[Another account is of] Phillipine Senger, the magnetic girl of Bergzabern, in the Pfalz, whom Hornung visited in the hospital at Frankenthal. Her story was published by Baron Du Potet in the Journal of Magnetism, and shews her to have been exactly of the class of Angelique Cottin, Elizabeth Squirrel, and the magnetic girl, now Mrs Fawcett. She was the child of poor parents, and just as great a stumbling-block to the doctors as these other mediums.
Knockings first began in her parents’ house every evening immediately after she fell asleep. Then there came scrapings, rumblings, drumming of marches. The parents, alarmed, pulled up floors, and broke into the walls to find out the cause of the noises. Now the child began to talk in her sleep to somebody, and ordered him to knock and drum in different ways, which was always done exactly.
The thing took wind, by the father fetching the police, and numbers crowded to the house. It was soon found that whatever was put into her hand, hung to it, and only with difficulty could be forced away. Cigar cases, keys, pieces of gold, iron, or other things, touching her hands, hung by her finger-ends firmly. By rubbingh her hands on those of others she could impart for a time the same property.
In one instance, a compass being placed near her, the needle was deflected fifteen degrees; but this did not occur again. Everything proved a magnetism in her, but not the ordinary magnetism. Then things began to fly forcibly about the house; pieces of wood, cushions, rulers, a tailor’s sleeve board, a smoothing-iron of six pounds weight, were forcibly flung from one place to another.
It was found that the bed on which she lay would, when ordered by visitors, move across the floor, and four men sitting on it could not stop it, but when ordered to stop it stopped instantly. A harmonica laid on a chair in the room played of itself.
The doctors took up the case and watched it, and came to the sage conclusion that the noises were made by some disease in the girl’s muscles; but the disease in the articles that were flying about the house was beyond their science; so she was sent to a sort of Government pauper school, where Horning saw her, and where she was threatened with severe whipping if she ever said a word of what had occurred to those then about her. Here the spirits seem to have spared her the magisterial floggins by letting her alone, for there all was quiet. That the phenomena, however, were real, Du Potet himself, as well as hundreds of others, had witnessed.
The Spiritual Magazine, June 1864.
also see https://www-ipeak-net.translate.goog/site/estudo_janela_conteudo.php?origem=662&idioma=1&f=0&_x_tr_sl=pt&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc