How Spiritualism Works

you know what, I'm gonna go to the studio. Yeah, because I know it'll sound great in here, and I know there won't be dogs and children, and uh, everyone should feel good about it because I have not seen another human being. Yeah, in the building. Security didn't a security guard try to run you off the road when you were parking. He didn't try. He stopped me literally in the parking lot. Was like, what are you doing here? I was like, I'm going to my job, and he

said okay, he said stay home, save lives. But before we left, I mean apparently since I left. Uh, they have these. Um, there's a bottle of microphone sanitizer. WHOA, there are headphone sanitized or not sanitized, but just disposable headphone covers. Sweet, and I feel more safe here than I do at my house. What microphone sanitizer that sounds really made up? Yeah, it's um. We'll go ahead and buzz market. No I won't because it smells bad, and I didn't want to buzz market and then say it

smells bad. It's apple flavor, which would make Emily just like turn over in her bed. It's a it's a good um jolly rancher flavor. Not the best scent, though. I hate it when they add sent to stuff that doesn't need scent. Try finding an unscented garbage back these days. Uh? Is it tough too? Yeah? Man, every single one of them. I even got some that said unscented and it still smells like something you've missed it. In parentheses underneath it

says mostly we can't help ourselves one percent. Rosemary Well, I don't have my over the ear headphones right now. I just look one of you mas long scarves wrapped around my head twice to keep from your audio bleeding onto the track through my microphone. You either look like Lawrence of Arabia or like you just wandered in with a headed tree. Yeah, I had to kept slipping off with the lawrence of Arabia. Look, so I had to do it the other way around. So now it looks

like I have a nineteent century toothache. Oh, man, to me another picture. It's not it's not very comfortable. My Adam's apple is being pressed towards the back of my throat right now. Yeah, what was the deal with that whole toothache thing? Like? Was there ice in there something? Or was it just like I just die their gin shutting help? Knowing that era, there were probably some sort of like razor blade and heroin concoction that would just scrape the area where the tooth was and inject you

with dope to keep you from complaining. Doctor Dr Payne's new chin wrap now with more leeches right from the makers of microphone sanitizer. All right, let's get into this. We've already been goofing around for too long. Let's just finish, just get this over with. Let's get serious and talk about spiritualism, shall we. This is a great, great job by grab Stir, great idea by you, and it'll be

a great episode. Yeah, grab Stir, We we asked him to help us out with this, so we put together a world class article for us, and um, when we asked him, we said, hey, how about spiritualism because my brother wrote his dissertation on that should be simple and I mean just afforded us that it did. It didn't even like a racist brother's first name. He just did

a strike through and wrote ed after easy Money. So, um, it is like a really really interesting phenomena and something I think we kind of take for granted because it pops up everywhere in our world in pop culture. I mean, it's just a part of everything from crystal balls to seances, to Weiji boards to tarot cards, all of this stuff. Movies. Yeah, as a matter of fact, I ran across so you know, dan Ackroyd's huge into UFOs, right, I didn't know that. Actually,

he's also enormous into spirits and ghosts. It's actually one of the impetus is Yeah, I think so of him writing Ghostbusters. He's actually a fourth generation spiritualist with a capital at like the Church Spiritualism. He was raised that way. His his father, grandfather, and great grandfather were all spiritualists and that's how he was raised as well, um, so it does this kind of it's so permeated our our culture. It's weird to think of a time when it wasn't there.

But there actually was this period starting and riot about in the middle of the nineteenth century going well into the twentieth century where there was a movement that basically said, the spirit world is there, it exists. When you die, your personality survives, and some people actually have a talent for communicating with the spirits and the spirit world, and we're going to start doing that. And that was spiritualism,

the spiritualist movement. Yeah. Um, and ed uh pointed out, which we should as well, that ghosts and things like that and ghost stories they had been around people have been around everyone since the dawn of humankind has tried to figure out like what happens after you die too, people visit, do they take on, you know, other other forms or whatever. So that's different than what we're talking about.

What we're talking about is spiritualism in that it became a a big scam in way to get money out of people who are in pain for my friends or loved one's death sadly, Yeah, yeah, for sure. Um, but there is like a through a thread through there where. Um. This same era, the same period, in this belief in communicating with the spirits and the idea that you could go to a seance and talk to your dead loved

one or whatever. It produced this other group of people who said, yes, there are tons of fraudsters and hucksters out there who are taking advantage of this, but there's also this real, Um, there's a the real version of of it actually does exist, and we're gonna apply this new fangled thing called science to investigate it. And that produced that that era of people like Charles Fort or Harry Price who visited the Borerley Rectory the most haunted

place in England. Um. Or uh, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Um, like those guys. I know I'm trying, not a new version. UM. Like these guys though they they were they they believed in this stuff and the possibility of it that they also believed in the possibly of applying science to it, and even if science couldn't explain it, it didn't mean

that it didn't exist. And then there was another group who were what we would recognize today is like pure skeptics, like the James Randy's of the day who all followed in the footsteps of Harry who DENI is we'll see who kind of created this. So you had hucksters, believers who were skeptical and genuine pure skeptic dicks who believed

none of it was correct. Yeah, and what I mentioned before, like all the previous attempts to do stuff like this, pre mid eighteen hundreds in largely the Northeast United States, it was more religious like prophets and shaman and stuff like that. Spiritualism was the birth of the Madame Cleo's of the world. Uh Ed refers to it as a democratization, and that's one way to look at it, but it was. It was the idea that hey, if you are chosen and you are special, um, you could you know, it's

not like you have to be some religious leader. You can just be a regular person with the gift exactly. Yeah, which was a huge sea change. And um, there are basically a few things that kind of came together for this mentality this um this fertile kind of imagination of this pocket of America and western New York where all of this began to kind of take shape. And one of those things was the frontier, this frontier mentality um.

