Hey, guys, it's me your old pal Josh, And for this week's select, I've chosen our twenty twenty episode on spiritualism, which, as you might be able to tell from the first couple of minutes, was recorded during the height of the COVID pandemic. But that's not why I chose this one. I chose it because it's been coming up a lot lately for some reason in episode after episode, which I've taken as a sign to choose this as a select.
But it's also kind of made me think about all of the back and forth I've gone through in my life. Is there an afterlife? Is there not an afterlife? Who knows? That's where I'm at right now. Who knows. So maybe listen to this episode about the spiritualism movement and see what you think about the whole thing. Enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Bryan over there somewhere in the heart of darkness. I'm in the office, dude, where I hear your voice, Chuck, but I can't see you.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know why people need to know the behind the scenes things. But home recording provides some challenges and I was getting pretty frustrated. So I was like, you know what, I'm going to go to the studio yep, because I know it'll sound great in here. Yeah, and I know there won't be dogs and children and everyone should feel good about it because I have not seen another human being.
Yeah, in the building. Didn't a security guard.
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. I 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 I apparently since I left. Uh, they have these.
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 a microphone sanitizer? That sounds really made up?
Yeah, it's 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, whoa, which would make Emily just like turn over in her bed.
It's a good, jolly rancher flavor. Not the best scent, though.
I hate it when they add scent to stuff that doesn't need scent.
Yeah, agreed.
Try finding an unscented garbage back these days.
Uh is it tough to Yeah?
Man, every single one of them. I even got some that said unscented and it still smells like.
You've missed it. In parentheses underneath it says mostly we can't help ourselves. Rosemary, Well, I don't have my over the ear headphones right now.
I just yeah, so I'm look one.
Of Yumy's 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 head entry.
Yeah. I had to.
It kept slipping off with the Lawrence of Arabia looks, so I had to do it the other way around. So now it looks like I have a nineteenth 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 or something?
Or was it just like just tie their gin shut and it'll 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 uh, doctor Payne's new chin wrap now with more leeches.
All 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. Fine, just get this over with.
Let's get serious and talk about spiritualism, shall we.
This is a great, great job by Grabster, a great idea by you. Yeah, and it'll be a great.
Episode, yeah, grabs Her.
We asked them to help us out with this, so we put together a world class article for us. And when we asked him, we said, hey, how about spiritualism? He because my brother wrote his dissertation on that should be simple and me.
Just forwarded us that.
Right it did. He didn't even like erase his brother's first name. He just did a strikethrough and wrote.
Ed after it easy Money.
So it is like a really really interesting phenomenon 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 Ouiji boards to tarot cards, all.
Of this stuff. Movies.
Yeah, as a matter of fact, I ran across so you know Dan Akroyd's hugeno UFOs, right.
I did know that.
Actually, he's also enormous into spirits and ghosts. It's actually one of the impetuses. Yeah, I think so of him writing Ghostbusters. He's actually a fourth generation spiritualist with a capital S, like the Church spiritualism.
He was raised that way.
His father, grandfather, and great grandfather were all spiritualists and that's how he was raised as well. So it does just kind of it's so permeated our culture. It's weird to think of a time when it wasn't there. But there actually was this period starting in right 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 in the spirit world, and we're going to start doing that. And that was spiritualism, the spiritualist movement.
Yeah, and Ed pointed out, which we should as well, that ghosts and things like that and ghost stories they had been around since people had been around. Everyone since the dawn of humankind has tried to figure out what happens after you die. Do people visit, do they take on, you know, 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 big scam and way to get money out of people who are in pain from a friend's or loved one's death.
Sadly, yeah, yeah, for sure, but there is like a throw a thread through there where this same era, the same period, and 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.
There's the real version of it actually does exist, and we're going to apply this newfangled thing called science to investigate it. And that produced that era of people like Charles Fort or Harry Price who visited the Borley Rectory, the most haunted place in England, or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle like those guys. I know, I'm trying, not a new version to these guys though they were they believed in this stuff and the possibility of it. They also
believed in the possibility 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 Randys of the day, who all followed in the footsteps of Harry Houdini. Is we'll see who kind of created this. So you had hucksters, believers who were skeptical, and genuine pure skeptics 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 Madam Kleios of the world. Ed refers to it as a democratization, and that's one way
to look at it. But it was the idea that hey, if you are chosen and you are special, 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 there are basically a few things that kind of came together for this mentality, 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. 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 leading edge right right beyond that what they're coming up against. 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 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 threw 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 this is a perfect example.
The frontier life is one. Religious fervor is another, 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 there was no big religious authorities in the area that were out on the frontier, they had no structured hierarchy of religion, and so again they could just make up stuff.
