaved like a small child.

Okhorovich observed Tomczyk’s abilities in several demonstrations, during which he witnessed, for example:

“Creation of light, effects produced contactlessly on photographic plates in the dark or in red light, or on a galvanometer. Sudden deposition of chemicals in solution and vision through an opaque screen. Its strength seems to alternate from one class of phenomena to another, and each class arises at a time when the others do not appear. “

He could also observe how Stanislava lifted a variety of objects into the air, including scissors, corks, balls, cigarettes, spoons, and a matchbox, which were laid out on the table in front of her and which she made to rise and soar without touching them, but simply putting her hands on either side of the object. All these experiments were, among other things, captured in photographs.

According to Stanislava, when she performs all these “miracles”, she feels something like a current coming out of her hands, and her fingertips begin to tingle.

Okhorovich suggested that this telekinesis is due to some “hard rays” emanating from Stanislava’s fingers. He also noted that if you hold your palm in the air between Stanislava’s fingers and the levitated object, you could feel something like a very thin and completely invisible thread:

“I felt this thread on my hand, on my face, on my hair. When she separates her hands, the thread becomes thinner and disappears. It feels like a spider web. sewing thread “.

Unlike many other mediums and psychics of that era, Tomczyk conducted all these demonstrations in brightly lit rooms, where she had little chance of the typical manipulation of objects by charlatans.

In addition, she always wore a blouse with cropped sleeves so that everyone could see that she was not hiding anything in the cuffs or sleeves.

After Okhorovich, some other scientists also took up the Stanislava Tomchik phenomenon. In 1909, she was investigated in Paris by Professor Theodore Flournois, who eventually left her, fully convinced that she really possessed the power of telekinesis, or the ability to move objects with the help of the mind.

In 1910, Tomczyk was examined by the Physics Laboratory in Warsaw by a group of scientists under rigorous testing conditions, leaving them impressed and unable to detect any signs of deception. In 1913, it was also studied by the German scientist Baron von Schrenck Notzing.

She also soon attracted the attention of the British Society for Psychical Research, which in 1914 also took up the study of her and her alleged abilities in the most careful endeavor. The committee that came to study it consisted of researchers Mark Barr, W.J. Woolley, W.W. Baggalli, and Everard Feilding, who conducted a series of experiments to see what this woman was really capable of.

They had a total of 11 sessions with Tomczyk and noted that her abilities were strikingly similar to the poltergeist phenomenon. Specifically, Feilding wrote the following:

“They occur spontaneously and usually unexpectedly in her normal state and include knocking, moving tables and chairs without visible contact, throwing or transporting objects around the house in which she lives, often in her immediate vicinity, but also often in places apparently outside her usual reach, for example, outside the room she is in, or even in another room whose door is closed. “

Tomczyk also showed them her standard telekinesis tricks, sitting at a table on which various objects were laid out in front of her. She made them rise and levitate after focusing on them for 10-45 minutes.

The degree of control she had over objects seemed to depend on how much “current” she could collect at any given time in her hands, and her degree of influence on objects could range from a simple slight movement to completely hovering over a table or even spinning. objects, although the latter was observed only once in all 11 experiments when she caused the ball to hover and rotate 9 inches above the table.

In some cases, she could not make objects move at all, in three such experiments no movement was detected. Although the researchers left, convinced that she was still a true psychic, their results were scientifically inconclusive.

Feilding also expressed the idea that he felt her powers were weakening, possibly due to the mental instability she was suffering from at the time. The fact is that shortly before these experiments, Tomchik was imprisoned for 10 days for participating in city protests, after which she began to develop hysteria and mental dissociation.

It is curious that this experiment had its unexpected results, during which Tomczyk and Feilding became very close and got married in 1919.

After Stanislav’s marriage, Tomchik stopped conducting her public appearances with telekinesis, and since then the question of whether she was a real person, endowed with an unusual gift, or was a very clever fraud, still hangs in the air.

She definitely had many ill-wishers and many magicians claimed that her sessions were just sleight of hand, but Tomczyk was never convicted of fraud.

One of the main skeptical arguments is that since sometimes there was a certain “thread” between her hands and the object, this was supposedly a method of forgery. Skeptics claimed that Tomczyk used extremely thin, almost invisible threads to make various objects move and rise into the air.

However, this still does not explain how she was able to confuse so many professional researchers who never noticed any thread or other tools in sessions with her.

Who was this woman and what was she really capable of? Was any of this real, or was she just another charlatan? In fact, no one knows, and the Stanislava Tomchik case remains a strange mystery.