S2 – INTERVIEW 6: John Buescher

Occult Periodicals. It's an online database where John and his team have digitized thousands of pages of newspapers, pamphlets, books and advertisements, which is a gold mine for historians and people like me. Researcher Carl Nellis talked with John about all kinds of spiritualists. Some we covered in our season of Unobscured, like Corras Scott to John Conklin, and some will introduce to you here for the first time. So let's get to the interview. Here's Dr John Buscher. This

is the Unobscured Interview series for season two. I'm Aaron Mankey. Yeah. Well, it meant to be attached to a movement that was sometimes firmly and sometimes loosely associated. Um. These were people who felt that they could make immediate contact with the soul, so they departed and in order to do that, They typically would sit around in a around a table and join hands and UM wait for things to happen. Lights

tree usually turned down fairly low, and UM. One of them would be would act as a medium, which means someone who could establish psychic contact with the spirits. Sometimes things would happen that We're not just what you might think of as messages coming out of the medium's mouth from various spirits, but sometimes UM, furniture would move, or people would feel caressings or here wraps under the table and so on. And that was more or less the

practical meaning of being a spiritualist. But it was wide movement, and you didn't necessarily have to actually attend what came to be called seances in order to identify yourself with as a spiritualist. Spiritualist also developed a kind of constellational beliefs about the afterlife and about this life, and so there were spiritual conventions. There were UM a bunch of people who traveled as platform lecturers who speculated on this new theology and new doctrine and new era that was

opening up that would join up heaven to earth. You know, That's what it was. In that variety of kind of events that would be considered spiritualists, from the platform lecture to the test medium investigation to the seance. When people were coming to these seances to meet with these mediums, what kinds of things were they looking for? What do

they want to get out of it? Well, they they wanted to see wonder um, and one of the wonders that they saw or hoped to see was some immediate connection to their own relatives or friends in the afterlife. They were anxious about that, and if it could be proved that connection was made UM, it would of course alieve their own grieving over the departed souls of their friends and relatives, but it would also give them some conviction.

They typically talked about how traditional religion was based on faith in the afterlife, but they were seeking knowledge or proof of it. So that wonder that they were seeking, I think was just larger than asking Aunt Bertha, where where that will was of Uncle Carl's that nobody knows that we can't find it? Now, where was the dresser or something? UM? Or how are you doing? Um? Is it? Is it a good place that you've gone to in

the afterlife? But there were larger questions about anxieties to be answered about the direction of the country, about the direction of about even about politics, about the new world that would seemed to be merging all around them. Um. So these were the kind I mean, it was a

very broad spectrum of things that were going on. There were many people who tended seances that called themselves investigators, you know, as if they were amateur or sometimes professional um scientists who were looking for evidence and would regard these sessions as an opportunity to test whether or not fraud was going on, or self delusion or whatnot, as well as firm believers that what they were seeing was

and was in fact true. So I think, um, it's a hard question to answer, but there were a range of motivations from people who joined in seances or even

who attended platform lectures. Um. I think it's very typical reading account of a medium who would go up on stage and the audience would be mixed between firm believers, and they would usually set themselves off towards the front in a kind of cord and maybe to pretend the speaker I don't know, but and then behind them there big hecklers and people who, you know, we're sort of vaguely threatening Uh, you know, might ask embarrassing questions or

try to trick medium or something like that. Mm hmm. In the course of researching the movement and studying its members. Uh, You've you've fastened on some figures like John Mary Spear and John Conklin and and odeali Adista Bar and you've written book length treatments about them. Is there a common thread between the kinds of people that you have taken as your research subjects and decided to tell their their story in a kind of robust way. Well, there's two

parts of that answer, Quarrel. I think one is that I'm fascinated with writing people's biographies. Um. I don't know how to write history and abstract way. Um I usually my eyes usually glaze over as I'm looking through history that depicts it as a playground of impersonal forces and working against each other and dropping out the individuals. I think all I can see about history is the stories of people to tell tales about other people, and that's

what I've always been interested in. So that's one way to to talk about why I'm incasantly writing biographies. I don't know how to do it any other way. But the other issue is the people I've focused on, maybe, as you've noticed, are really wild characters. And I think I've always been I don't know if you'd say gifted, but at least fascinated by outliers. These are the sort

of the wildest of the wild folks. And h I think I've always been able to, I don't know, walk along the beach sand and find some odd saying that whether people don't notice, or some piece of glass that looks shiny, uh. And these are definitely that those kinds of people, you know, within the wide range of the spiritualist movement, I seem to be able to find, you know, the toad and the hole or the serpent in the garden,

if you might say. And I think by looking at those outliers, so you can see stuff that's true within the movement, but maybe harder to see stuff that's true m in potential, and that leads you into, you know, questioning main narrative about what spiritualism was and trying to follow its logic. They seem to be loose threads that you can pull and see the texture a little better. That's that's fantastic. Maybe as we as we as we

talk over the next hour or so. UM, it would be awesome to hear you kind of reflect, maybe because I want to talk about both John Conklin and Cora Scott who became Corea Hatch and Cora Richmond, and maybe we'll be able to compare a little bit and talk about what the main narrative is and and who the outliers are and kind of how they played against each other. Um, over a few decades of spiritualist history. I would love that if we could do that kind of going forward.

