Angélique Cottin, the "electric girl" of Bouvigny

In the winter of 1846, Angélique Cottin was 14 years old. She was a peasant girl from Bouvigny, in the commune of La Perrière, in the Orne. She wove silk gloves for a living. Her relatives lived in straitened circumstances.

15 January 1846. About 8 pm. Angélique sat with other girls at an oak weaving frame. The frame "began to jerk as if it were alive." No one could hold it steady. A turning cylinder broke free and was flung across the room, again and again, with no visible cause.

When she touched the oaken table, one account says, "it retreated before her, or was even upset." Her chair moved the other way, rocking as it went.

The force seemed to come from her left side. The wrist. The elbow. It was strongest between 7 and 9 pm, when she had to stand in great agitation. Chairs and tables leapt from her touch in bright daylight. A bed rocked beneath her. Candle flames bent near her wrist. Compasses were violently agitated in her presence.

The physician Dr. Tanchou wrote it down. "A very large and heavy sofa, on which I was seated, was violently pushed against the wall when the young girl placed herself beside me." A strip of paper balanced on his finger was "blown away several times as though by a sudden rush of wind." A man named M. Hébert said he was lifted into the air while sitting on a heavy trough. People who touched her said they felt a true electric shock.

Dr. Tanchou reported the case to François Arago, permanent secretary of the Académie des Sciences. On 17 February 1846, Arago watched demonstrations at the Paris Observatory with colleagues. He told the Academy what he had seen. Touching her in the paroxysms, he said, gave "a shock like that given by the discharge of a Leyden jar." He asked for a commission.

The commission included Arago, Becquerel, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Babinet, Rayer and Pariset. It met at the Jardin des Plantes. Over about five days of testing, almost nothing happened. Only the sudden, violent movements of her chair were seen. On 9 March 1846, the verdict came. The report suggested that "certain habitual manœuvres hidden in the feet and hands could have produced the observed fact." The communications on Mlle Cottin "should be considered as never having been sent in." On 10 April 1846, the effects stopped.

Her family and her impresario, Nicolas Cholet, had been exhibiting her for money. Cholet later declared that she had lost her powers. Louis Figuier, writing in 1875, treated the episode as a debunking. Supporters answered that the commission never accounted for what Arago had seen first. Albert de Rochas argued in 1896 that the effects were already fading by the time of the Academy tests. Later writers pointed to puberty, or to a nervous malady.

It remains one of the earliest poltergeist-type cases examined by a national scientific academy. Within months, the "Electrical Girl" had reached an American medical journal. Some see her as a forerunner of the Paris table-turning craze. A long-told story said she drowned herself in the Seine. Michel Ganivet's 2015 book says that is false. She lived on in obscurity, among ordinary people.