The historian Frederick Jackson Turner called it the significance of the frontier in American history, and he basically said, man, the people who are living out there on the frontier, they're living on the edge of civilization, the the leading edge right right beyond that what they're coming up against. And and this is highly debatable because part of what they were coming up against was Native America. It just wasn't a civilization in the forum that any European had

ever encountered before. But the idea was that the people who are living on the frontier and expanding westward were basically being forced just by virtue of having to survive under these weird conditions outside of culture and civilization in the European sense, that that they were having to abandon that culture and basically make it up as they went along and recreate a new culture from the frontier, and

that that just kind of through the rules out the window. Yeah, this is one of my favorite things when we do topics, that when you can look back at a movement and point to factors that at any other time in history, if just one of these might not have taken you know, might not have influenced it, that it might not have happened at all. There's something about that that I've always really loved. And uh, this is a perfect example. The

frontier life is one. Religious fervor is another. Uh. And specifically in New York in the eighteen hundreds, people were really caught up on this religious fervor and it kind of went from town to town and there was no uh, there was no big religious authorities in the area. They were out on the frontier. They had no structured hierarchy

of religion, and so again they could just make up stuff. Uh. And I'm not saying that's not tied to this next sidence, because I don't want to turn anyone off, but a lot of religion sprang out from this region during that time, like Millerism and Mormon is um and uh, Quakers and Shakers kind of had a a resurgence, basically a shot in the arm, just because of this fervor going on

at the time. And I couldn't quite put where um Millerism, why it seems so familiar, And then I remember that that was the woman who gave birth eventually to the Seventh day Adventists and that popped up in the Kellogg episode. Remember yeah, yeah, Millerism was where it all started. But that was and that really kind of indicates And I love it when things just things we talked about before,

like have even more context from something else. But that that just kind of goes to show you, like, this is the kind of place where somebody could be like I'm in contact with the spirits or Jesus came and hung out with me or whatever, and this is what I what I know and what I've been told. So, um, let's start a religion based on it, and not even necessarily just religions too, but also like social movements, like utopian societies where into your food twenty times, so you'll

poopies here exactly, um. Or you know, women have equal equal rights as men, which is just completely radical. Or um, how about fifty of us lived together and just by the fact that we all lived together were married according to this utopian society, just just whatever you wanted to to do, you kind of could because the frontier through the rules out the window, or at the very least cultural traditions that most people are raised into. When that's

not there, people make up their own. Yeah, for sure. Uh. And the third big factor that UM that you mentioned was we haven't talked about yet with science. And you talked a little bit about science at the beginning, but the idea that in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, when we're really learning a lot more than we ever have about science and things like electro electromagnetism and things that you can't see, but science is saying, oh, it's there.

This kind of fed the spiritualist movement because you know, that's something else that you can't see that other people are saying is there. So they're like, well, hey, if science is saying there are things out there we can't quite explain, but trust me it's real, then why shouldn't I believe this stuff too? Yeah? Or well this electric like electro magnetism, maybe that actually explains how spirit survive

after death. It was a really wide open time as far as you know, um acceptance of possibilities rather than no science has said this is not possible, or it can't explain this, or you can't see it with your own eyes, so it won't It doesn't it doesn't jibe like. There was a lot more willingness among people who were scientifically minded to say, well, maybe this is a good explanation of that. Let's investigate. Yeah, the birth of science and medicine was a really crazy time. It really was.

It really was. So should we take a break? Yes, come on, man, Yes, I think you're you're beard holsters on too tight. I haven't been able to feel my nose for about fifteen minutes. All right, we'll go, uh rub your nose and bring some feeling back, and we'll talk about some of the furty ritualists. Okay, I'm gonna

say it's spiritualists. Nice um. And there there was actually so there was a bunch of factors that led to the beginning of all of this, including there was one that, um that I also came across that we need to mention, a guy named Andrew Jackson Davis who combined ideas of the German hypnotist Franz Mesmer with the Swedish philosopher of the soul, Emmanuel swedenborg Um. They were both eighteenth century.

He kind of brought them together, and he was a bit of a nobody, but he emerged very very soon after the Fox sisters became celebrities as a founder of the spiritualist movement. Almost like he was doing it off in isolation at the same time that all of us began. Yeah,

so the Fox sisters figure into this really quite largely. Uh. And you can even pinpoint a date to what you might consider the birth of the modern American spiritualist movement is March thirty one, eighty eight in Hydesville, New York, near Rochester, at a farm. This Fox family lived there, real people, not a family of cute little red for fuzzy creatures voiced by George Clooney exactly. Uh. Mr and Mrs Fox had three daughters. Actually one was much older.