And I'm not saying that's not tied to this next sentence, because I don't want to turn anyone off, but a lot of religions sprang out from this region during that time, like Millerism and Mormonism and Quakers and Shakers kind of had a resurgence, basically as shot in the arm, just because of this fervor going on the time.
And I couldn't quite put where 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 I love it when things, just things we've talked about before, like have even more
context from something else. But 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 know, And what I've been told, So let's start a religion based on it. And not even necessarily just religions too, but also like social movements like utopian societies where.
And chew your food twenty times so you'll poopies here.
Exactly, or you know, women have equal rights as men, which is just completely radical. Or how about fifty of us lived and just by the fact that we all lived together, we're married according to this utopian society, just whatever you wanted to do, you kind of could because the frontier threw 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.
And the third big factor that you mentioned was or 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 elect electromagnetism and things that you can't see but science.
Are 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 electromagnetism, maybe that actually explains how spirits survive. After that, it was a really wide open time as far as you know, 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 Holster is on too tight.
I haven't been able to feel my nose for about fifteen minutes.
All right, we'll go rub your nose and bring some feeling back, and we'll talk about some of the chiritualists.
Okay, I'm gonna say it spiritualists nice 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 I also came across that we need to mention, a guy named Andrew Jackson Davis, who combined the ideas of the German hypnotist Franz Mesmer with the Swedish philosopher of the soul, Emmanuel Swedenborg. They were both
eighteen century. He kind of brought him 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. And you can even pinpoint a date to what you might consider the birth of the modern American spiritualist movement is March thirty one, eighteen forty 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.
Mister missus Fox had three daughters.
Actually one was much older. Her name was Leah. She was nineteen and twenty three years older. Why was that funny?
Because I saw a picture of her and she's like the spitting image of Jeffrey Ross. Look her up, Jeffrey Ross's that's what Leah Fox looked like.
I didn't see. I saw the picture of the three of them, 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, he's doing.
All right though. What if he had really thin skin? Rosmaster?
He couldn't take a joke against himself. Have you seen that bump in Mike Show? It's pretty good?
Uh? No? Is that the roast competition thing?
Yeah?
He and David Tell just sit there and roast people. It's really good.
Man.
I used to love David Tel back in the day.
He has just turned into like the weird like comedy genius friend that Jeffrey Ross has.
And it shines through in this awesome I'll check it out.
So the Fox family, older daughter Leah was nineteen 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, on March thirty first, eighteen forty, they heard these rapping knocking sounds and they didn't know where it was coming from, and that kind of kickstarted 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 thing is is like when it went from you know, like, oh, there's a ghost rapping or knocking like a poultrygeist 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 rap like fifteen times or something like that. And 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 and from what I read.
Yeah, I just sorry. I was thinking of a rapping ghost and right gott sidetracked. I'm the ghost, George Washington. I'm here to say I love fruity pebbles in a mateor 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.
My name is Blondie.
I'm here to say I'm gonna try rap because it's popular today.
Exactly.
So what were you saying? I was laughing. I didn't even notice.
I'm sorry, Oh, 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 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
a hold of these stories. And obviously back then 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 just changed everything.
And also other 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 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 it's really 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.
That's happy in and of itself.
It was Yeah, they should have just been like, forget all this spirit so bunch, this weird thing.
But 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, and said, like, this is how, this is how we did it actually in an effort to take her sister Leah down, 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 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, you'd try, right, But the two younger sisters and Maggie especially were in pretty bad shape with alcoholism, and they died sort of in a call your Brother's esquay, very quietly and fairly destitute in New York City in the eighteen nineties.
Trapped under newspapers maybe, but no. They had very interesting but also very sad lives. Like I think Maggie married a skeptic and.
He not a good move, right he died.
He talked to her out of doing spiritualism, but she went back after he died. Kate married another spiritualist and she had a huge career touring the world as a spiritualist, made a lot of money 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, yeah.
On them at least. I'm sure there are plenty on that they're featured in. But and no give me those Fox sisters.
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 confiding, as Mark Twain would put it, that you know, like the Andrew Jackson Davis guy who kind of started this thing on his own, supposedly wrote on March thirty first, eighteen forty eight, that spirit came
to him and said the work has begun. We just started something over here, and then later found out about the Fox. There's 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 died in the wolf 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, it's crazy. It's just love it. I love this whole story.
So it's sweeping the nation at this point by the eighteen fifties, and we're going to 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. The first one
is channeling, 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 showy things to kind of get people, you know, pretty pumped up.
I feel like they're spending their money.
Well, you get 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. Maybe the parents lost a child, or I'm a woman.
