S2 – 12: There Is No Death

The press was wild with excitement. They filled the New York Academy of Music in October when Maggie appeared on stage, just as she had so many times since her childhood in Rochester. A front page illustrated story in that morning's issue of The New York World ensured the crowd would pack the hall. After an opening act that highlighted the tricks used to debunk other mediums, Maggie arrived on stage, still dark haired in her fifties. She out needed glasses

to see the words she'd written for herself. Maggie held the lenses up to her eyes and read off a declaration. Everything she had done for spiritualism over the course of her life was a falsehood. She had already published a letter in The New York Herald that called spiritualism, a curse and a covering for heartless persons and the vilest miscreants, people who used it to cloak their evil doings. As she said, now she was making the same pronouncements in person.

But it wasn't just statements. Of course, Like so many other rooms before, the hall became filled with knocking sounds. They started around Maggie's feet faintly, then they rose along the walls and scattered upward, where they rang out from the ceiling, thundering throughout the room. Here's author Nancy Stewart, and she and hikes up her skirts and shows how she makes these sounds their feet with her toes. And by now there's a national Association of Spiritualists and so on,

and they are just outraged. What follows is an enormous controversy that goes on for a long time. A committee of doctors stepped on stage and solemnly confirmed what she told them. Maggie made the sounds with her feet. It was all a hoax, a fraud, and it was everything they wanted, an exorcism of Mrs Satan herself and everything she stood for. The newspapers, crowd doubters and cynics roared

their approval from the rooftops. This was spiritualism defeated. This was the perpetrators of the nineteenth centuries most infamous fraud finally dragged into the light around the Fox family acid rumors had always circulated that Leah, a single mom, saw an opportunity to take a simple gag her younger siblings were pulling on their parents and turn it into something

which larger a chance to enchant and enthrall audiences. And yes, it was also her chance to do more than be a part time piano teacher for the daughters of aspiring middle class families. But did Leah, like Cornelius Vanderbilt throughout his own life, see an opportunity and seize it with a vengeance? She was like P. T. Barnum, just someone who knew how to profit from spectacle when it crossed

her path. For viewers of Maggie's very public confession, at least that was the takeaway, But it wasn't so simple. Here's historian and Browdie. Fraud is a very fraud subject in spiritualism, because there are no question that there have been fraudulent mediums who perpetrated deception on the public and profited by it, and that there have been gullible people

who were embarrassed and disserviced by fraudulent mediums. Yeah, now that is also true of many professions, law and medicine, for example, Not to mention politics provides opportunities for deception and double speak and misrepresentation. Does that mean that all participants in it have those motives and are dishonest? Spiritualist believers weren't swayed by Maggie's performance, As we've noticed throughout

this season of Unobscured. The Fox Sisters were often put forward as the mothers of the movement, but they were far from the only mediums at work in their world, and even if their own stage shows were faked, those hoaxes didn't invalidate centuries of spiritual visions and experiences that had breathed life into the movement long before the Fox Sisters were even on the scene. And when it came to Kate and Maggie, spiritualists pointed to Maggie's history of alcoholism.

She was already discredited. They said, there was nothing she could say now, no lie she could fabricate that could undo a lifetime of miracles. She was simply pandering to the doubters in order to stir up controversy, they said, and to put herself in the headlines once again. In fact, Leah's husband, Daniel Underhill, soon went to the newspapers to make it known that Maggie had betrayed spiritualism out of spite,

just to put a knife in her sister's back. After all, Maggie and Leah had been at odds for decades, and three years earlier, Leah, at this point in her seventies, had published her own book, The Missing Link in Spiritualism. In a lot of ways, Maggie's on stage confession was an axe that hacked at the root of Leah's claims. But could that attack banish everything, including Andrew Jackson Davis's harmonial philosophy, Cora's trans lectures, Emma's histories, and Sojourner Truth's

lifetime of work and love and power. New Yorkers had certainly witnessed a disaster, yes, But like so many spectacles from the world of spiritualism, it seemed that ultimately what observers took away from it all looked very much like what they brought in belief this is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. Cora took the age. She had been doing it her whole life. After all, it was eight and she had arrived at the National American Women's Suffrage Convention with an