Her name was Leiah. She was nine seen in twenty three years older. Whow was that funny? Because I saw a picture of her, and she's like the spitting image of Jeffrey Ross. You gotta look her up, Jeff That's that's what Lea Fox looked like. I didn't see. I saw the picture of the three of him, and I didn't get a good close up. That's an unfortunate look for him and her. Yeah, anybody really? Uh? And I think he would admit that too. Oh yeah, but he's

doing all right there. What if he had really thin skin? Ros Master he couldn't take a joke against him something. Have you seen that Bumping Mike show. It's pretty good. Uh No, is that the roast competition thing? Yeah? He and Davidtel just sit there and roast people. It's really good. Man. I used to love Davidtel back in the day. He has just turned into like the weird like comedy genius friend that that Jeffrey Ross has, and it shines through

in this awesome I'll check it out. So the Fox family, older daughter Lea was nice teen and twenty three years older than younger Kate and Maggie or I guess Maggie and Kate if you're going in that order. And on that night in March eight, they heard these rapping, knocking sounds and they didn't know where it was coming from,

and that kind of kick started this whole thing. In a weird way, this led and we'll talk about the more specifics, but in a weird way, this led to them eventually saying, wait a minute, we can make some money if we convince people that young Kate and Maggie are a conduit to the other side. Yeah. The the thing is is like when it went from you know, like, oh, there's a ghost rapping or knocking like a Poulter guyst

kind of thing too. This ghost will respond to questions from the sisters through rapping and knocking, like how old is Maggie? And it would wrap like fifteen times or something like that. And that that really caught a lot of people's attention. And Maggie and Kate moved in with Leah. And apparently, from what I read, it was Leah whose idea it was to take the show on the road try to scam people out of money. It was not a super great person from from what I read. Yeah,

I just sorry. I was thinking of a rapping ghost and right got sidetracked. George Washington And I'm here to say I love fruity pebbles in a mate a way. You know what's funny is I was going to do that exact same thing, but for the Fox family. That's like the go to rap for guys like us. Oh, it totally is guys who can't wrap. Yeah, I'm here to say something, something something in a something way. The Zach Morris method, I think, is what that is. I

wonder if that's based on an actual rap. I guess there was one at some point that really did that, right, Yeah, I think Blondie was the popular. Um my name is Blondie. I'm here to say I'm gonna try wrap because it's popular today. Exactly. So, uh, where what were you saying? I was laughing. I didn't even notice. I'm sorry, Oh, just that it was basically I was laying at Leah's feet for corrupting the younger sisters. Yeah, she kind of.

She ended up managing them as a unit, I think later on, if I'm not mistaken, But there aren't great records of everything going on at the time. But um, the idea was that Kate and Maggie were the ones. It wasn't really her parents, but they're the ones who could actually communicate with this barn spirit. And so they said, you know what, they not only can talk to this spirit.

Media starts, you know, getting ahold of these stories, and obviously back then that it was a very big deal with something like this coming out in the media with not a lot else going on. But they moved and would go away to other places and said, wherever they go, ghosts are talking to them. So you guys, my daughters are talented and gifted. They're not just talking to the what we think is a murder victim from our previous house,

right right, which which just changed everything. And also rather suspiciously, Leah suddenly realized that she was able to communicate with spirits too, So all three of the sisters were able to But yeah, not just that one murder victim in their house that had been the original ghost, but just about any ghost. And this was the beginning of the spiritualist movement. Basically a trank by a couple of teenage girls that got way out of hand really fast. Yeah,

and so what do they do. They start having these uh private sessions where people would pay money, and they would wear these big long dresses that were in fashion at the time, and they would no one's exactly sure the exact mechanism, but they would do some sort of toe knocking or something where they couldn't be seen. And that was the Morse code that they said was the ghost speaking to them. So it was it's really um.

They they had like a little wooden stool under the table with them and they would take off their shoes surreptitiously, and from what I can gather, they could pop their knuckle of their toe up and down with enough force that it would make a thud on that wooden stool. It was. Yeah, they should have just been like, forget all this spirits stuff, but this weird thing, um. But

that that was that was the phantom knocking. And we know that because Maggie later on confessed to the New York Tribune maybe or the Post one of them, um and and said like, this is how, this is how we did it actually in an effort to take her sister Lea down. UM. But it ended up taking the spiritualist movement down in large part. But that was it, like thumping your knuckle on a wooden stool. They did this for forty forty years. They made a living around

the world doing that and created a new religion from it. Yeah, and the UM. By the time the spiritualism fad sort of died away, the two younger sisters were and she recanted that confession, by the way, but everyone's like, yeah, you already said it could try, um. But the two younger sisters uh and Maggie especially were in pretty bad

shape with alcoholism. And they died sort of in a call your brother's sq way, very quietly and uh, fairly destitute in New York City in the eighteen nineties, trapped under newspapers maybe, but now they they had very interesting but also very sad lives like Um, I think Maggie married a skeptic and he not not a good move, right he died. He talked her out of doing spiritualism,

but she went back after he died. Kate married another spiritual since she had a huge career um touring the world as a spiritualist, made a lot of money, um, but but apparently lost it all. And Leah again was just kind of I guess, a bit of a villain in this story. Where's that movie? Man? I was wondering the exact same thing. It's crazy it hasn't been made fifty times already, you know, Yeah, that would be that would be pretty cool. I couldn't even find a good

documentary on it. Oh yeah, on them at least. I'm

sure there are plenty on that they're featured in. But and no matter how you look at it too, whether you look at it from the aspect of a believer who thinks like this is where it all started, these two sisters, and there's plenty of reasons to believe if you're a credulous person or um confiding, as Mark Twain would put it, that, you know, like the the Andrew Jackson Davis guy who who kind of started this thing on his own, supposedly wrote on March thirty one, eighty eight,