Or I'mammy Davis Junior.
Hey babe, 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.
He invented rap.
That's right.
So if you were a good talented medium, that meant that you were probably a pretty good actor.
You could probably do good voices. Sometimes.
In the case of Corus Scott, who I know, we've talked about her before.
Her name, just can't remember what I have no recollection of talking about her.
Yeah, sounds super familiar.
But she was one of the top mediums, trance 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 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, Cora 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 I looked up her picture and Kate Winslet I think is from my cast in Couch is who I would throw in that movie. Okay, Okay, not as the twelve year old that would be weird unless they do some sort of bad irishman de aging. But she looked enough like her and she's a great actor.
So so that's 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 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 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, you 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 and four.
Yeah, but that can sort of coincide it with the Reverend Bob Dobbs and the televangelism and all that good stuff.
Yeah, it was a crazy 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 and speaking as the spirit, the spirit took over their hand and they would start writing. And so in just the same way chorus Scott would 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 that trying to decide if I could do that.
Well, sometimes they would use their non dominant hand, So if you want to change your handwriting, just.
Do that to start. Yeah, I can't some way.
And then 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 the seventeenth century woman from England named Patience Worth.
Nice. 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 closed.
Yea.
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 there it's dark enough where you can't really see their lips moving throwing their voice. There was a woman named Leslie Flint, a medium.
Oh really, he looked like the old man from up.
Oh did it make you cry when he.
Looked at him?
My daughter did?
Watched that.
Here have these balloons, So yeah, Leslie Finch, I actually love that name for a man.
So yeah. And I don't know why I.
Assumed, but he would recreate famous people like Sammy Davis Junior, but wasn't very good at it apparently, which is kind of funny. That makes us all a little bit more rediculous and fun.
Well, I was reading 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. Yeah, and you know, maybe there was another person who was
a confederate in the room. Who knows, But it just goes to show that even still even today, and this guy's obituary that was written in the nineties, the nineteen nineties, that they were like, yeah, you know, he was largely
considered a trickster or 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. 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 wija board with this. It's the same sort of thing, except the wija board would be the actual table that you're sitting at. 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 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 you're moving the table yourself like a Oigi board.
I can't remember what it's.
Called, but basically, your your body 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 I bet your favorite too is ectoplasmic manifestations.
That's a good one.
Yeah, it's pretty good.
This is when you would actually, as a spiritualist, produce something physical, something would manifest itself, an actual substance, and it was They called it ectoplasm, and they could pull it from their body and it was just basically something that they would make beforehand.
Out of whatever. I mean, they would make it out of all kinds of things.
There 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 ectoplasm eighteen hundred's seance is just the pictures themselves are hysterical and frightening all at the same time.
Yeah, 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. You just suddenly see some luminous 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 really easy to explain. But in a darkened room that you been sitting in for three hours communicating with spirits, you might be a lot more prone to buy into it than under normal circumstances.
Yeah, for sure, maybe you're a little.
Drunk right tipsy on Chinnap's.
Levitation was another big one, nice little party trick. 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 in air.
Right, No, it's it's you're thinking of trampolines.
Oh, that's not the same thing.
No, people can see those.
Oh No, it's all about the angle with the David Blaine method 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 hiding that with your other foot, so it looks like you're just 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't strength that is required to do that.
You can raise yourself up with one foot.
In a seated position.
No, no, no, you're standing uh.
Oh oh oh, I got you.
Yeah. 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.
Yeah. No, I've got 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 better, mate.
Right, oh, I'm getting drunker.
Well, both of those things are happening.
I thought you were talking about like you know, like a fake here or something like that where they're sitting cross legged and they're levitating. I was like, to do that with just three toes. That in and of itself is pretty impressive, but it's pretty good, all right.
What are the other There's another couple of things they did too, What are.
The beer photography?
Pretty straightforward stuff where you know, this is the very beginnings of photography. So people didn't understand double exposures unless you were 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.
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 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 did not even understand.
Right, it was like the deep fake of the time.
And they were probably like everybody, we got maybe three.
Years, Yeah, we ready to get prolific.
And then everyone's going to be like, oh, that's just double exposure.
Right, and then people like I said earlier too, a lot of the New Age stuff that's tied into spiritualism today, like tarot readings or oh, I don't know, astrological 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 heretical. There was no religious leader in charge of anything.
There was no scripture, doctrine or anything like that. It was still very much tied into and born out of Christianity. So stuff like occult things would have, yeah, it 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, pre Civil War in the United States, spiritualism was popular. 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 attainment.
There was a lot going on back then, kind.
Of like looking at penguins in a zoo today, like you know they're fake, but it's still fun to look at.