official title from an official group. She was now the head of the fraternal delegation to the Convention from the National Spiritualist Association, and she was there to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of eighteen forty eight for the women's suffrage movement. It marked fifty years since meeting at Seneca Falls, New York, and the Declaration of Sentiments that had placed a stake

in the ground for American women's rights and equality. There was still so much work to be done before those rights would be recognized, but much had changed in those fifty years. Women had already cast legal ballots in Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, and Colorado, but it would still be decades before the Nineteenth Amendment would be passed into law in nineteen twenty, giving women across the nation the right to vote. One courageous and outrageous woman had even run for presidency, however

unconventional her approach might have been. For Cora, of course, also marked fifty years since the fateful events around Rochester. That decade that followed Maggie's confession of fraud in New York had done little to overthrow Cora's worldview or her place among spiritualists. In fact, the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties were a time when spiritualism and Cora's role within it,

took on a more permanent form. She had settled in Chicago right around the time when Victoria Woodhall was cutting ties and leaving for England with a pocket full of Vanderbilt money. Victoria's reputation as Mrs Satan had threatened COR's livelihood, as it did for spiritualist mediums across the nation, but I didn't stop Cora from marrying into a widely respected Chicago family and taking a paid position as the shepherd

of the city's first society of Spiritualists. In eighteen eighty nine, Cora and other Chicago spiritualists formed the Morris Pratt Institute in Wisconsin, built with the proceeds of a mining company, a company that had been guided to valuable mineral deposits

by mediums and their helpful spirits. The Institute would become a Temple and School for Spiritualists, a place where teachers and students could meet together and study the works of spiritualist theology that mediums like Andrew Jackson Davis, Emma Brittain, and even Cora herself had delivered to the world. Three years later, in Nettie Colburn died, she had been the most prominent medium to ever claim that she'd had the

ear of Abraham Lincoln. When she was laid to rest, it was Cora who took the pulpit to preside over her funeral. The following year, eightee saw an astonishing event come to Chicago. Along with the World's Columbian Exhibition. Something new arrived, the World Parliament of Religions, a two week summit on faith. But while the spiritualists weren't part of

the larger gathering, they were certainly there in spirit. Here's and Browdie once again in we have the World's Colombian Exhibition, where we have Americans exposed to many of the religions of Asia for the first time, and we have Swamy's and other Asian religious leaders recruited to come to the United States and teach Americans about their faith. And so we have the whole movement of theosophy which is attempting, attempting to combine the wisdom of the East and make

it accessible to Westerners. And Spiritualism moves in and out of all of these developments. Because spiritualism is always available, you can always talk to the dead and in any movement, whether you think that wisdom is going to come from Egypt or from Tibet, or from South America or from Australia, you can always make contact with the spirit from one of those places who can give you wisdom that draws on those traditions and on esoteric practices from another part

of the world. In fact, spiritualists saw that the reason they didn't share the stage with their fellow believers was that they still had no organization, and that was the precise agenda of their meeting to form a permanent national association. They believed it was time for the best interests of spiritualists to have a more unified home, and one that was more identifiable than a simple network of newspapers passed between spirit circles in Washington, Boston, and Chicago. By the

end of their meeting, the National Spiritualists Association was born. Now, they said outside societies could contact them at their headquarters with requests for information, or you know, with invitations to important meetings of the world's religions. Wink, wink. The irony of spiritualists boxing themselves in wasn't lost on those at

the meeting, or on Cora herself. She started her welcome address to the convention by noting that in the past, asking spiritualists to join an organization was like talking to someone who had escaped from prison about going back again. All things connected to human life, she once said, have been organized to death. Cora was probably not the only one to remember just how many spiritualists had left their

churches to join the ranks of science schoers. That had certainly been true for the Posts who had left the Quaker organization behind. It was true of Henri and his Sir Carmonique, and for Catholics everywhere who wrestled against church authority, and it was a strong memory for any spiritualist who had been present for the Ruckus at the Hartford Bible