that spirit came to him and said, the work has begun. Um, we just started something over here, and then later found out about the Fox sisters. Like, there's all sorts of stuff you can believe, and so it's interesting from that respect. But also if you're just a pure gied in the Wold skeptic who do not believe in any kind of afterlife or soul or anything like that, it's equally interesting in a totally different way that this whole like almost

century long movement started from that. You know, Yeah, I just love it. I love this whole story. So it's sweeping the nation at this point by the eighteen fifties, and uh, we're gonna go over some of the different things that they would do, some of the methods that they would use to communicate with the other side, to fake communicate with the other side. Uh. The first one

is channeling um and these would be trance mediums. So this is like when you've seen in a movie when someone is just talking like I am in my regular voice and I'm entering the trance and I'm doing a lot of a lot of showy things, uh, to kind of get people, you know, pretty pumped up. I feel like they're spending their money. Well, you giving me pumped up, I'll tell you that. And all of a sudden, you know, I go into this other voice and I'm like a

small child. Uh, maybe the parents lost a child, or I'm a woman, or I'm Davis Jr. Hey, Brad, I just came back to say that, don't worry about me. This cat is doing just fine. I came back to say I love pretty pebbles in a major way. Invented rap. That's right. So, uh, if you were a good talented medium, that that meant that you were probably a pretty good actor.

You could probably do good voices. Um. Sometimes in the case of course Scott, who I know, we've talked about her before, her name, can't remember what, I have no recollection or talking about her. Yeah, it sounds super familiar. But she was one of the top mediums trans mediums because she was this very sort of demure, attractive young

lady and her whole demeanor was about that. And then she was apparently a great actor because she would go into this these big, heavy, gruff voices, and the gulf between who she was and who she was imitating was so great that everyone was just like, fantastic, Corra Scott,

you're a genius. Well also, yeah, she was like a little twelve year old girl when she started, and supposedly she would take the stage and confidently discuss like physics and philosophy and all that stuff because there was some authoritative spirit who had basically taken possession of her. Yeah, and uh, I looked up her picture and Kate Winslet I think is from my casting couches, who I would throw in that movie. Okay, not not as the twelve year old that would be weird unless they do some

sort of bad irishman d aging. But she looked enough like her, and she's a she's a great actor. So um So that's so. So. Channeling is what you kind of think of, where somebody becomes possessed, the medium becomes possessed. Right. Yeah. There's also ones where like they're they're just saying like, oh I can hear what they're saying, but you can't because they're speaking to me through telepathy, right, Okay, that that reminds me of John Edwards. Remember him crossing over

with John Edwards? Yeah, I can't picture him. I think if I saw a picture I would totally remember, though you would he would. What a weird time the nineties were as far as stuff like that goes, although I think his show ran from two thousand to two thousand four. Yeah, but that can sort of coincided with the uh Reverend Bob Dobbs and the televangelism and all that good stuff.

Um time. So then there's automatic writing was another big one too, And all of this should sound familiar again because the stuff just is so permeated in a pop

culture it's crazy. But automatic writing is instead of the medium's voice being taken over, the medium being possessed in and speaking as the spirit, um, the spirit took over their hand and they would start writing and so in just the same way Corus Scott would um have a completely different personality or a different voice or different accent or something like that. This, like the handwriting or the word usage or anything like that would be different than

the medium's normal handwriting. This is automatic writing and there was I'm trying to decide if I could do that. Well, sometimes they would use their non dominant hands, So if you want to change your handwriting, just do that to start. And then uh. There was a woman named Pearl Curran who wrote at least five thousand poems, novels and plays through automatic writing, all channeling the spirit of a seventeenth century woman from England named patients Worth. That's prolific. That's

a lot of words. And then what about direct voice? Yeah, direct voices When you are a medium, you contact a spirit and the spirit is so powerful that they just speak to you directly, like the medium is just sitting there with their mouth clothes. Uh. And this happened usually in a dark room where they would have a business partner just behind the curtain obviously use talking, or maybe they were just doing a bad ventriloquist kind of deal where they're it's dark enough where you can't really see

their lips moving throwing their voice. There was a woman named Leslie Flint is a medium. Oh really he looked like the old man from up. Oh did it make you cry when you looked at him? My daughter watch that? Here have these balloons? So yeah, Leslie. I actually love that name for a man, so and I don't know why I assumed, but he would recreate famous people like Sammy Davis Jr. But was it very good at it apparently,

which is kind of funny. That makes us a little bit more ridiculous and fun Well, I was reading um obituary about him that was written by somebody who attended one of his or a couple I think of his seances, and they said things like, you know a lot of times you could tell it like what the trickery was or whatever, but there are other times where he would like be speaking over the voice, which is tough to

do with ventriloquism. Or one time he was tested, he was made to hold colored water in his mouth while the spirit voice was speaking, and you're like, wow, you

know that's pretty interesting. And then you just think, well, there's there's always an explanation for it, um, And you know, maybe there's another person who who was a Confederate in the room who knows, but um, it just goes to show that even still even today, and this guy's obituary that was written in the nineties the nines um that they were like, yeah, you know, he was largely considered