Right, Why not go pay a nickel to see madam whatever do her little? Do her a little erotic because we'll get into that. The'se got a little sexy at times too.
A little ghost shimmy.
This is part of the part of the draw, the ghost shimmy.
But you need to talk about a couple of things here. The Civil War for sure, but 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 some might argue still is in the South didn't leave a lot of room. The hierarchy didn't leave a lot of room for other schools of thought. And it was basically, even though it wasn't necessarily a 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. The mediums at the time would move off the stage sometimes and have these private seances.
Yea.
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 going to get in touch with Sammy Davis Junior or whatever. The popular dead figure at the time.
Was Sure, but that was for like pre Civil War, it was an entertainment, it was an amusement. But when the Civil War came, 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 these 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. Why don't you have a seance with him. You just have to, you know, pay him to do
this work, because it does 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. And so they would be paid and they would make a living like this, and so these seances, these performances were decreased in size, but vastly increased in frequency.
Yeah, a lot more spiritualists doing smaller mediums for families or smaller seances for families, And the same thing happened after World War One as well. So it's 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, 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 necessarily that it's like an affront to science or reason or common sense or anything like that, but that there are a lot of people who have parted 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 shod thing to do.
That's a life lesson right there for everybody listening, especially with youngsters.
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, it's true, sell the family farm like stuff like that.
Oh God, thought about that.
And not only sell the family farm, sell it to me the medium. That's what your dead brother wants you to do.
For what something's coming through. They're saying pennies on the dollar.
That's great.
Oh wait so yeah, yeah, that's terrible.
So by the end of the twentieth century, things started to decline a bit. 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 it right.
So part of it was that they were making more and more audacious claims, but also there were more and more scientists like those that that open minded scientific approach had become a lot more hardened toward spiritualism and mediums because so many had been investigated and found to just
be total frauds. Most of the time, the outcome was the medium couldn't reproduce this ectoplasm or get in touch with the spirit when they were under controlled conditions, or they went for it and they were found to be a fraud, like the knuckle of their toe was found to be wrapping on a stool or something like that.
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 just the general public kind of turned away from spiritualism as hocum and bunk. But the thing is is not everyone did. Even still today. Go ask Dan Aykroyd. There is a group of people who adhere to spiritualism as.
A religion, no for sure.
And one of the big reasons that it didn't completely go away was Spiritualists were very smart in that they would use influencers of the day in their act. They would seek out these well known people. They would tour the world, sometimes tour Europe and do seances with like royal families of various countries. The newspapers write about this.
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 seiance, but you got to give me a quote that I can use my flyer or whatever.
What's it called quote?
No, no, no, no, that fallacy, the logical fallacy, appeal to authority.
I think, yeah, yeah, the appeal to authority, sure, okay, yeah, which you know makes a lot of sense that people see, oh well, they did a sands for the Prince of Monaco or Sammy Davis Junior, then it's got to be good enough for me. It's not pseudoscience at all, because why would Sammy Davis Junior believe in pseudoscience?
Right, He's just a Satanist. He didn't care about pseudoscience, that's right. So one of the other authorities that they would appeal to, Chuck, was what this one. There's an expose written in eighteen ninety 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, a fraud, and I'm pretty sure it was published in eighteen ninety seven, and it is like four hundred pages exposing all the tips and all that stuff, all the tricks. But one there's a glossary of like nineteenth century slang words among hoasters.
It's amazing.
But one of them was the heavy, and that was a scientist who was over credentialed. They had all these PhDs and everything like that, so they were BookSmart, 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 one hundred scientists and one of them was a top heavy who'd said something valuable to you, that's the only one. You're the tenth dentist of the nine 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. I guess actually one of a legendary top heavy, even though he wasn't a scientist, credential or otherwise, was Sir Arthur Kunnan Doyle. I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm sorry, Sir Arthur cohnin do yell.
By the way, before I forget, If there's not a band called the tenth Dentist out there, then I don't know what to think anymore.
That's a good one. Remember those Trident commercials. I think it was four out of five dentists.
One of them.
I was it four out of five.
He was bit on the testicles by a squirrel before he could pronounce how, before he could recommend denteen or trident or something like that.
Maybe it should be the fifth. It is four out of five us, it's not nine out of ten.
Do you remember that though? No, it was that great?
The uh? What was the what was the was it? We make holes and teeth? Oh?
Yeah?
Remember that the cartoon that was Crest.
Okay, do you want to hear you want to hear the pinnacle of eighties marketing to kids. My third grade maybe fourth grade class put on a play about toothpaste, 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 I now use 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 didn't work. Gotcha, I'm an Aquafresh boy now?