Convention forty years earlier. Although those numbers were shrinking every day, Spiritualism had always threatened the priest, politicians, and profiteers who benefited from the status quo. It had given spiritual and moral authority to people who had been stripped of their rights, pushed to the margins, and burdened with work, while others

reaped the rewards. The last thing spiritualists wanted to do, even in the nineties was to give up on their labors and returned to a world of the strong crushing the week. But in the coming decades, Cora and the Chicago Spiritualists weren't the only ones who saw a spiritualist future finally taking shape. It just wasn't the future they had expected. Death was not something to be afraid of. For Henri and the Cir Carmonique, death was just what Andrew Jackson Davis taught it to be, a door into

a new and more perfect existence. It was the chance to leave a corrupt world behind and to climb into a higher, more sublime, more magnificent country. For as long as their science circles had gathered together, the cir Carmonique had held onto the belief that by talking with the spirits, they could learn all about that more magnificent country, and then they could make this world more like it. In his role as a city official and a school board member on reh had seen the chance to do just that.

But as time went on, it became clear just how fierce the opposition was. Here's historian Emily Clark. Violence, like the Mechanics Institute right, was not alone. In seventy four of the Battle of Liberty Place, during which the White League, a white supremacist organization, takes control of New Orleans and is like cutting telegraph wires and so that messages can't get out, they slaughter the At that point, integrated police

kill some people who are just walking by. There's a black carpenter who's killed with his own hatchet by White leaguers who are just like marauding through the city. During that the spirits of Mechanics Institute riot martyrs appear to the Sar Carmenique and encourage them to keep the faith that their rights will be maintained. Henri did keep the faith, but he watched pieces of his world fall apart around him.

Black students were kicked out of New Orleans schools not long after he was forced off the school board as well. Efforts to rebuild the South in the image of a different world had been abandoned by the political powers of the federal government. This is a place that is increasingly becoming more and more dangerous to hold two ideas of equality, it seems like actually starting in late eighteen Most of the seance records for the last two years are mainly

just on re and the following years were tough. One December, Andre's home was burned to the ground. His seance records were saved, including the handwritten messages from countless spirits, but much of what was precious to Anri was lost to the flames, and slowly the members of the circle died or moved on. I think about him sometimes, just sitting by himself at a table, a table that used to be full of vibrant conversation about the potential of what

the spirit spoke of, and now it's just him. I'm sure the silence records offered some comfort, but in the end, it's just him, and the records end in November of eighteen seventy seven, as reconstruction itself comes to a close. Even as the radical fire burned low in some spiritualist circles, the fight for equality continued. The Great Railroad Strike of eighteen seventy seven inspired working class people across the country.

Nine years later, forty thou workers in Chicago fought with police in another nationwide push for an eight hour work day. In one street battle, police killed four strikers. The following day, a bomb was thrown into a crowd of police as they marched toward protesters. Eight of the officers were killed and dozens more were in In response, the police opened

fire on the crowd and each other. Eight of the city's anarchist organizers were scooped up in the following police raids, and that's when Cora stepped in, taking up the mantle that Victoria had laid aside. Believing in the cause of the striking workers, Cora was shocked when she heard that the arrested anarchists were going to be hanged on circumstantial evidence. She organized an amnesty committee and then set out for Springfield, Illinois, to confront the governor and asked him to support the

eight hour work day. A massive crowd of people from across the state had gathered at the state House pleading for the men to be saved. One reporter noted that Cora's lecture was so moving that it left the group in tears. More than any other. It was this act that wrote Cora's name into Chicago's history. In the end, though the governor met Cora's please the same way New York met Victoria, she was turned away. Four of the men were hanged, and Cora turned home in mourning, but

also certain of her righteous cause. She later wrote that the power of money and of human selfishness are doomed, whether in the individual, or in society, or in corporations, or in governments, or in crowns or in kingdoms. Perhaps it would just take longer than the spirits had led

her to believe. But Cora wasn't the only one on daunted by setbacks, because there were Spiritualists across the country who had begun to revive that dream of a model community that had fostered Spiritualist beliefs way back in the eighteen forties. All of them, we're looking for a place the finally call home. It was a camp, but only in name. In fact, the thriving Spiritualist community in western New York had showed signs of being a permanent settlement

