The Via Bava Poltergeist: Cesare Lombroso and the Bottle-Smashing Spirits of the Bottiglieria Cinzano, Turin (1900)

Turin, 1900. At Via Bava No. 6, in the district of Borgo Vanchiglia, stood the Bottiglieria Cinzano, a wine and liquor shop. A large hall with many tables. A loft upstairs where the owners slept, a small room for the shop boy, and below, the cellar. The owners were the Fumeros, from Nole Canavese, and the shop boy was 13.

Early November. Wine bottles put in a kitchen cupboard in the evening were gone by morning, along with food. The owners stayed up from closing time to opening time to watch. The bottles still vanished. The house cat, wrote the French investigator Paul Joire, "seemed to be taken with strange mad attacks; it jumped as though possessed."

Around 16 November, it escalated. Liqueur vessels tipped over, furniture and saucepans "commenced to dance about", and shoes flew out of the kitchen. Bottles broke in the cellar. Signora Fumero remembered it plainly: "The house seemed shaken by an earthquake: all the chairs began to fly here and there." She is reported to have fainted.

La Stampa ran the story as "Gli spiriti devastatori di via Bava", on 10 or 19 November depending on the source. The shop filled. Joire described a crowd struggling for entrance and drinkers making up epigrams about the spirits. The police came. They were powerless.

27 November. Raynero, a family friend who ran the Annunziata baths on Via Po, watched shoes come flying through the air from the kitchen. The boy was washing bottles. He stayed in view the whole time. Down in the cellar, several bottles toppled and broke "under my eyes".

Professor Cesare Lombroso went down to see for himself. "I went into the cellar, at first in complete darkness, and heard a noise of broken glasses and bottles rolled at my feet." He set six lighted candles on a fairly large table in the middle of the cellar, but the light had no effect. The bottles "were rolled, as by unseen hands, in the direction of the table, and broken to pieces beside it." He looked for threads or cords and found none.

Then he tested the household. Signora Fumero, whom he described as in poor health and subject to hallucinations, was sent to Nole. The boy was sent to his parents outside the city. Once the boy left, the events stopped.

Lombroso was convinced. He tied the phenomena to the adolescent, whose motivity, he believed, had externalised spontaneously. Under police pressure to end the crowds, Fumero publicly declared that he had driven the spirits away.

Sceptics see other possibilities. A 13-year-old at the centre of a poltergeist is a familiar pattern, though Raynero said the boy stayed in view the whole time. The crowds brought a business boom. And Lombroso had already accepted the medium Eusapia Palladino as genuine, a judgement the BMJ questioned in 1895. No hoax confession or formal debunking has been found.

Lombroso wrote up the case in the Annals of Psychical Science and in his 1909 book Ricerche sui fenomeni ipnotici e spiritici. The chemist Livio Silva published a booklet in Paris, and Joire wrote about it in Psychical and Supernormal Phenomena. Later Italian retellings added a skeleton with a dagger buried under the cellar. No early source mentions it, and the first accounts report no apparitions, lights or voices. Only bottles, falling.