A table was placed inside the circle five feet away from the medium. On it was a lamp with a red shade, a bell, a plate with flour on it, a little slate and piece of chalk. An upside-down wastepaper basket stood next to the table with a music box on it, both with luminous ribbons attached; a typewriter was on the floor near the baron; and luminous felt rings were strewn about the floor, some with luminous strings attached. The room was illuminated by a covered dark red ceiling light and the little table lamp. Mann states that Willi gave off light, as did  the rings and the objects, so “the field of operations was visible; and after a little while the top of the table seemed really quite well lighted.”

Willi went into a deep trance, as if he was asleep. His head drooped sideways on his chest until his familiar “spirit communicator” Minna made her presence known through his body movements, and responded to questions by squeezes of Mann’s hand while he controlled Willi. Initially nothing happened, so they took a break; and even after that, almost an hour passed with nothing at all. Then, with Willi in a deep trance, Minna returned. The baron and another sitter encouraged and cajoled her into performing, and she requested the handkerchief. Familiar with what this meant, the baron dropped a handkerchief on the floor near the table, where it lay, “a white gleam in the twilight,” while the participants leaned toward it and chattered at Minna’s request. Mann describes what happened next as he watched the handkerchief:

Before all our eyes, with a swift, assured, vital, almost beautiful movement it rose out of the shadow into the rays of light, which colored it reddish; I say rose, but rose is not the word. It was not that it was wafted up, empty and fluttering. Rather it was taken and lifted, there was an active agency in it, like a hand, you could see the outline of the knuckles, from which it hung down in folds; it was manipulated from the inside, by some living thing, compressed, shaken, made to change its shape, in the two or three seconds during which it was held up in the lamplight. Then, moving with the same quiet assurance, it returned to the floor.

It was not possible—but it happened. May lightning strike me if I lie. Before my uncorrupted eyes, which would have been just as ready to see nothing, in case nothing had been there, it happened. Indeed, it presently happened again. Scarcely had the handkerchief reached the floor when it came back up again into the light, this time faster than before; plainly and unmistakably we saw something clutching it from within, the members of something that held it—it looked to be narrower than a human hand, more like a claw. Down, and up again, for the third time up. The handkerchief was violently shaken by the something inside it, and tossed toward the table, with a poor aim, for it hung by one corner and then fell to the floor.

Mann was shaken. “Never before had I seen the impossible happening despite its own impossibility.” He held Willi’s wrists while someone else had custody of his knees. “Not a thought, not a notion, not the shadow of a possibility that the boy sleeping here could have done what was happening there. And who else? Nobody. And still it was done. It gave me a queasy feeling.”

Next, the bell with its gleaming ribbons and shiny metal was placed on the overturned wastepaper basket by the baron. Then it too was lifted up—“impossible, of course, but it is taken by a hand, for what else can take a bell by the handle?”—and it was rung violently, carried through the air, rung again, and flung under one of the sitters’ chairs. “Slight seasickness. Profound wonderment, with a tinge, not of horror, but of disgust,” Mann writes.

The wastebasket was knocked over, then lifted high into the air illuminated by its ribbons and the red light, and then tumbled to the floor. Again, reacting to the intellectual affront of these events, Mann felt “a mild form of seasickness.” He left Willi’s side and sat in the circle near the table, while somebody else took the job of holding Willi’s wrists. Minna then made an effort to turn the handle of the music box. “Tell it to stop,” the baron told Mann. Mann commanded her several times to stop and start the music box, and she obeyed each time. “You sit there, bending forward, you command the impossible, and you are obeyed, by a spook, a panic-stricken little monster from behind the world…”

Then Minna shoved and tossed the illuminated rings on the floor and carried one with a string to the table and put it down. She made knocking sounds on the table. “Tut, tut, you hole-and-corner fish out of water, why, and with what monstrous knuckles, are you knocking like that on our good table, before our face and eyes?” Mann thought to himself. At that moment, Minna flung a felt ring into his face.

The baron suggested that Minna “do something useful” and go to the typewriter on the floor, which had paper in it ready for use. Mann writes:

The thing seems able to listen to reason, it desists from its efforts at the box. We wait. And, on my honor, the writing-machine begins to click, there on the floor. This is insane. Even after all we have already seen, it is in the highest degree startling, bewildering, ridiculous; the fantasticality of the thing is even fascinating. Who is it writing on the machine? Nobody. Nobody is lying there on the carpet in the dark and playing on the machine, but it is being played on. Willi’s arms and legs are held fast. Even if he could get an arm free, he could not reach the machine with it; and as for his feet, even if they could reach that far they could not touch single types on the machine, they would tread on several at once. No, it is not Willi. But there is nobody else. What else can we do but shake our heads and laugh? The writing is being done with the right touch, a hand is certainly touching the keys—but is it really only one hand? No, if you ask me, there are surely two hands; the sounds are too quick for one, they sound as though proceeding from the fingers of a practiced typist; we come to the end of a line, the bell rings, we hear the carriage being drawn back, the new line begins—the sound breaks off and a pause ensues.

Then, in front of a dark black curtain, a little apparition appeared. It was “vague, and whitely shimmering,” lighted by a sort of flash of white lightning that came from within it. Then it was gone. The baron asked Minna to put her hand in the plate of flour and leave an impression, but she didn’t. The séance ended. A “nonsensical jumble of large and small letters” was found on the previously blank typewriter page. Mann writes:

I am in that intriguing and confounded state of mind in which reason commands us to recognize what reason on the other hand would reject as impossible. The nature of the phenomena I have described makes it inevitable that the idea of deception should afterward haunt the minds even of those who saw with their own eyes; only to be laid, over and over, by the evidence of the senses, by the reflection that deception was definitely impossible.

Despite feeling seasick, Mann writes that he couldn’t resist going to one more séance, so that he could see the handkerchief rise up into the red light before his eyes. “For the sight has got into my blood somehow, I cannot forget it. I should like once more to crane my neck, and with the nerves of my digestive apparatus all on edge with the fantasticality of it, once more, just once, see the impossible come to pass.” I can strongly relate to his reaction—it is unforgettable and deeply compelling to witness these unnerving, “impossible” events, and all these years later, I too felt the strong calling to relive them after attending my first séance. Thankfully my digestive tract was not affected; I did not feel queasy or seasick—quite the opposite—as I will explain in a coming chapter.

I have to wonder if Mann would have needed to be rushed to the hospital if he had witnessed something even more impossible: the creation of a visible, moving hand. As hard as it is to believe, some mediums can facilitate the materialization of hands with joints and fingernails that are warm and fleshy, that touch people, bang on solid objects, and carry things around the room. In some rare cases, they dissolve while people are actually holding them.

http://www.harrypricewebsite.co.uk/Seance/Schneider/schneider-intro.htm