from its early ist years. They would eventually rename their town lily Dale. They built their own post office, hotel, store, and library. They even took on a bold new project. They relocated the house where the Fox family had first been shocked by the sounds of spirit rappings, and once it was safely at home in lily Dale, the structure turned their community into the destination for spiritualist pilgrimages in

the Northeast. Down in Florida, friends of the lily Dale community followed spirit voices to a home of their own on the Atlantic Coast. Previous meetings in Florida had brought together as many as one thousand spiritualists, so in the president of the National Spiritualist Association joined the founders of lily Dale and many others to open camp meetings in Cassadega, Florida. As so many spiritualists had done before, they put out a call for universal brotherhood, welcoming people of any race

or class who were interested in spiritualism. But when white Northern leaders welcome their new black neighbors to lectures at Cassadega, they violated several Jim Crow laws, highlighting the spirit of liberty that had visited so many seance tables in previous decades. Here's historian Kathy gutierres the Cassadega community, the Wily Deal community. These folks understood perhaps the single most important thing about spiritualism,

and that is the vanguard for multiculturalism. I completely think that Spiritualism's primary contribution is to ethics, and it is to the dismantling of a duality of heaven and health, and to the relegating of all of your neighbors who are not exactly like you to help. There are other people who didn't actively believe in a hell, the Unitarians, the universalists, right, everyone was going, you know, to heaven.

You don't want universalist smith. But as a mainstream, low splashy movement, spiritualism really was a driving force behind nascent multiculturalism, and I think that that is its lasting contribution. Even today, the Cassadega community continues to be a home for Spiritualist practice. Like Lily Dale in New York. It remains an enduring testament to the power of the harmonial philosophy and the deep belief of the generations who had lived and loved

its teachings. But it wasn't just on the East Coast that spiritualists made more permanent homes. In California, Spiritualist settled along the Pacific and form settlements like harmony growth, a community that's still meeting in a spot first marked by a simple ten foot platform and a hitching post. In Santa Barbara County, Spiritualist formed a colony they called Summerland.

It was their own slice of heaven, and it became a haven for spiritualist all throughout the West, even more so when they drilled for oil off the coast, and yes, you heard that right, by pumping crude oil up from the seafloor in eight six, the Summerland Project became the nation's first offshore oil well. It was one more sign for those still certain of their spirits guiding them at least, that they were entering a new age of prosperity. If

only those spirits had been more foresighted. But if there were some spiritualists who held true to those original goals of the mid nineteenth century, there were others who had veered away. They were looking for new revelations in a different direction. And even as those new offshoots of spiritualism grew, they watched the influence of the old spiritualism fade and change. If you've been listening to the stories of figures like Sojourn or Truth, Cora and the Fox Sisters. And you've

been wondering what happened to spiritualism. Well, the answer might lie closer than we think. Here's historian Molly McGarry. It had found its way to theosophy, which does grow. During that time, spirituals are still meeting in camp meetings in the you know, in the eighteen eighties and beyond, they're

still doing their work. I think what's true is because the newspapers become less important and the community becomes more diverse, and because many historians look at the northeast and don't look at the west quite as much, that they've missed a lot of the rebuilding that goes on in the eighteen eighties and the kind of experiments that are happening outside the northeast or the central New York, and that that area that had borth the original movement. So I

think that it's less that spiritualism declines. I mean, that would be one way to see it. But it just becomes more difficult to see for all sorts of reasons, and it moves, it moves into different formations, but it doesn't. I yes, theosophy was one of the new religious movements that drew strength from its spiritualist roots but also from

its spiritualist founders. And among the earliest visionaries of theosophy was Henry Steele Alcotts, that veteran investigator of frauds who turned his mind to spiritualism in the eighteen seventies, and he was joined by Emma Britton, whose theatrical performances were surpassed in their power by her histories of spiritualism itself. Here's Kathy Gutierres once again. Well, Emma was at the initial eighteen seventy two party in New York that founded

the Theosophical Society. And what the Theosophical Society and Madame Bolvowski in particular proposed is that spiritualism was this is my phrase, and obviously but too exoteric, right, That actual occult work requires initiation, it requires adepts, and it requires secrecy. So if you could talk to the dead, you were