Um m hm. You're one of those people who has done a great service to academia with the with I apps up in digitizing and working to collect digitized periodicals from spiritualist history. Uh. With with the team there, can you talk about what originally drew you to the to that work and uh and what you've done with that organization? Yes, I can tell you. UM, I put a few things

on the web. M. I don't know fifteen eighteen years ago. UM, that struck me as important and fascinating about history of spiritualism. Mostly you get to know spiritualism I think from the ground up as a historian. UM. And the ground was

missing here. There is plenty of secondary material. But if you read secondary material people who already have a take on it, and maybe we were not as familiar as they could have been with this primary material, then you're not really getting down into where the history was being formed. And it was also my conviction that all of the material I was looking for was present in the periodicals and newspapers that spiritualists themselves were producing back in those days.

You know, they would often give lists of platform mediums and where they were going in their lecture tours and so on. They would also give criticisms of one another, um on this point at that point, who was marrying who, who was dissing who? Um. Those kinds of things are not readily available, and they were only in these periodicals.

So in order to get hold of these periodicals, I mean, these were this is ephemera, you know, and a lot of if you think about it, librarians, who an archivists, who would be expected to um collect and preserve such materials,

they were inclined. Over the century and a half since these things were produced, they were quite inclined to de accession these things at at their first chance, either about of their own convictions or simply because I thought oh, this is kind of crazy, and I need the space here, and let's throw away these fourteen volumes of the Banner of Light or something. So in practice, what that meant

was if you wanted to do primary research in that area. UM. The collections were scattered all over the country, in fact, all over the world. You might have a volume collected here or in Washington and the Library Congress, or there might be one UM at the New York Public Library. And so UM there was three or four of us who decided, maybe we're getting to be sort of retired gentlemen here or whatever, men of leisure or something like that, and we're of the same conviction that we really couldn't

rely on UM secondary material. So we set off sort of quixotic project to collect all this stuff. And one of us, in particular, Mark Damrest, was quite skilled, and UM I t and decided that we could elect all

this and put it on a server. We could scan it, We could go dust off stuff, travel here and there on our own resources, and use our time and talent to either photograph these things stuck in a corner somewhere here and there, UM or shell out some bugs to get the libraries themselves to make microfilm roles that we could turn into O c R stuff and call it

at all and put it on the web. And wouldn't that be a wonderful resource for everybody, so people wouldn't have to go trudging around and sort of work in the darkness. So that was the that's the inspiration for it. And uh yeah, it really has been such a service.

Uh you know, of course I've been in offended from it for this project, but just as I've been sorting through the more recent secondary material that's been written since those resources have been on the web, Uh, I see, I see the debt to you and Mark and and the folks who have joined you over Power Vaney, the other guy who has joined us was retired lawyer from New York. He had spent probably years collecting microfilm roles sticking him in his study. He bought a microfilm reader

and would put, you know, just for enjoyment. Instead of other people who might, you know, turn on a football game, he would go into his study and load one of these microfilm rolls on and read the Um Spiritual Telegraph from eighteen sixty four and just to have a good old time. So he was a really primary resource for us at the beginning, especially at the beginning. Uh, this kind of creates an interesting bridge back to what spiritual us we're doing with publishing. How would you describe what

spiritualists were doing with various kinds of technology. I mean, there was lots of experience, experimentation, and interest in both spreading news but also figuring out how to communicate across new horizons. And I see almost some parallels between I mean, what kind of what we're doing now with podcasting, but uh, you know where every kind of group has a podcast or a website or a blog, or what you were doing with digitizing saying we can put this out on

the web. We can. Um, can you talk a little bit about how spiritualists in the nineteenth century engage technology and communication and how that was really tied into the movement. Well, there's several things that we could talk about there. One of them is essentially the newspapers from periodicals themselves. There weren't that many spiritualists around the country, but um, they formed a definite group and had related interest. And the

newspapers weren't local newspapers, they were national newspapers. They were always conceived of is that way, um, And so they functioned as a sort of social media platform I guess you could say, in a primitive way, uniting people who were surrounded by seeds of unbelievers and had you know, allowed them to basically talk to each other. So that's uh, that's one way in which they used their you know, the emerging technology of newspaper distributions and subscription lists and

cross references and so on. So it was an interesting time in the history of newspapers itself in the United States, and spirituals took full use of that made you full use of that. So that's one thing. But there's another issue that's quite striking about spiritualism in general. There was an emergence during this time of new technology that was

an inspiration to them religiously. I think you'd have to say, Um, it looked to them like harnessing of previously invisible forces steam electricity, and there were inventions that suggested to them that there was there were things in the world that hadn't been seen before, powers and potentialities that were being revealed to them unmistakably. Spiritual telegraph, which is the name of one of the main papers back then took its name from this kind of inspiration. The electronic telegraph had

just been demonstrated, and it was a miracle. Basically, too many many people, and there was some real conviction that there were things going on, that we're turning the times into a new era, a new age, and that it was it was you could think of it as a sort of secular millennium. Heaven and Earth were being joined, the visible and invisible, Spirit and matter were coming close together. UM, the dead and the living would walk together. Space and

time would be annihilated. And it was exciting too many people and a hopeful and optimistic time that it was also somewhat distressing, UM annihilated. I think if you look at there's one particular story of called the Celestial Railroad that was written by UM David Thorow, and this story is about a gentleman who gets on the railroad at some place I forget anyway, All the points along the way are are named for the points of progress that

the pilgrim makes in the old Pilgrim's Progress story. And by getting on the railroad, he just sails on past the slough of Despond and Vanity Fair. He just sees out the window and it sails right onto you know, the Heavenly City. But as he's moving into the Heavenly City, waiting for the final stop, it does occur to him whether or not this this is going to be heaven or it's something like it's reverse. Um. There was plenty

of anxiety as well as optimism about it. And I think this is one of the things that made people, you know home for the best with the secular millennium that was upon him. So I think the spiritualists were both impressed and put somewhat at sea with the rest of everybody else about this new world that was opening up before them. And there are a few spiritualist inventors who try to create technologies that will capture or become themselves.