Is that the one with the tricolor?
Yeah, which is another very appealing part of it.
Man, you'd buy it all, don't you.
I do so gullible. 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 was an early skeptical slash believer society, and he always he bought into this. He was just convinced. But on the other side of the equation, we're skeptics who were not convinced, who basically didn't keep their mouths shut. They were the other four who would say, like, no, oh, everybody, actually,
this guy's wrong. My esteemed colleague has been taken. But then the head of those guys was Harry Houdini. Amazingly enough, yeah, Houdini.
Which makes it super ironic that at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles they have long had Harry Houdini seance nights.
Oh yeah, 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 supposedly if you go to 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 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 you're scheduled to pitch there tonight. Do you remember that Scary Stories of Telling the Dark book?
Yeah? Where was that? What that was from?
It was like two friends who played baseball together. Yeah, they had a pack to 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 barre on.
Yeah, that was great stuff. And by the way, we should give a big rest in peace to mister Mort Drucker who passed away. Oh yeah, a couple of weeks ago in real time. But that was that was a big one. We talk 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. Yeah, big time with his drawings. Yeah. Nice, we'll hear from you soon, right. He's like, you guys are pitching tonight.
Oh no, both of us.
So so Harry Houdini.
He's like, yeah, Josh is gonna flowb it and Chuck's gonna have to be brought in for the safe. So Harry Harry Houdini created this long standing tradition of stage magicians exposing the fraud of spiritualism.
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. Richard Wiseman, who's come up a few times. He was in the Sheldrake 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 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 miss report the events that went on in the seance, to say that, yes, you know, the table did levitate or all the stuff that he's studying under these controlled conditions, and it's basically shown not just that the medium himself or more often herself as we'll see, was engaging in fraud,
but also that the audience had a willing suspension of disbelief. And we're part of this too by saying, like I felt the phantom arm tap 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. I thought this was very interesting, actually, the social implications of this. Most of the not all, but a lot of these spiritualists were women in the nineteenth century. For some practical reasons, they could wear these long dresses that could hide talented
toe knuckles. 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. One is that women could make their own money, and so it's
easy to poopoo something like this. But I'm sure those Fox sisters made a lot more dough than they ever could have, as you know, doing anything else offered and available to them at the time. So that's a good thing. They gave them some agency. But these 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 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 or the temperance movement, a lot of these progressive movements, workers' rights and you know, if you were an abolitionist and you didn't believe 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 in that some people would like their spirits that were being channeled by the medium were 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 influence on getting the message out there 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'd attach their ego to you and your success.
Very strange.
So I just wanted to give two shouts out, one to the probably the greatest ghost movie that involved seances.
Ever Ghost No would be Goldberg.
No, all right?
The others with Nicole, Yeah, that was good, it was 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 night Side. It's a short story. It's the same title as a collection of her short stories from the seventies, I think nineteen seventy seven night Side. Look it up and thank me later. It's seriously just bone chilling how good it is.
I wonder if we could get in touch with her and read that for our Halloween episode.
I tweeted to her once kind of crassly and never heard anything back. Even though you're like Twitter, I know she saw that tweet.
Hey at Joyce Carol Loats, you think you're so cool?
Right?
I would love to read that one. There's another one too. She's probably not just the greatest American writer, but the greatest American horror writer too.
She's great, She's so wonderful. I would read.
Any of her stories. So, if you out there know Joyce Carol Oates, 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 might like that aspect.
Okay, Oh, one last thing, Chuck.
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 that.
I'm going to call this.
We haven't gotten emails in two weeks from people because something's wrong with our email server. So it's on bidets again. You're going to get a couple on bidays.
I think.
All right, Hey, guys, listening to your recent episode on bidays reminded me of a funny story I thought you might like. Two thousand and four, my family bought a new house in the suburbs of Detroit. It was designed and built by an exceptionally pragmatic, efficient yet lacking an esthetic appreciation engineer. To our surprise my husband's delight, as he is from Spain, the master bathroom included a separate bidet unit. And remember this is two thousand and 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 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 Carolina.
What was she once missed South Carolina, because that would explain that last bit.
No, 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.
Oh okay.
Your voices accompanied us as we made many twelve hour trips back and forth. We enjoyed the knowledge and the tangents, even the tangents, and now you continue to soothe 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 Salcedo.
Nice.
Thanks a lot, Michelle. We're glad to know that you're doing okay there hanging out waiting for things to get.
Back to normal in the South Carolina.
That's right, Chuck, And as it will eventually go back to normal, and in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, like Michelle did to let us know some silly story.
About a Biday or what have you.
You can get in touch with us send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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