A strange thing happened one day at a small shoe shop, the Villica Footwear Company, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Shoe boxes kept flying off shelves for no apparent reason. The activity seemed to be centered on a young man named Carmine Mirabelli. The young man was promptly dismissed from his job and transported to Juqueri Asylum where he spent 19 days under observation by various doctors. The conclusion was he was not normal yet not sick either. One of the doctors, Felipe Aché stated that Mirabelli apparently had abilities, “… the result of the radiation of the nervous forces we all have but that he has in extraordinary excess.”¹ Further testing showed that Mirabelli was able to make a skull rotate on top of a glass by merely looking at it leaving behind a type of globular liquid.  The director, Dr. E. Costa, recognized the young man's peculiarities to be due to psychism. After Dr. Costa did further testing, he was the first to verify that Mirabelli was a medium. Costa was fascinated by Mirabelli and under strict controls had him demonstrate his ability for teleportation to an assembly of doctors who were confounded. When the news of the experiment found its way to the Brazilian newspapers, Mirabelli’s psychic career was launched. Mirabelli would spend much of the rest of his life under the scrutiny of scientist, doctors and skeptics. There is more recorded unquestioned phenomena attributed to Mirabelli than anyone else with some exception to Daniel Dunglas Holmes.

It is said Mirabelli was telepathic, clairvoyant, precognitive, an automatic writer (capable of writing in one language while speaking in another) and a trance artist. He could speak more than 30 languages, German, French, Dutch, English, Greek, Polish, Syrian, Albanian, Czech, four Italian dialects among them: Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, and several African dialects, in addition to Latin, Ancient Greek, and his native tongue, Portuguese.  According to the Encyclopedia of the Unexplained: While entranced, it is said that Mirabelli wrote treatises in the style of Lombroso, Kepler, Voltaire, and Galileo. These works included an essay on evil written in Hebrew and signed by Moses, a tract on the instability of empires by Alexander the Great, and an essay on the mysterious things between heaven and Earth by Shakespeare. Although unable to verify such prestigious authorship.²

He was never musically trained but under trance could sing and play a piano with great skill. Before a gathering of doctors, who lent their names to a deposition, Mirabelli caused a violin to be played by spirit hands. At a party with more than a thousand guests in attendance, the medium conducted an invisible orchestra of trumpets and drums which entertained the astonished partygoers with a lively march.³

He was telekinetic (often described as poltergeist activity) moving objects and was also capable of producing objects out of thin air and making them disappear just as easily. Mirabelli could also levitate and materialize dead people. At a séance, Mirabelli once materialized the spirit bodies of a marshal and a bishop, both long deceased, and both of whom were instantly recognizable to many who had assembled were in attendance. His levitation skills included being able to rise to a height of about six feet and remain suspended there as one witness claimed for at least three minutes.

Mirabelli was born in 1889 in Botucatu in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil. As a youth he was very interested in religion and had hoped to enter into the service of the Catholic Church but fate obviously had other plans for him. According to his biographer, Eurico de Goes he had great energy and charisma and was equally excitable and impatient. He was very tolerant, good natured and generous. Even though he embraced spiritualism, he possessed excellent business acumen and was quite capable of making a living in the mundane world. He founded and directed spiritual centers in several towns in Brazil. His exhibitionism made him unpopular amongst orthodox Spiritists but he carried on none-the-less.

As he got older, Mirabelli didn't lose his strange gifts.   There are records on file with reports of phenomena being observed up to 1950, a few months before his death. On Monday, April 30th, 1951, Carmine Mirabelli and his son Caesar had left their home. Mirabelli was crossing the road to buy milk, leaving his son chatting to a shoe black on the side of the road, when suddenly a black Ford car, according to Caesar's recollections, turned the corner and ran over his father leaving him in a state of coma.   According to the death certificate, Mirabelli had a skull fracture and died in hospital aged 62.   His body was entombed the next day, on the evening of May 1st, 1951 in the cemetery at San Paulo, Brazil.⁴

The talents of Mirabelli were never debunked with one possible exception:

In 1990, Dr. Gordon Stein found a picture in the collection of the London Society for Psychical Research that depicted Mirabelli in a white laboratory coat levitating to a height of several feet in the air. The photograph was inscribed to Theodore Besterman, an SPR researcher who was known to have visited the medium in August of 1934. At the time, Besterman had prepared a contradictory report about Mirabelli's paranormal abilities which, according to Mirabelli's defenders, reflected more upon Besterman's inexperience as a psychical researcher than the medium's ability to produce genuine phenomena. In 1992, Guy Lyon Playfair published an illustrated article about the incident in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in which he points out that the famous levitation photograph reveals signs of careful retouching which eliminated the ladder under Mirabelli's feet. Proponents of Mirabelli's mediumship argue that if the photograph was deliberately faked by Mirabelli, it would be the first evidence of trickery on his part ever discovered by any investigator. ⁵

Check this site for some an excellent photo collection of Mirabelli:

http://felixcircle.blogspot.com/2008/06/part-2-of-lost-mirabelli.html

Resources:

^{1. This Perilous Medium, Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time, Guy Lyon Playfair, pg. 1952}

^{2., 3. 5.  http://www.unexplainedstuff.com/Mediums-and-Mystics/Mediums-and-Channelers-Carlos-mirabelli-1889-1951.html}

^{4. http://www.the-voicebox.com/mirabellicarmine.htm}