A spiritual telegraph that will allow spirits to speak to people. You you write about John Mary Spear and there's a god machine. Uh. Decades later, there's the psychophone, right. Yes, there's a whole a series of machines for connecting humans with the other world. Um. And one of our co directors on the IP project, Brandon Hodge, really has made that his specialty. He's a collector. If you walk through

his house. It's kind of scary anyway. But he's collected plan chats and whigy board to do all kinds of stuff. He's very well up on this. This is really his his, He's Bailey Wick. But yes, there was But they didn't just focus on machines to contact 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 that would help everybody. John Murray spirit you mentioned, he worked on under the conviction that the spirits could give him and his fellow workers new ideas for patenting. They would avoid the patents of the singer and how for perfecting the sewing machine and spend quite a bit of time trying to um materialize those I guess you would say, into a workable machine. Another spirit actualist you claim to have invented vacuum canning.

I think she did actually, So there were people that were looking who who are thinking about inspiration in a new way, were open to ideas that they didn't know where where they were coming from. I think everybody actually has such experience of feeling that they've been inspired by in the creative act inspired by ideas that don't seem to them to be connected with anything that they actually

tried to figure out to work from. And spirituals were very, very, very much of that mind that goes way back right to the idea of the muse. Yes, I think so. I think the muses personific asian of something mysterious that that works inside you. You know, in some ways you can you can see there something that connects spiritualist movement which began late eighteen forties with the earlier Romantic movement UM.

They two were very much impressed with UM the idea that poetry was a holy art and you could be inspired by resorting to non non rational faculties and powers that were beyond your little self, And in the thirties and forties kind of seating the ground for modern spiritualism. There was all kind of interest in uh mesmerism and animal magnetism and um magna of ties, chances and some of those practices that were considered kind of new horizons of applied science of the of the human person, of

the mind of the soul. Can you talk a little bit about how those ideas laid the groundwork for what would become spiritualism. Okay um. Historically, there was a French mesmerist who whose name was Charles Poya, who decided to come to America and give a series of Mesmerick demonstrations, as he called them, and spent most of his time around New England giving demonstrations of what we would recognize

as hypnosis, and it very much impressed people. Um, and it created a rowing mass of other mesmeric demonstrators, demonstrators who applied their way around the country, showing off what was possible here and the sort of miraculous things that that people under hypnotic control could be expected to do, one of which was clairvoyance. Some of their mesmeric subjects were seemed to be capable of leaving their bodies and traveling other places, coming back and reporting to the audience

details that they couldn't know. Um. They might be able to report being able to see into other people's bodies and figuring out diagnosing their diseases and prescribing what would

cause them to heel. Um. This was a shock to people, and I think it was, as he said, laid the groundwork for the possibility that um, well, you know, in a larger sense, I think you can see him during that time that what we call the self was a mystery was being revealed as a mystery, that that it wasn't unitary, or there was something underneath, hidden underneath, beyond what was on top of your consciousness that usually identified as yourself. You know, people who are speaking about main

narratives here. It is often said that one of the crises of modernism a modern man that threw man into a dizzy. I mean capital M. Here was um for a for ad Darwin. But in Fred's case it was that he discovered and made plausible the notion of a subconscious But in fact um this was an issue, had been an issue um and a matter of much anxiety back into the late eighteenth century. And the people that were wandering around showing off their mesmerism, Um, we're certainly

part of that. I don't know what you called uh discussion or um in the broader public realm didn't demonstrating that there were other things going on inside the self that might not be a parent At the same time, Uh, there are also changes in American religion. You write a lot in your book The Other Side of Salvation about connections between especially universalist ministers and spiritualists in the eighteen

forties and eighteen fifties. Can you talk a bit about, um, the way that Universalism's place in American religion, uh was another piece uh of preparing the ground for spiritualism. Yes, okay. Um. Universalists were people who generally were what they called come outers of established religion. Now come outers as a term that they lifted out of a reference to the Book of Revelation where the Holy people are advised to come out of Babylon the fallen and go off into the wilderness,

separate themselves. And so yeah, Um, there were many people who formed groups that I thought of themselves as come outers from either established religion or established government. And um, America was full of utopian projects and communes and so on, always has been, and the universe less in particular work come outers of what they called orthodoxy. That it's probably a too narrow a term to really understand without comment.

What they meant by orthodoxy was a form of congregationalism based on mostly on what they understood of John Calvin. And the reason they came out of it was or or said that they came out was because they they

were anxious. Seemed they were oppressed by the notion that, um, that there could be a god who would ah force people into endless misery and that such people couldn't act two affect that from their reading of Calvinism, it seemed that they were cut off from heaven, they were cut off from any effort to change their destiny, and that's a hard load to bear, and so they declared for universal salvation instead. All people would be saved in some ways.

