Eva Carrière



Eva Carrière (born Marthe Beraud) also known as Eva C was a 19th-century French spiritualist medium.

Fraud
Gustav Geley investigated the mediumship of Carrière and concluded she was genuine, but after his death photographs were discovered which showed fraud. Wires could be seen running from Carrière's head supporting fake ectoplasm. Baron Schrenck-Notzing also investigated Carrière and believed the ectoplasm she produced was genuine. The Schrenck-Notzing experiments were bogus as scientific controls were scarce and there was evidence that Eva was freeing her hands.

Carrière claimed to materialise a spirit known as "Bien Boa". However, a man called Areski admitted in a 1906 newspaper article that the entire thing was a hoax and that he had dressed up as Boa. Carrière had used cut out face clippings from the French magazine Le Miroir as her ectoplasm faces.

Ruth Brandon in her book The Spiritualists (1983) documented the fraud of Carrière throughout her career.

Sexual activities
Eva has been described as "perverse and neurotic". She was well known for running around the séance room naked indulging in sexual activities with her audience. According to Kalush and Sloman (2006), "[Juliette] Bisson would, during the course of the pre-séance examaination, introduce her finger into Eva's vagina to ensure no "ectoplasm" had been loaded there beforehand to fool the investigators. The whole procedure was so enjoyable for Eva that she often stripped nude at the end of a séance and demanded another full-on gynecological exam."