a trickster fraud. But they'll still hedge and say, you know, but there were a couple of things and at the very least it's unexplained, which is pretty interesting and neat, but that doesn't necessarily mean that, Oh no, there really was a spirit that was talking in the room thanks to him. Amazing. So we had table turning. Uh, this is at a you know, this isn't like a theatrical performance. This is in a small room. Everyone and this kind

of think wegia board with this. It's the same sort of thing, except the wigia board would be the actual table that you're sitting at. You and everyone would put their hands on the table and then the table would move or tilt or something when you're asking questions. So it's inhabiting the furniture. Of course, what's going on here is either like knee movements or sometime they had uh these rings on the medium's finger that were slotted and

could move the table around without anyone noticing. Just another little parlor trick basically, yeah, or you know the idea that in your moving the table yourself like AUGI board. Um, I can't remember what it's called, but basically your your body is is moving without your brain being aware of it. And then there's also just the straight up power of suggestion, and this applies to table turning in a lot of

other stuff. But if you're saying, like if you're the medium at a seance and you said the table is rising, it's rising people who are willing to believe, a lot of people who went to seance is wanted to believe. We're already believed in this stuff. Just the power of suggestion could be like, oh, it is raising a little bit, I can feel it. I can tell kind of thing. Yeah. My favorite, and uh, I bet your favorite too is

ectoplasmic manifestations. Yeah, it's pretty good. This is when you would actually, as a spiritualist, produce something physical, something would manifest itself, uh, an actual substance. And it was they called it ectoplasm, and they could pull it from their boy and it was just basically something that they would make beforehand, um out of whatever. I mean, they would

make out out of all kinds of things. It was one story about someone who was actually gluing cut out faces from a magazine onto dolls and those were ectoplasm spirits. But they would hide these things sometimes like up their butt or in their other body cavities, and they would pull these things out. And some of the pictures that you see online if you look up ectoplasma eighteen hundreds seance is just the pictures themselves are hysterical and frightening

all at the same time. Yeah, and especially now when you look back and see them, you're like, how did anybody fall for that? And it's really important to keep in mind one they wanted to believe, but two, these seances would be carried out in dark rooms to where you couldn't see much at all. Um, you just suddenly see some luminous you know, cloth or something that you were led to believe was ectoplasm kind of what looked like floating in the middle of the table or something

like that. It's stuff that's that's really easy to explain. But in a darkened room that you've been sitting in for three hours communicating with spirits, you might be a lot more prone to to buy into it than under normal circumstances. Yeah, for sure. Uh, maybe you're a little drunk, right tipsy. Levitation was another big one, nice little uh party trick. Um. I actually could sort of do this

for a little while. The David Blaine method. I don't know if you ever saw his when he made himself levitate. It's just kind of hopping up and down and air right. No, it's it's you're thinking of trampolines. Oh, that's not the

same thing. People, people can see those. Uh No, it's all about the angle with the David Blaine method um of getting them to see you from the right angle to where what you're really doing is you're rising your body up with just one, like just your first three toes on your right foot, and you're and you're hiding that with your other foot, so it looks like you're just a sort of levitating a few inches off the ground, and then you act like you're unsteady, and then you

land back down and go, oh boy, that was a good one. That was pretty powerful. So wait a minute, David Blaine can raise his entire body weight with three toes, well, I mean he's on his toes. I just I mean I could do it at the time too. This is in the nineties. Man, that's impressive. I don't think I've ever had the kind of toe strength there that is required to do that. You can raise yourself up with one foot in a seated position. No, no, no, you're standing.

Oh oh yeah. So what you're doing is you're standing there and then you raise yourself off the ground with just the toes on your right foot, let's say, and you're keeping your left foot is shielding that so you can't quite see it, and it just creates if you got someone at the right angle. And I got pretty good at it. My roommate Justin was like, you're getting bet a mate, right, Oh, I'm getting drunk. Well, both

of those things were happening. I thought you were talking about, like, you know, like a fake here or something like that where they're sitting cross legged in their avocating I was like, to do that with just three toes, That in and of itself is pretty impressive, but it's all right, What are the other There's another couple of things they did too, What are the photography? Pretty pretty straightforward stuff where you know, this is the very beginnings of photography. So people didn't

understand double exposures unless you're a photographer. But if you were, you could do all sorts of neat stuff like double exposed something to put a ghostly face in the background over someone's shoulder. U. I saw one. I saw a spirit photograph where it was a ghostly arm. It also could have been a genie coming out of a bottle. One of the two. It looked exactly the same, but it was like that it was on a table, so they were like, this is a spirit arm levitating the table.

So they're like tying three things together. Table turning, levitating and spirit photography. Those are great. I think the spirit photography just because they were taking advantage of this new technology. People didn't even understand. It was like the deep fake of the time, and they were probably like everybody, we got maybe three years, Yeah, we better get prolific, and

then everyone's gonna be like, oh, that's just double exposure. Um. And then people like I said earlier to a lot of the new age stuff that's tied into spiritualism today, like tarot readings or um oh, I don't know, astrology, that kind of stuff that had nothing to do with this because spiritualists, all of it grew out of Christianity, so there was some Christian basis to all of the spiritualist practices. And even though in a lot of ways

it was extraordinarily her ridical. There was no religious leader in charge of anything. There was no scripture or doctrine or anything like that. It was still very much tied into and born out of Christianity, So stuff like occult things would have would have been very much frowned upon by spiritualists totally. Should we take another break, I think

we should. All right, We'll take another break and tell you about what the Civil War had to do with all of this right after this, all right, so, uh, pre Civil War in the United States, spiritualism was popular or it was booming, but it was more like the kind of thing that you did in a theater and you would go see it as a curiosity or you might just maybe even knew it was fake and it was just entertainment. There wasn't a lot going on back then.