It's taking Calvin and turning him on his head. M So that was how exactly they came out, um, but

I mean humans are humans. So they immediately began arguing about, well, if if everybody goes to heaven straight off, no matter what they've done on earth, then that means, for example, that Judas, who hung himself after betraying Christ, got to heaven before Jesus did his master are you know, posing sort of extreme consequences on each other to try to figure out, well, maybe there is some thing going on

in the afterlife that would be evolution. The soul would progress, it would move higher and higher, And that notion of progression in the afterlife was one of the things that definitely disposed universalists, particularly of the conviction that there was progress in the afterlife. You couldn't you couldn't just say that everyone was immediately saved, so you could speak to maybe spirits who would tell you about what they were

doing here and have conversations with you. And the afterlife was a place very much like this, except everybody was

moving upward, you know, a little bit better day by day. Um. So that notion was really part of spiritualism from the beginning, and it was what you might say, both attracted universalists to it as well as I think you could say that early spiritualism was you know, which was at the very beginning was a very chaotic group of phenomena, but it was Universalists, mostly ministers, that that coagulated around it, gloamed onto it, that formed it's it's most basic convictions

about this. So, with it being these come outers who are so helpful in addressing and building up a kind of a reputation for spiritualism, how did it then relate to those established tradition Christian traditions. Um, with it being so involved with universalism, what was kind of the response of the the other Christian traditions other than universalism to spiritualism following, you know in the okay Um. It's a very complex thing about the relationship between spiritualism and Christianity.

In some ways, you can really see it as a sort of this is a loaded word, but a sort of parasitic upon Christian belief. Um or is codependent with Christian belief, mainline Christian belief, but um clearly the history of Christianity is very much in the direction that, hey, you're not supposed to call up the dead and talk to them. That's from absolutely forbidden UM. And that's that's

just the way it always was. So most of the um Christian population the United States thought that this was not only crazy and full of fraud and duplicity, but it was also demonic. It was it had to do with idle worship and a resort to witches and soothsayers, fortune tellers and so on. So there was there was that, and they found that the spirituals found themselves quite a quite hammered on because Christians vaulted them for all that.

On the other hand, spiritualists themselves were often conceived of themselves as as if they were part of what you might call the second wave of the perfection of the Protestant Revolution, which was itself a sort of coming out. They were come outers, the early Protestants from the Catholic Church. So um, they themselves were of divided opinion about their

relationship with Christianity. Some of them, some of the most famous spiritualists, saw themselves as having come out completely out of Christianity into um secularism, atheism, free thought, and saw Spiritualism as the enemy of Christianity. On the other hand, I wouldn't say that they were the majority of spiritualists. The majority of spiritualists I think saw themselves as sort of Christianity plus m hm hm. With the kind I

answer that, yeah, that's great, that's okay. Um, with the kind of opposition to spiritualism that you just described, uh, where the majority of Christians take a very negative view, whether because they see it as idle worship or fraudulent or demonic. Um. It seems maybe surprising that spiritualism spread so quickly and even became a global movement, got picked up, you know, traveling back to France and to England and

to Germany and the Caribbean and Australia. Um. What made this kind of distinctive modern spiritualism attractive beyond the context in which it first appeared. Well, I think it's probably common human aspiration to try to know about the afterlife. Death is a worrisome thing. If there's an answer somewhere and you can be made to believe it, it's certainly something you'd want to pay attention to, no matter where you were on earth. That's one way to answer your question,

I suppose. UM. Another way is to sort of comb into the final details of what actually did get spread. There is a variety might say, of spiritualism that was shared through personal contacts and through English language. UM, that you could think of as Anglo American spiritualism, and this was something that was has always been predominant in the

United States, in Britain, in Australia. But there is a wider form of spiritualism that I think was inspired by the early experiences of American spiritualists and referred to it, often referred to it. But this form was developed by essentially and and was essentially spread by the writings of a French um. He called himself a spiritist to distinguish himself from spiritualists, and his name was Alan Cardack. That

was his pseudonym anyway. And the big difference I think there is that he believed in and wrote in his all his works um reincarnation, reincarnation, and that was something that was absolutely surprising and even an athema too Anglo American spiritualists who regarded the afterlife and the soul's further progression is something that was onward and upward, maybe with varying degrees of velocity, but it wasn't coming back to

Earth as a materialized being. So that's uh. That form of spiritualism is something that at took cold in France and southern parts of Europe and then spread through Brazil other parts of other parts of the world. M. Most of the Brazilians in Brazil is has a huge population and a large probably the largest spirit is population of any country in the world, and their followers of Cardeck and therefore reincarnation is a part of their belief M hmm,

thank you. Yeah, that's great. Um, let's jump into the stories of a few particular mediums. Um. So I'll ask you, I didn't have him in this outline that I prepared for us, but okay, springing on me, Well, you've written about it. I remember the name. I don't know, well, it's John Dods. It's John Bovi Dodds, who you've written about. He was one of those univer Sist ministers gets into

spiritualism at one point. Here comes an opponent of spiritualism over the course of the eighteen fifties, and then comes back to it. So I found his story really interesting. Um. Can you can you walk us through kind of who he was in his relationship to spiritualism or are you comfortable with that? I think though, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to say much more than you just I'll give her my bed shot. Um, he was