approaching something important, but you weren't there yet. So they actually set out to create a much more esoteric as an actively secret and requiring gradations of initiation that sort of spun off of some of the primary principles of spiritualism, and it was also unlike spiritualism, which, as we've discussed, it's very optimistic in so many ways, theosophy is paranoid. It's a massive conspiracy theory. So it has a different trajectory, right. It is not progressive or kind or healing. At the

core of it. It's much more about self transformation. It's much more about the secrecy and inner sanctum. In the eighteen seventies, Mary Baker Eddies Christian science joined theosophy as another religious belief that blossomed in the world that spiritualism had made. But it wasn't just new religious movements that found their origin in spiritualism. It was science too, especially

the science of the mind in the eighties. When you really see the rise of neurology and psychology as medical disciplines, then they start edging into what has traditionally been religion's purview. So when you have women speaking in multiple voices than traditionally okay, are you a saint, are you a witch? Or are you mad? And Nancy Stewart agrees, So it's a gateway, if you will, into what we know today is a modern psychology and understandings about psychiatric states and

trance states, and illnesses and and so on. I think that's all pretty familiar to people today, but then was brand new investigation. In many ways, it's fair to say that spiritualism was the bridge from our past to our presence even today. If we know where to look, we can find its trace is all around us. If we listen closely, if we know how to interpret the quiet echoes, we can sense its eerie presence in the background of our everyday life, like the sounds of knocking on a

distant door and I'm scaring. The past doesn't always mean delivering a simple story. Sometimes it means stripping away the simple parts of our past that we think we know in order to explore the complexities of what really happened. Sometimes that means we come into a chapter of history thinking we have all the answers, and then learning that the story we were told barely even gets the big

picture right, let alone the smaller details. And honestly, it sometimes means re examining a familiar moment in time and noticing the ways the crucial parts of its history were written out of the story, the embarrassing, the uncanny, the parts that look foolish when we're using today's lenses to filter out the uncomfortable parts of our past. But when we look back objectively, with help from scholars and historians like those who have joined us this season, we can

start to see with a bit more clarity. Spiritualist people, along with their ideas and hopes and fears, were embedded all throughout life in nineteenth century America. Religion, science, finance, technology, and politics were all braided together with the echo of voices from beyond the grave. Rapid changes in the world gave rise to modern spiritualism, and then those spiritualists turned around and changed the world some more. By listening to

and following those spirit voices. Spiritualists showed just how much the age old questions still capture our hearts and minds, even as a rush of new ideas and new devices turn our world into something unfamiliar all over again. Here's historian and browdie. We tend to think of seances as a parlor game, and certainly they could become that, and they did become that a popular entertainment. But the first seances,

I don't think we're games at all. I think they show us the deep, deep hunger to communicate with the spirits of the dead, the deep hunger to be reconnected with loved ones that we have lost, and the deep hunger for knowledge of the divine, for knowledge of what

will happen after we die. I think how long it took to get a spirit message by passing your hands over the alphabet until you heard raps at a single letter, and then you had to repeat that process, maybe fifty or a hundred times to get a brief spirit message. And meanwhile, you're kind of hoping that you have a human medium who will be an effective vehicle for communication.

And to my mom, as a historian, I feel completely confident in saying that the majority of mediums were absolutely sincere in their belief that they were channeling communications from the spirits of the dead. Spiritualism earned many critics throughout the eighteen hundreds. It suffered through predators and fell victim to profit seeking opportunists, just like so many other realms

of American life. But I can't help but think back to Amy Post and her mixture of ardent, hope and sincere belief in the eighteen fifties, because it was that mixture that led her to spend those long hours at the seance table taking down messages from the spirit world, and all the criticism that can land at spiritualism's doorstep. Well, it wasn't the death knell people assumed it would be. In many ways, we're still living in a world that

spiritualism made. Here are some final thoughts from Molly McGarry. If it's very easy to sort of look back at the past and see irrationality and superstition and a kind of secularization narrative in which we, you know, are are no longer part of this kind of you know community community of believers are dupes or the credulous ones. And you know, I live in Los Angeles. Most people know their sun sign, if not their rising sign. People don't

know their blood type, and they know their astrology. This hasn't gone away. I mean, what can be seen as a kind of spurious consolation or after dinner pastime speaks to a real need for people for contact, for connection. And it's easy to see a superstition or as a

child kids parlor game, but it was really powerful. It was amazing to me the way that the imagination, the possibility that spiritualists could cross from this world to the next, allow them to collapse, distinctions between world, between bodies, between genders, between races in some cases. That that cosmology allowed for a remaking of things in this world, and that material connection,