Kind of penguins in a zoo today, like you know, they're fake, but it's still fun to look at, right and not. Why not go pay a nickel to see madam whatever, do her little do her little erotic uh, because we'll get into that he's got a little sexy at times. Do your little ghost, Jimmy. This is part of the part of the draw. The ghost Jimmy. But um, we need to talk about a couple of things here. That the Civil War for sure, but um, one of

the things that was going on. You know, we've been talking about a lot about the northeastern United States, and there's a very good reason it didn't take hold in the South. It's because the way Christianity was and so I might argue still is in the South didn't leave a lot of room. Um, the hierarchy didn't leave a lot of room for other schools of thought. And it was based sically, even though it wasn't necessarily cult. It was just shut down kind of from the beginning in

the South. They're like, we'll stick to our voodoo, thank you very much, exactly, keep that spiritualism stuff out. Yeah, So it was just not a big thing in the South. Um. The mediums at the time would move off the stage sometimes and have these these private sciences. Uh. Sometimes they would get in touch with a family member, but oftentimes it would just be kind of the same in the state as the stage show. They would say, like, I'm gonna get in touch with Sammy Davis Jr. Or whatever.

The popular dead figure at the time was Sure. Um, but that was for like, pre Civil War, it was an entertainment, it was an amusement. But when the Civil War came and a lot of people died in the Civil War, and that means that a lot of people who survived the Civil War lost a loved one. And this might have been people who you know, went off to fight and just never came back, never heard from again, no nothing, have no idea where they died, where they

were buried. And so that kind of grief, you know, that transcends any kind of time or place, and it created a lot of people, a large population of people who were very interested in getting in touch with their dead relative. And it just so happened that at the time there was a movement afoot that said, oh, well, this guy over here is actually really good at getting in touch with the dead one. Don't you have a

seance with him? You just have to, you know, pay him to to do this work, because it is a lot of work, whether you are a believer and a skeptic, it's a lot of work to have been a medium during this time. Um. And so they would be paid and they would make a living like this, and so these seances, these performances, uh, were decreased in size, but vastly increased in frequency. Yeah, a lot more spiritualists doing smaller mediums for families or smaller seances for fami lens.

And the same thing happened after World War One as well. So it's um, you know, it's kind of all fun and games until it gets to this level. If it's a big theater show, fine whatever, Uh, go pay your

money and get entertained for an hour. But when you are taking people's money who have lost loved ones in battle, then that's when it gets kind of really ugly if you ask me, right, And that's where I think a lot of the genuine skeptics who who beat this kind of stuff to a pulp, that's the place that they're coming from, you know, not not not necessarily that it's like an a front of science or reason or common sense or anything like that, but that there are a

lot of people who have parted um money from people who were bereaved at the time, and you just you don't take advantage of people who are undergoing grief. That's a pretty shoddy thing to do. That's a life lesson right there for everybody listening, especially Not only that, not only taking their money. But I imagine in a lot of cases people made real life decisions based on things that would happen in these seances. You know, right's to sell the family farm, like yeah, stuff like that. Oh God,

I hadn't thought about that. And not only sell the family farms, sell it to me the medium. That's what your dead for. What something's coming through there saying pennies on the dollar, that's great. So yeah, that's terrible. So by the end of the twentie century, things started to decline a bit. Um. One was just pure greed. There were too many of them out there. They were all trying to outdo one another. They were trying to draw bigger crowds and more money, and they were getting more

outrageous by doing so. And that meant, just like anything, when you try and do that, the bigger you try to force something to be Sometimes that can lead to its kind of early death. I guess, yeah, go big or go home, But eventually you're going to go home anyway. That's the end of that saying. I love right, so um.

Part of it was that they they were making more and more audacious claims, but also there were more and more scientists like those that that UM open minded scientific approach had become a lot more hardened towards UM spiritualism and mediums because so many had been investigated and found

it just be total frauds. Most of the time, the outcome was the the medium couldn't reproduce this ectoplasm or get in touch with the spirit when they were under controlled conditions, or they they went for it and they were found to be a fraud, like the the the knuckle of their toe was found to be rapping on

a stool or something like that. UM. And so as these reports kept coming out, more and more these scientific investigators were like, I don't think any of this is real, and they would be interviewed in newspapers and the papers would run these articles, and so over time the just the general public kind of turned away from spiritualism. Is is hocom and bunk. But the thing is is not

everyone did and even still today. Go asked Dan a Kroid, there is a group of people who would here to spiritualism as a as a religion, No for sure, UM. And one of the big reasons that it didn't completely go away was UH, spiritualists were very smart and that they would use influencers of the day in their act. They would seek out these well known people. Um. They would tour the world, sometimes tour Europe and do um seances with like royal families of various countries, the newspapers

right about this. Um, they would get a quote or maybe demand a quote from someone like well known and they would say, all right, I'll come to a science, but you gotta give me a quote that I can

use my my flyer or whatever. What's that called pull quote? No? No, no, the that that fallacy, the logical fallacy, appeal to authority, I think, oh yeah, yeah, the appeal to authority, yeah, which you know makes a lot of sense if people see, oh, well they did a stance for the Prince of Monaco or or Sammy Davis Jr. Then it's got to be good enough for me. It's not pseudoscience at all, because why would Sammy Davis Jr. Believe in pseudoscience? Right, He's