John Bovie Dodds. I won't go into all the de deals about always got that name, but it was a kind of family name. Anyway, he was he was He first had his spirit experience walking through the woods one day. Um. This was about eighteen o seven eight something like that. Um, when he encountered the spirit of his father, who spoke to him and told him some things. When when the boy got home, he told his family that he'd seen his father out in the woods, and they thought he

was crazy or you know, sick somehow. Um, but he did encounter his father's spirit in the woods repeatedly, and then he also later the spirit of another relative of his who had committed suicide. And so, according to again Orthodoxy, I suppose it's I put it in quotation marks for everybody at this point orthodox he would would definitely consigned to everlasting misery. She appeared to him as a glorious spirit clothed in light and told him that things were

coming to a head and he would be revealed. Things would be revealed to him that wouldn vert him from um mistaken beliefs. And after that he started experiencing um parent what we would call it a paranormal phenomenon. M Furniture would start to move across the room, people who are in the house would hear heard. I think one group of them experienced hearing but not seeing, a cannonball traveling across the room and then jumping onto the bed one day, depressing the mattress, and all of this by

some sort of invisible thing that couldn't possibly be material. Um. One day, this glorified spirit grabbed off his hat and threw it in the air and sailed around for a mile or so. He watched in the air and it came back and landed on his head. He became you can imagine that he developed fairly strong beliefs about the reality of not only the afterlife, but also because of this experience that he is supposedly damnable relative and achieved some high and glorious state. He also came to question

Orthodoxy as well. So that was his early experience. He became a Universalist minister, and then got really fascinated with the mesmeric demonstrations of Koyan and some of his fellow Universalist ministers, and became m He came a demonstrator himself, and spent quite a bit of time um essentially doing experiments and hypnosis on himself and his family members and anybody else they could drag into. And and he even, as I recall, he even tried it on his congregation.

Um to what extent, I can't I don't know, but I'm imagining him standing on you know, on the platform in front of the congregation, trying to put his trying to put his congregation in a trance of sub guide. I'm not sure there's some comic potential there, Carl, Like you know, you could develop it later into stuff. They um, the sources are not clear enough for me to imagine it very well, but anyway, um. As a result of this, he developed this theory that there were, in fact, um

there were two minds at work. In other words, one of his critics said, every man is engaged in thinking thoughts of which he is profoundly unconscious. He carries in his own brain a separate world of mind, endowed with the power of sustaining masterly arguments, imparting various and astounding information before wholly unknown, and answering with readiness many difficult questions without his own knowledge of the fact. And yes, this was what he was proposing, that there was what

we would call subconscious at work. The mind was something that may have been machine, but it was made up of wheels within wheels, that there were things going on that we were not conscious of. This was a big pill to swallow for a lot of people. Essentially, what it did was it moved him off a spirit interpretation of his own experiences onto a more materialistic explanation. And

for a long time he taught that. He wrote, in fact, a long book, and a very influential one about spiritualism, in which he basically dissolved it into something that was a physical or mental phenomenon. And the opponents of spiritual him were very grateful for his book and used it quite a bit. But what happened to him was, Um, the spirit started coming back to him and be rating him repeatedly that he aired he'd gone off the track here and just such a strong degree did they did?

They appear to him that he was made to repent his materialism and go back to being a spiritualist. So that was the way he continued to be a spiritualist into UM be an activist in the spiritualist movement, UM based in New York for a long time until his death. M Um, that's great, thank you. UM. Let's jump to another one of the figures that you've written about a lot, but that a few other historians and scholars seem to have really explored, and that's John Conklin. Um. The I

had to dig him up out of the grave, Corl. Yes, yes, and and I'm so glad you did so. Uh introduce him to to our listeners into the world, you know, who was on Conklin and how did he get involved in spiritualism? And then of course we'll walk toward the White House with him as as we go. Okay. John Benjamin Conklin was a member of the proletariat. It was

sailor Baker. He had various odd jobs. Um. He was born well and up in New York, I mean Upper New York City near Bronx and uh it's been a long time um working on the docks and in the ships. And he'd always been fascinated by magic, performing magic apparently. And when spiritualism first broke and he began hearing about raps on the tables and people going into trances and connecting with spirits of the dead, he was He was an early adopter and transformed himself into a medium who

used it to make a living. He opened up offices in New York City which he moved from time to time. And not only did he take um individuals for consultations in which they would pay him for um for his being able to contact dead spirit which should I say living spirits anyway, but they He also set up a kind of mm hmm exhibition space, performance space, I guess quite near Arnama's Museum, and people would come to that as part of their experience of the Big city, they

would visit Arneam's museum. They might take in some other sites, but they would also visit his spirit room, in which they would sit around in a big circle, rows and rows of of people who looked at what was going on in the center, and he would face off basically against a table, a table between them, someone of the of the audience, and it was like, you know, the people who were sitting around the outside would take a number. And I don't know if this is a game. It

was exactly true, I don't remember. But when their turn came up, and that was their time to go down and sit opposite the table of Conquin and uh, he would um. In those kinds of situations, he would um answer their questions um and usual, often by this excuse me, this method of having the person right. Little questions that they wanted answered by the spirits are a piece of a slip of paper, and they would roll up the slip of paper, bunchet up so that he couldn't see it,

ostensibly as a guard against fraud. And then he would take these pieces of paper and roll them up in his hands and then throw them down with a bunch of other suppostly blank slips of paper. UM. This was called billet reading or ballot reading. UM. The billets were the little slips of paper and then he would pull out one or two who slips of paper and hold it against forehead and answer the question that was written on it. These are questions directed to spirits basically that

the people wanted to contact. He also held private more or less private seances in which UM. There was the use of a wrapping board. In the early days of spiritualism. You know, there are these just random wraps that would um emerge in a dark room and these were attributed to spirits. Well, they were attributed earlier to ghosts. So what was it? What was the big deal here? Well, the big deal was that these ghosts or spirits could