I think remains very powerful. There is no death. That's what one of the best known British mediums called her memoir. She borrowed the title from American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, but the idea of messages traveling across fathomless depths had always defined spiritualism's power. Besides, spiritualists had been saying it for decades. For spiritualists, there is no Death wasn't just

a platitude. It was truth. The memoir was published in the eighteen nineties and it reads like the personal recollections that we've discussed throughout this season. The medium tells stories of encountering the spirits of dead children and lost friends, and by doing so, she offered hope that even when our loved ones pass away, they will always be there. We can always talk to them because are always near. After all, there is no death. But the First World

War was coming. It would deliver death to European families on an unbelievable scale, and all that loss created a home for spiritualism in Britain that deserves to have its own story told. Here's historian John Busher. There was a big revival of spiritualism in the post War War One period, and in some sense it's still a part of what lay at the heart of spiritualism is still in continuity with what we see around us all the time in our own culture. Belief in psychic powers, relief in channeled

texts that give some higher revelation. A lot of that interest is now labeled new Age, which is a term that was, as far as I know, was invented in its original center, or in the sense that we know it now in the spiritualist community. You know, a lot of that still with us today, just like the thousands of American mediums who haven't entered our story this season. The long and complex legacy of spiritualism in Britain has

only gotten a few brief mentions. But the same can be said about any of the other nations where spiritualists traveled and taught and heard their questions answered in the dim light of a seance, places like Europe, Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Australia in the early nineteen twenties, though, spiritualism may have found its most ardent new student in the person of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who added his name to the list of the Curious and then the converted. Here's

Nancy Stewart. You know people have laughed about this, people like Arthur Conan Doyle. Here we are the most rational detective writer. He's a spiritualist. Fudini started out believing in it and then he got to debunk it as a magician. You know, it just kind of goes on. This leads later, much later into investigations by people like William MacDougald, Harvard

psychology professor was the chairman. Duke and his disciple Dr Joseph Banks Ryan look into esp In the first decades of the New century, Spiritualism was revived and responded to new catastrophes and to offer answers to the questions of a new century with its new wars, new technologies, and

new social formations. It survived countless tests and investigations. It even outlived its most powerful publication, The Banner of Light, which finally ceased printing in nineteen o seven, and it survived the decline of its most hopeful early projects, as well as the scandals of its most prominent mediums. And there are so many more stories left to be told

because for spiritualism, well, there is no death. She was the oldest, and of the many medium we followed this season, it's easy to see how sojourn Or Truth forged a path for others to follow with her courage. Here is Margaret Washington to share a final word on her life.

To me, it's almost like a no brainer. And spiritualism, how is that different from spirituality except that people want to get in touch with loved ones who have gone on, and an African spirituality that is taken as a given that your loved ones not only do they not leave, they protect you. They surround you, so they're part of you. So spiritualism for her was an extension of that. Sojourner finally reconnected with those loved ones in three when her

traveling feet finally found rest. Yes, she was oldest, but there were others who had walked most of that road with her. They might not have had the same destination all the way, but Sojourner and the Fox Sisters were travel companions nonetheless, and they were ambassadors for spiritualism, just

like she was in their own ways. Even after Maggie's confession, the show went on because just one year later, she changed her mind and tried to take back whatever she had thrown to the wind, but time got away from her and in Leah would pass away to the other side. Their sister Lee riffed unhealed. Here's Nancy Stewart with the end of their story. Long story short. It's it's kind of sad, but it leaves a lot of questions about her. Towards the end of her life, Katie's dying and does

die of alcoholism. Ultimately, Maggie does die two and they're all kinds of mysterious knocks and sounds A person who is her nurse, who was not a spiritualist, cannot explain them at the time of death. At the very end, Maggie seemed to be challenging the world to explain the power that had flowed through her. She and Kate barely outlived their first interpreter, their friend and mentor, Amy Post, who had been more than certain than anyone else about