just a Satanist. He doesn't care about pseudoscience, that's right. So, Um. One of the other authorities that they would appeal to, Chuck was, um, what this one. There's an expose written in seven and by God if I can't, I can't find it anywhere in my tabs. But it was basically uh oh, Revelations of a Spirit Medium is what it was called. And it was written anonymously by a medium, a huckster of fraud, and I'm pretty sure it was published. And it is like four pages exposing all the tip

and all that stuff, all the tricks. But one of there's a glossary of like nineteenth century slang words among hoaxters. It's amazing. But one of them was the top heavy, and that was a scientist who was over credentialed. They had all these PhDs and everything like that, so they were booksmarked, but they were super gullible. And if you could get a top heavy to basically say, like, I can't explain it, Science can't explain it, that would go

a very long way to bolstering your career. You know. Yeah, Even if you talked to a hundred scientists and one of them was a top heavy who had said something valuable to you, that's the only one You're You're the tenth dentist of that I'm out of ten dentists, right, exactly exactly, And that's all you need, especially if the other nine dentists just keep their traps shut because they have better things to do. But there were a bunch

of people who would not keep their traps shut. Um, I guess actually one of a legendary top heavy even though he wasn't a scientist, credential or otherwise was um so Arthur Conan Doyle. I don't know what's wrong with me? Um, I'm sorry, sir Arthur Coning. Do wheal by the way before I forget if if there's not a band called the tenth Dentist out there, then I don't know what to think anymore. It's a good one. Remember those tried in commercials? I think it was four out of five dentists.

One of them was a four out of five. He was bit on the testicles by a squirrel before he could pronounce how, before he could recommend dentin or trident or something like that. Maybe it should be the fifth. It is four out of five, it's not nine out of ten. Do you remember that though it was great? What was the what was the cult? Was it? We make holes in teeth? Remember that the cartoon that was crest? Okay, do you want to hear you want to hear the

pinnacle of eighties marketing. Two kids, my third grade maybe fourth grade class put on a play about out yes and cavities sponsored by Crest. Yeah. They had a big pushback then for taking over the minds of American children. Well it worked. What's funny is is I now use um aquafresh the orange tube? Oh? Man, if there is a favorite toothpaste that any boy in America has ever had, that is it in its mind that was from the eighties. No, it is now. But I'm saying the Crest takeover of

my mind doesn't work? Got you? And I'm an aquafresh point now? Is that the one with a tricolor? Yeah, which is another very appealing part of it. Man, you'd buy it all, don't you. I do? Yeah? I am a little gullible. You're like an Arthur Conan Doyle. So he if you recognize his name, he was the author of Sherlock Holmes. Of course, he was super into this. He joined the Society for Psychical Research, which is an early skeptical slash believer society. Um, and he always he

bought into this. He was just convinced. Um. But on the other side of the equation, we're skeptics who were not convinced, who basically didn't keep their mouth shut. They were the other four who would say, like, no, everybody, actually, this guy's wrong. My esteemed colleague has has been taken um. But then the head of those guys was Harry Houdini.

Amazingly enough, Yeah, Houdini um. Which makes it super ironic that at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles they have have long had Harry Houdini seance nights where you can go into the Harry Houdini Room and do a seance, which is, you know, it's all for fun. But it is kind of funny that he was very much against this stuff, although it supposedly if you go the Magic Castle, they'll tell you that he did, and he may have

really done this. Is told his wife before he died that, hey, listen, if I was wrong, I'll come back and I'll contact you and let you know you're right. And and he came back and he said, I've got good news and I've got bad news. The good news is there is a heaven. The bad news is your scheduled to pitch there tonight. Do you remember that Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book? Yeah, where was that what that was from there was like two friends who played baseball together.

He had a pact like Harry Houdini and his wife. Apparently. I think that's a There's different versions of that joke though. Man, the illustrations in that book were just barrened on. Yeah, that was great stuff. And by the way, we should give a big rest in peace to Mr Morton Drucker, who passed away a couple of weeks ago in real time. But that was that was a big one. We talked about Mad Magazine a lot, and mort Drucker was my number one with a bullet favorite artist and he passed

on and he was one of the greats. He definitely shaped my childhood in a very large way with his drawings. Yeah, Um, we'll hear from you soon, right, He's like you was her pitching tonight? Oh no, both of us so so Harry Houdini. He's like, yeah, Josh is gonna flub it and Chuck's gonna have to be brought in for the safe. So Harry Hudin Harry Judini created this longstanding tradition of stage magicians, um exposing the fraud of spiritual is m Basically, yeah,

because they were, They're like, they're stealing our tricks. Yeah, and it's pretty cool. Like he would incorporate into his stage shows a lot of these things that spiritualists were doing to show how they did it, and he was relentless at it. Yeah, he was very relentless, but it was very cool. And the fact that it's still going on today. Um Richard Wiseman, who's come up a few times.