be communicated with. There was a spiritual telegraph you could you could the wraps could be interpreted as like the clicks on a telegraph. So the means that was used was UM. You would count there was one wrap, it was an A. If there were two raps it was a B, and so on through the alpha. But so basically had to sit around and wait for a message UM, which would be a series of wraps UM and I can't imagine, but it was boring to sit around and wait for the whole message to to wrap itself out

one not time. Anyway, he would do this. This was the early technology, might say of of spiritualism. But it did. It did develop into a more efficient system as things went along. Um. But he he used whatever he could that way. Anyway. He got to be one of four or five pretty famous or notorious you might say, um spiritualist operators in New York City at the time before the war. Emma Harding is another one, Emma Harding Britain that we're following, and he was in her milieu, right.

They knew each other, they sometimes worked together. Yes, I'm not sure how much they actually worked together, that's a that's an interesting question. But I do know that Emma

Harding was essentially converted by him. She went to a seance in which there were these raps, one of these ones I've described wrapping out a message, and the spirits were um allegedly delivering a message that she regarded as blasphemous, and so she freaked out and and left, and but she went back curious a couple of times and became convinced that spiritualism was real, and I suppose she also became convinced that it wasn't blasphemous but something elevated. Um.

So that was her connection. That was her direct connection with Conklin. Anyway, and there's Uh, there's another interesting moment in his life where he's he wrote about what you called a raucous public science in where there was kind of a debate between the spirits of Daniel Webster, Uh spoken through another medium and Henry Clay spoken through Conklin. And this creates a connection to Lincoln for him. Can

you talk about that science? What strikes me about that particular science is that there were two people entranced at the same time who were delivering messages in the voice of two actors. It was sort of improv wasn't it. Um One was playing off the other in a way that we wouldn't expect except outside of or modern improvisational theater, and neither one knew what the other one was going

to say. But they've been prepped, or they'd prepped themselves, of course obviously with knowledge of who these actors were, what their political positions were, and so on. And so we're in a way that or making making riffs on the position of Henry Clay or Daniel Webster. It was a kind of dramatization, wasn't it, of of what these now deceased people would would say on the issue. That's probably not what you're driving at, though, is it. Well, no,

that's right. There's just in what you wrote about Conklin, because Henry Clay was such a mentor figure and an inspiration to Lincoln. Um, you mentioned in your in your book about Conklin that this might have been the moment when he caught Lincoln's attention in that would then perhaps have brought him into Lincoln's orbit during the war in Washington. But let's just let's just step to that time. It may have happened that way, But um, I am fairly sure that Lincoln had seen him before and had sat

in his New York Um exhibition room. Um, maybe not in a fully engaged way, but in a curious sort of way and asked him questions, submitted questions to him before. So then when we get to the war years, John Conklin, along with Nettie Colburn and a few others, were spiritualists mediums who claimed to have influenced Lincoln, even to the point of some claims about UH directly dictating the emancipation

Proclamation from the spirits to him and those kinds of things. Um, how much do we know about the seances in the Lincoln White House and how involved these mediums were? Well, I hope that everything we know is in the book I just published, as I certainly tried to put everything I knew about it in there. But UM, it's a lot of it. What we claimed to know or claim

to be false. UM came out UM essentially much later, around eight nine, when a medium spirit spirit medium who had been in Washington during the Lincoln years and who had certainly been in the White House and involved with other spiritualists at the time, published her memoirs. UM. I happen to believe that UM Nanty Colburn. While while she was a medium and working in Washington, she wasn't a professional medium, and she may not even have been noticed

much by other more famous mediums at the time. UM. She was a member of group of friends who were spiritualists and more or less direct access to the president. But by the time her memoirs came out, it obviously been amplified by people during that time, and I mean by that the nineties, who had a lot of stake at claiming that Lincoln was essentially being directed by spirits all the time. And so I try to sort through

those claims in the book. And Natie may not have been the most um famous or or even notorious medium who was in the Lincoln's orbit, but she definitely was there. John Conklin was definitely there too, although a lot a lot of the action seems to have taken place off stage, as it were, in the home of postmaster, not a postmaster, but a post office and employee, a civil service employee, UM, whose family was quite devoted to spiritualist men who thought

of themselves as mediums. That was, they lived into Georgetown, and Lincoln visited there. I'm pretty sure of that. There's a lot of testimony that's quite solid that he did that. And I think it's also pretty solid that Mrs Lincoln in particular was devoted to a full believer in spiritualism, UM, that she invited mediums to the White House, that they conducted seances there. I'm inclined to believe that her husband took part in at least as an interested observer. In

many of those seances. Typically the line of historians has been, well, he just went to protect his wife, which may have been the case actually in some in some respects, but I think it's the evidence is pretty clear that he was listening very very closely, and Conklin was one of those. There were others. There was there was a medium who

was probably brought down to the White House too. I think you'd have to say minister to the Lincoln after their son had died, and she had a reputation for being a healum healing medium who could see inside the body and prescribe healing medications and so on. Um. I think there was also they were well, they were well

protected by their guards. There was a cordon of people ranging from secretary to um, you know, all kinds of folks who were very protective of his reputation and did not particularly want the idea that Lincoln was listening to mediums in the White House and getting advice on the conduct of the war to get out. So it's pretty difficult to sort through those kinds of conflicting and you know, conflicting testimonies. I did my best here. Um, do you

have any comments on Colchester? Well? He was a rogue. He was um, a man often prosecuted for fraud um um. And by that I mean presenting himself as an exhibitor of messages from the spirits that were he was caught in as having faked UM. He was amount of bank. He warned. He was giving exhibitions that were in Washington, d c. That were well attended by all the upper segments of society there. He was brought into the White House to to give seances for Mary Todd Lincoln and

was investigated. I mean, I think this is this is the source of where you're here, that Lincoln had to protect his wife from unscrupulous mediums, because this is basically what he did with with Colchester. He had the because he was suspicious of the guy. He had the UM. I think he was the head of the Smithsonian Institute. UM recommend somebody to come in, you know, give his opinion on this guy, and he essentially declared him um fake.