how to explain that power. In eighty nine, though she passed away into the summer lands. The last surviving member of the Sir Carmonique left New Orleans in and moved with his children to Jamaica. His letters to relatives in Chicago show that in both places the deep belief in the power of the spirits lived on. He died in nineteen four, and his son in law would later donate the seance record books of the Sir Carmonique to the

library at the University of New Orleans. Here's Emily Clark, So, the Sir Carmonique, over the course of their roughly twenty years of practice, bill something like thirty five or thirty seven books with messages. If you stack all of the science record books up, it reaches around my rip cage. So we're talking thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of messages from the world beyond this one.

Those records are a testament to the faith and conviction of the Afro Creole community in New Orleans who poured their heart and soul into a new vision of the future when the cover closed on their last record book. Though it was far from the end, New Orleans spiritual churches rose in their wake, led by a generation of new Black leaders who would be the mothers of a vibrant religion in the twentieth century. In Chicago, Cora finally

laid her head to rest in nineteen twenty three. She had traveled, taught, organized, and lectured on the world of the spirits for more than half a century. Her legacy still lives on in countless ways too, and the efforts she made to lay a foundation for the Spiritualists of the future held true. The Morris Pratt Institutes and the

National Spiritualist Association of Churches are still active today. Yes, some things do pass away, but others stand the test of time, especially when they're rooted in something eternal hope. Victoria Woodhall found a new home in England. She found a new husband too, and a new life. When the British Museum opened a display that explored the Beach or Tilton scandal that had destroyed Victoria's place in New York, her husband John took the museum to court for libel.

Victoria was ready to be Mrs Martin. Now no more scandal, no more battles, no more smears. But even if you believe there is no death for the soul, the body can't survive on belief alone. In nine seven, John Martin had been sick. He wanted to see if island air would help him heal, so he set out to spend the winter in the Canary Islands off the northwest coast of Africa. But when he did, he left Victoria back home in England. She had also been ill, maybe even

too sick to travel. When he was on his way out, John wrote to his father that Victoria was very much depressed, just like Elisha Caine. Traveling away from Maggie Fox into the frozen North, John left, but anxiety nod at him, and he wrote Victoria often during his winter stay. In one of his last letters, he said he wondered if it would ever reach her. I am out of the world,

he wrote. There is no telegraph, no newspapers. A flurry of lonely telegrams from Victoria were finally answered in March when he sent a note saying I will sail tonight for the most remote of all the islands and be cut off from the world for ten days. He promised that he would come home to her afterwards because he wasn't getting any better, But he was cut off from the world more severely than he had imagined. John died far from home on March. His doctors sent Victoria a

telegram with the devastating news. But if she still believed that messages crossing an enormous gulf could be a comfort, there is no record of it. On his death, Victoria inherited John's wealth, including shares in his bank and his family lands, and then she retreated. One note that she wrote to herself explores the devastation that she clearly felt. Your temperament is of an active type, she wrote. Maybe she was thinking back to her younger years criss crossing

America in a carriage with James Blood. Are going toe to toe with New York City's hypocritical ministers and corrupt tycoons. But I feel a sad, tired feeling. She continued a lonesomeness, so she retreated to the Tutor's style mansion that had been empty for ten years. From there, she had a view over the Severn Valley and the Cotswalds. She even started driving throughout the countryside to keep her mind off the dark moments of her past, and by all accounts,

she fell in love with cars. Here's Mary Gabriel once again. John Martin, her husband had a family property in Gloucestershire and the west of England, and she literally would move there and live in this grand house up on a hill and wage for the rest of her life, wage very small battles for education, for driving, for women's rights to drive, of all things. She got involved in minor

scuffles with local authorities. She was still that fighters, still Victoria Woodhall, but her days of trying to change basically America and the world were well past her. She went on to become the first woman to take driving tours through London's Hyde Park along with her daughter. She drove all throughout England and France. But she wasn't done forming societies either. Her Lady's Automobile Club attracted others from her new social set, including the Duchess of Sutherland. Their first