He was in the Shell Drake episode. He was in the Ghosts episode, and I think we somehow misconstrued as research in the ghost episode to suggest that he had proven ghosts exists. I don't remember exactly the details of it,

but what we got that one wrong. But in this case, he has recreated seances from the nineteenth century and has shown how willing people are to totally misreport the events that went on in the seance to say that yes, you know, the table did levitate, or um all the stuff that he's studying under these controlled conditions, and it's basically shown not just that the the the medium himself or more often herself as we'll see UM, was engaging in fraud, but also that the audience was Um had

a willing suspension of disbelief and we're part of this too. By saying like I felt the phantom arm tapped me on the shoulder. The medium didn't have anything to do with that. That was just something that kind of came out of the environment that was produced in the seance. You know. Yeah, pretty interesting, It is pretty interesting. So we'll finish up here with this. UM. I thought this was very interesting actually, the social implications of this. UM. Most of the not all, but a lot of these

spiritualists were women in the nineteenth century. Um, for some practical reasons, I could wear these long dresses that could hide uh talented toe knuckles. Um, they were not because of the time, they wouldn't get like searched too closely, obviously, because you wouldn't do that if you were a scientist trying to examine whether or not a spiritualist was real or not. And that led to there were men, for sure,

But that led to this kind of interesting side note. UM. One is that women could make their own money, and so it's easy to poop poo something like this. But I'm sure those Fox sisters made a lot more dough than they ever could have as uh, you know, doing anything else offered an available to them at the time. So that's a good thing that gave him some agency.

But these uh, it was no coincidence that sometimes the voice from the other side would champion sort of progressive views, because this turned out to be a chance to sort of reshape policy in a way. If you were a woman and you were a spiritualist, it would be very easy to say, you know, they're saying that that women should have more rights and if not, they will come back and haunt you, all right, And that kind of

ended up happening in some ways. Yeah, there was a huge connection between spiritualism and spiritualist movement and abolitionism, the women's suffrage movement, the women's temper or the temperance movement, a lot of these progressive movements with workers rights and that. You know, if you were an abolitionist and you didn't believe in this kind of thing, you might be like,

I'm not really happy about that. But at the same time it kind of whipped up this fervor and that some people would like their spirits that that that was that were being channeled by the medium. We're saying things like you guys better get on the train of abolitionism, you better get rid of slavery, and it actually did, especially in these theatrical settings, have a widespread in fluence on getting the message out there, um through the spirit communication.

Weirdly enough, yeah, it's almost like one could say anything at all. It's something like, oh, I don't know a campaign rally, and people would believe it if they were an ardent enough believer in the speaker exactly, especially if they detached their ego to you and your success. Very strange. So um, I just want to give two shouts out, one to the probably the greatest ghost movie that involves seances ever ghost No WHOOPI Goldberg all right? The others, Yeah,

that was good, so good, and then spoil it. The greatest short story involving seances in the spiritualist movement, written by arguably the greatest American writer of all time, Joyce Carol Oates. It's called Ninth Side. It's a short story. It's the same time. Idol is a collection of her short stories from the seventies. I think nine seven, Um, Nightside, look it up and thank me later. It's seriously just bone chilling how good it is. I wonder if we could uh get in touch with her and read that

for our Halloween episodes. I tweeted to her once kind of crassley, um, and never heard anything back. Even though you're like Twitter, I know she saw that tweet. Hey at Joyce Carol Oates, you think you're so cool? Right? Um? I would love to read that one. There's another one too, there's a she's probably not just the greatest American writer, but the greatest American horror writer too. She's so wonderful.

I would read any of her stories. So if you out there no Joyce Carol Oates were in contact with her or her publisher, please, we would love to read in our ad free episode one of her short stories for Halloween. That's right, so I think she I like that aspect. Okay, Oh one last thing, chuck. Uh. There's a place called lily Dale in New York, appropriately enough, which is basically a spiritualist community where you can go

basically be among spiritualists as a religion. Today wonderful, since I said today it's time for listening to man, I'm gonna call this. Uh. We haven't gotten emails in two weeks from people because something's wrong with our email server. So it's on the Days again, You're gonna get a couple on bad days. I think, hey, guys, listening to your recent episode on the Day's reminded me of a funny story I thought you might like. Two thousand four of my family bought a new house in the suburbs

of Detroit. Was designed and built by an exceptionally pragmatic, efficient, yet lacking an aesthetic appreciation engineer. To our surprise my husband's delight, as he is from Spain, the master bathroom included a separate biday unit. I remember where this is two thousand four, and people were not as familiar in this country. Most people that visited our home had no idea what it was, and we also made the decision

to not give advanced notice when they went to the bathroom. Invariably, people would emerge from the bathroom trip either a little wet or with an embarrassed look on their face as they confessed having explored the contraption and released a stream of water onto themselves and into our bathroom. Was always good for a laugh. I sure appreciate you, guys. When we moved from Michigan to the South to the South Carolina, what she was? She once missed South Carolina because that

would explain that last bit. Now, I thought it was she met the South, and I didn't see on the next line it said Carolina. So that was just me. Your voices accompanied us as we made many twelve hour trips back and forth. We enjoyed the knowledge and the tangents, even the tangents. Uh. And now you continue to suthe and educate me as I go on my four to five mile recreational walks during the pandemic quarantine and temporary hopefully furlough. And that is from Michelle sal Sado. Nice.

Thanks a lot, Michelle. We're glad to know that you're doing okay. They're hanging out waiting for things to get back to normal in the South Carolina. That's right, chuck, um and uh as it will eventually go back to normal. Um. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, like Michelle did to let us know some silly story about it a day or what have you, you can get in touch with us. Send us an email to stuff podcast how Stuff Works dot com. Stuff

you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios. How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.