And Lincoln's friends, one of them was a journalist UM essentially Collard Colchester and told him to get out of town um or you know, he'd make things hot for him, which he did um. Before he made off with the White House Silver basically and yeah, and there's records I've looked at the uh what was published in the newspapers about Colchester's later jugglery trial, the fraud the fraud trial. UM. Yeah, Um. So then you've also written about a lock of hair

that was probably given to the Lorries the family of mediums. Um. Can you describ vibe that lock of hair and why it would have been that they would have been able to take possession of it? Well, the problem was presented to me as something that appeared on the internet. Um. The Chicago Museum UM displayed to the public as a sort of what would you say, um, mystery for them to solve. Here's a bunch of fun things that we have in our in our possession that we don't know

what about. And one of these things was a lock of hair. They have a lot of Lincoln curio as a memorabila by the way, and they reproduced a piece of paper that came along with it, and it said Lincoln lock of hair taken him immediately after death, and there were names at the bottom. They were a little difficult to read, but not not very difficult to read. And I looked at it and I recognized those names.

The names were of the two of the members of the Lorrie family I've already talked about lived in Georgetown, mother and the daughter. And so it occurred to me, I mean not only just hey, Chicago Museum, I know who these people are, but how, how and why they would have gotten hold of this thing, um? And I

think it's by by pursuing my question. Um. I looked in detail at the last moments of Lincoln's life before he passed away and the following Almonds and discovered descriptions of the physicians being asked by Mary Todd Lincoln too cut her a lock of hair from Lincoln's head, and the physicians themselves, a couple of them, did the same and took those And the person I wanted to talk about in this context is Henry Steele Allcott, um, because he comes in he's one of the investigators of the

Lincoln assassination and then becomes a figure important to spiritualism and then theosophy later. Can you introduce him to us? Who was Henry Steele Alcott? Henry Steel Alcott was a man of many professions. He was a professional lawyer, he

he was he was a journalist. He had been sent, for example, by the UM I think it was the New York Tribune to um covered John Brown's execution in Harper Ferry, Harper's Ferry, which involves some undercover work on his part because basically that the public weren't wasn't invited to that UM. He wound up wandering the town there

and writing his account of that. At the same time that Alan Pengerton, who wound up as the head of the essentially what became the Secret Service for the United States during the during the Civil War, was also there UM or undercover UM. So he was involved with John Brown. He was an abolitionist, he was a reformer, and I think from an early age, like maybe fourteen, he was quite interested in spiritualism, uh, and it was part of that interest while he was UM working on assignment for

the New York Daily Graphic. I think it's okay that he was sent to investigate and probably he this was his own idea, But anyway, he was sent up to Vermont to investigate this amazing place run by a family named Eddie. They had set up a sort of I don't know what you'd call it, the Spiritualists. Branson Missouri

or something. They had a spirit house where they would give exhibitions of materialized spirits, and guitars would float around in the air and ethereal music would come and um phosphorescent hands would float about, um in the air, and so on. So he was set up there, and when he was up there, he was up there for a long time, many weeks. He met a one named Helena Blavatsky who was also there too investigate what was going on.

She was also a spiritualist at least at that time, and had come to New York and was living there, and they met and he became attached to her, enamored of her. And when they got back to New York, he published his findings that disappointed a lot of people but also inspired a lot of people because he essentially said, well, there's um a lot of miraculous things going on there I can't explain. So that was regarded as a sort

of positive assessment of the Eddie Families performances. He and Madame Blavatsky were instrumental in forming a sort of paranormal research society or fraud I don't know what you call, like a fraud investigatory, uh, society that would allegedly go around and try to expose different fraudulent spiritualist practices. But

that then turned into just just a little while. It turned into under especially under Madam Bobosky's influence, turned into a more you might say positive, um society that had its own goals, and that was what turned into Theosophical Society that was just a couple of years later. I think it was. Um, that's great. Let's uh, there are a number of other well, we've talked about Conklin, We've talked a little bit about Alcott. Um. They're a number of other people who were following in the course of

our kind of narrative history of spiritualism. Um. And there's one. We're going to step back a little bit in time because I'd really like to talk about Cora Hatch and her significance to spiritualism. And you know, so we'll go back and kind of start in the eighteen fifties, but go forward from there. Um, she she becomes a really significant medium. Uh what do we know about her early life? Can you talk at all about who she was and

where she came from? Yes, Corey Scott was born in the town of Cuba, New York it's an Alleghany County in eighteen o four, and her family, as she described it later, was entirely free of the bonds of any orthodoxy. I think you can read that in considering what her father finally did as being open to certainly to universalist doctrine,