parade of cars drove right past Buckingham Palace. After the First World War, though Victoria finally laid those activities to rest, her sister Tenney had also married into English money, but she continued to travel and speak. She even went back to America to confront Theodore Roosevelt about women's suffrage. But Victoria had begun to shut herself off from the world and its troubles. One of her gardeners remembered that once, when he was weeding the path outside her mansion, he

heard a strange tapping sound ring out. He looked up to see Victoria standing inside, knocking on the glass of the window. She shouted at him through the window pane, saying, those weeds had the courage to grow in the path of man, and you murdered them. Maybe it was a hint at the place she felt she had begun to inhabit in the world, somewhere between the world and it's untamed edges. She had been uncontrollable in the face of men who wanted to clear the land, always coming back,

always stirring up life where others only saw death. When death finally came for Victoria in ninety seven, she was eighty eight years old. Her ashes were carried into the North Atlantic and scattered into the chasm of the ocean. Here's Mary Gabriel once again. The war she was waging then she could be waging today basically almost using the same language, which is really both sad and kind of interesting.

I think that she's a very pertinent figure for us to study at this moment in that period of history is a fascinating one for us to look at because of the changes that were occurring, and the fact that where society wasn't eighteen forty eight, no one could have predicted where it would have been even in eighteen seventy one. Last story. When Victor Maria had sued the British Museum back in the eighteen nineties, she had taken the stand

to give testimony. Naturally, the museum's lawyers peppered her with questions. Was her spiritualist Guardian Demosthenes? They asked, just as Theodore Tilton had written, I do not think I shall tell you who he is or what he is, she replied. Then they asked her, would it be true that she took a prominent part in all the movements social and political that we're going on in America? Yes, she told them I had, would she say? They asked that her life was a career of what would be called a

very remarkable kind. It was, she said, a very laborious career. They then asked if she had at one time been a clairvoyant. Not at one time, she answered, all the time, and still are they asked, Victoria nodded, and still am. Today's episode was the final leg of this season's exploration of the spiritualist movement, bringing our journey to an end. If you've enjoyed the results of our team's hard work, you're written reviews and star ratings would be very welcome

on Apple Podcasts. Your kind words go a long way toward helping newcomers tap that subscribe button, and all of that helps the show grow. It's been an honor to be your guide over the past few weeks, and I look forward to our next tour through the darker corners of history. But we're not quite done with the story of season two. Starting on January, we'll be releasing all

eight of our incredible historian interviews in full. These are powerful conversations with the leading scholars in the world of spiritualism, and the insight and details they bring to the topic are perfect for those who want more. Just leave your podcast app subscribed to this show, and those interview episodes will arrive automatically every week, as will news about season three. In fact, if you stick around after this brief sponsor break, I'll give you a taste of what's to come. Next

time on un obscured Spirit Communication is ancient. It's probably as old as mankind. It goes way back into the Greek philosophers, many Asian religions, Native Americans. They have pet seances, the idea that your beloved animals continue with you through eternity. Personally, I can think of no stronger argument for belief in spiritualism.

Benjamin Ekland was a favorite medium for the communication of scientific information, and the notion that spirit mediums could communicate scientific information was understood as another kind of evidence of spirit presence. They didn't just focus on machine to make contact between the living and the dead, but they also put their minds at work to try to get inspiration spirit help to invent new machines that would help everybody.

They take up nineteenth century Victorian notions of the virtues of white female womanhood that allow certain kinds of power for women and girls to speak in public, but also a range of masculinities for men who might have sat outside the strictures or boundaries of what was possible for Victorian men. They believe that humanity writ large was also on a ladder of progress, and figures like John Brown and Tis Sultan over tour. They helped push humanity along

the ladder of progress. People from all levels of society used religion as kind of an umbrella to either hide under, to seek salace from, or to use as a mask. So Journer, when she wasn't on the platform, she liked to sit at the foot of the platform. That way she could interject things she could say, Can I say something? Un Obscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane in partnership

with I Heart Radio. Research and writing for this season is all the work of my right hand man Carl Nellis and the brilliant Chad Lawson composed the brand new soundtrack. Learn more about our contributing historians, source material and links to our other shows over at history unobscured dot com and until next time, thanks for listening. Unobscured as a

production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Monkey. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.