After two years of alternating neglect at home and exorcism by the Church, the little girl was sent to be brought up by nuns and proved to be a devout, cheerful, and charming member of the household. For nine years she lived there more or less free from ‘demonic’ interference, but in 1460, when she was sixteen, the Mother Abbess died and the convent dissolved itself in the face of demands by the Bishop of Padua that it reform its hitherto lax discipline. A new abbess and new nuns then brought a very different atmosphere to the convent, and it was their more rigorous régime which encouraged Eustochium to make the first step towards aking the veil. Almost as soon as she had done this, however, her behaviour altered and she alternated between being disobedient, rude, and violent, and as devout and humble as she had been before. These changes were a prelude to what appears to have been a period of demonic possession, and as a consequence of her speeches and actions during this time she suffered imprisonment within the convent for three months as the rest of the community sought to give themselves a respite from the outrageous things she said and did during her fits. Once released from confinement, however, Eustochium was subjected to even more violent preternatural attack.

At one time he dragged her violently along the ground to the very door of the convent as if he were bent on pushing her out altogether; at other times he lifted her up high into the air and then suddenly let her drop like a stone, until it seemed a miracle that she did not break her bones. Still more frequently he scarified the skin of her neck with a network of cuts, severing the veins sometimes so that she lost quantities of blood and fainted away from sheer weakness. Constantly it happened that he tied her up with cords or bound a rough haircloth round her loins which chafed her skin intolerably. Frequently again he crushed her head or washed it with ice-cold water, covering it afterwards with damp cloths and thus producing acute neuralgia. Three or four times every day he forced her to drink great vessels of spring water, especially in the morning when she got up, his object being to injure the organs of digestion, and there were occasions when he put lime into it or varnish or some other disgusting matter; and finally on one occasion he made her eat sponge fried with stinking oil which, as the doctors judged, would alone have been sufficient to cause her death.[80]

Nor was this all. At one point, recorded her later biographer, Father Giulio Cordara, ‘the evil spirit transported her on to a beam high up in the roof and there threatened to let her fall if she refused to make over her soul to him’, a ‘diabolic’ levitation witnessed by many of her horrified sisters. This is reminiscent of Christina’s being dragged out of bed and lifted up to the roof of her room while a sword, brandished by a hand unseen by the several spectators, was waved above her head. Eustochium died in 1469, her health and body fatally undermined by the attacks to which she had been subjected for the last eight years of her life.

The violent hostility directed against Eustochium may seem to resemble that of demonic obsession rather than that usually associated with a poltergeist, but it is clear, as Christina’s case illustrates, that both during the period we are discussing and much later, a simple and obvious distinction between demon and poltergeist is not to be had. Compare with Christina and Eustochium, for example, the nineteenth-century cases of Marie Julie Jahenny and Dominica Clara Moes of Luxembourg. Marie Julie, like Christina, was a stigmatic and suffered assaults upon her person, and between April and September 1873 endured a particularly concentrated period of hostility which saw crucifixes and relics thrown on the floor, her clothes torn, her body scratched, and filthy rags stuffed into her mouth – all actions attributed by her and witnesses to the Devil. On the other hand, Dominica Clara, Marie’s contemporary and another stigmatic, found that the entity plaguing her often acted rather more like a poltergeist than an obsessing demon. Personal items she used in her devotions would disappear and turn up again unexpectedly; large stones were thrown forcibly at her bed; crockery was broken; she was drenched in dirty water and had to sleep in a chair; her arms were covered in burns and her face with cuts; and in 1876 one of the sisters belonging to the convent of which Dominica was prioress recorded:

One evening I heard a tremendous disturbance going on in our dormitory. I rushed up to our dear Mother who lay there ill and in bed. I had great difficulty in pushing open the door, and I found the whole room turned upside down. All the bedding of our five beds lay tumbled in confusion upon the ground. In the middle of the heap and broken to pieces was a crucifix which used to hang at our Mother’s bedside, while under everything else I discovered a crown of thorns and a rosary.[81]

It seems, then, that there is, or has developed over time, a pattern of poltergeistlike behaviour which – in addition to lithobolia, transportation of objects, and other interferences with the person, such as the mutilation of clothes, all or some of which can be observed in cases where the targeted individual is not necessarily deeply religious – amounts to a sequence of violent activities directed at the body of someone for whom religion is the principal focus of her or his life and who may also be suffering emotional disturbance of a more or less serious nature. Now, this raises an obvious question. Are we to assume that the emotional disturbance provides a psychic opening for some malevolent entity to enter the world of matter and draw upon the                                         

energies emitted by that disturbance in such a way as to enable it to perpetrate its violence: and should we, bearing in mind that the accounts of these various attacks give the overwhelming impression of an intelligent, discarnate, external agency at work, take the religious component to be the dominant feature of and hence the key to understanding these reported phenomena: or are we to speculate that the phenomena are self-generated (not necessarily with awareness and deliberation aforehand) and are therefore caused by the individual’s emotional turbulence which turns energy into action in ways unperceived by the sufferer and little if at all understood by the commentator?

Unfortunately, asking who were those who reported these incidents and who were their audience does not help resolve the difficulties because, with the exception of Eleonore Zugun’s reporters and observing audiences who by and large did not share her own religious faith, or at least not to any profound degree, reporters and audiences were at one with the intense religious devotion of the sufferer or focus. Hence their attribution of the phenomena to an external agency they called ‘the Devil’ is only to be expected. For the moment, therefore, all we can do is observe the development of such patterns of poltergeist-like behaviour, co-existent but not necessarily co-terminal with the general behaviour of those entities taken to be poltergeists, and see whether they turn out to be a feature peculiar to a hostile entity’s dealing with deeply religious individuals, or whether emotional disturbance in the individual without the accompaniment of intense religious devotion produces the same level of targeted malevolence.