but maybe two other things, more free thought like stuff. Anyway, he was a lumbermill operator up there, and he got interested in the doctrines of a fairly famous Universalist come out or who had named Aidan Balue, who had formed a colony, a settlement about forty miles west of Boston that he named Opdale in eighteen and the family. He took his family back and forth basically between Cuban, New York,

and Hopedale throughout Corp's early life. She was um. I think she was probably ten when they decided to move to Hopedale, and they did for a little while, but for one reason or another they found it maybe too crowded or not entirely do their liking. They set out for west to Um finally wound up near Waterloo, Wisconsin

and made a home there. And it was while she was there, I think she was eleven years old when she would have her first conversion to although I don't know what it means to be converted to a belief when you're eleven years old, but had her conversion to some kind of spiritualist experience. Meanwhile, back in Hopedale, that

community was in full swing. Spiritualist interested Blue was by that time giving sermons to his followers in a sort of elevated trance state, supposedly under the direction of spirits, because there were wrappings going on all around the room. Anyway, there was obviously connection between Hopedale and the little community in Waterloo, Wisconsin, and it was in that environment that

she developed herself into a medium. I think the first media, first spirit control as it were, that she had was the son of Aiden Blue, Aidan Augustus Blue, who died early in his life and I'm not quite sure how

to um express this, but became her voice. She lent her body and voice to him, at least to his spirit, and that was the main way that she became known as a spiritualist and made her career as someone who in trance would be taken over by various spirits, mostly of the well known and authoritative figures who were um you know, her spirit control. She also had it developed a series of Indian spirit controls. One of them was named Weena. One of them was named Shannondoah. There are

a bunch of those as well. In her early career she also did some I don't know what you'd call it, spiritualist laying on of hands healing um healing work, but it was under the direction of somebody she described as a German physician, uh, spirit of a German physician. So that was her early work. But it was basically basically chorus ut um. Career consisted of standing before an audience personating as I would say, I wouldn't say impersonating, but

personating I guess that's a stronger term. Personating. The spirits of the famous departed Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Webster, Um, Theodore Parker was was long time spirit control of hers and speaking in those as as if they were present there. That was That was her career. She was very obviously, very gifted, very gifted improvisational speaker um and she produced a lot of a spur of the momentum poetry. Uh you'd have to make your own judgment about the value

of the poetry, but there's no denying that. If it was done truly without preparation, Um, it was pretty impressive. Mhm um do we do you do you have a sense of the kinds of things that spirits were saying through Cora. Was there some consistency between these different figures. Was there some affinity to certain ideas or theologies that she would speak that her spirit controls would deliver through her at these at these translectors. I don't think it

was so much um at Carl. I think it was her speaking to the events and the anxieties at the moment. She could um become the mouthpiece of Henry Clay, she could become the mouthpiece of John C. Calhoun, She could become the mouthpiece of Abraham Lincoln. She could become the mouthpiece of pretty much anybody who was who people were

looking to or might be looking to for advice. UM. A cynic might say she was looking for an angle that would appeal to a lot of people about subjects that were in the news at the time, and we're anxiously seeking some kind of advice about She was good at that. Can you describe it? She was also good at convincing people from high to low positions in the government and society that she was in fact giving them the advice that say Abraham Lincoln was would have given

if he were still with us after the war. She quite influenced the thinking of high ranking congressmen who were involved in the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson to believe

that he was involved in an assassination conspiracy. For example, if you look at the transcripts of seances she held with many of the people who were involved at the at the highest level UM in Congress, UM with matters of state, especially regarding the Radical Republicans Reconstruction Plan UH and the impeachment hearings, you can see that she was UM convincing at least two these people that were running the show, the radical Republicans who are running the show UM.

From an outsider's point of view, it looks like she's UM. She's been tasting the zeitgeist of gossip and rumors around town and UM, and that's what she was channeling. M. Channeling, by the way, is a very modern word. I just want to it's a very convenient word. But people back until I guess I looked up this a little bit, I didn't did a little research on it, but channeling to channel, channel or those things that we find so easy to describe, this sort of phenomenon didn't really appear

until maybe the nineteen forties or fifties. That's a great comment, thank you. Yeah, that's really helpful. Okay, um B. Before we got to that point in the sixties, there was um even as her popularity was growing, it was growing in coordination with her first husband, Benjamin Hatch. Uh. And then they had a divorce proceeding that was very very public drawn out. Can you describe her relationship to Benjamin Hatch, who he was, and then what happened with their marriage? Yes, Um,

Benjamin Hatch was alternative physician in that time. That could mean almost anything. In his case, it meant that he was one who was very intent on using mesmerism as part of his tools. So he was a mesmeric physician. That often meant that he either hired a clairvoyant to work with him to diagnose his patients ailments, or that

he himself um mesmerized his patients. But he was also a demonstrator of mesmeric phenomena magnetic phenomena as he called it, and a lot of those folks made a living out of it. In fact, that profession became ah what was later put on the vaudeville stage, you know, a hundred years later as stage hypnosis. Um. And when he saw Cora, she was probably third years younger than he was, maybe even more, and he romanced her and married her and became her I think you'd have to call him road

manager for touring her around the country. So there was some tension right from the beginning because they were so much older from uh, you know, he was so much older than her. But also, um, you know the kinds of thing gonna crop up in a marriage. Well, he's keeping all the money, he's not giving me any he's stepping out on me and seeing all these other women, and um, you know those sorts of things. So when um,

that became public knowledge when she filed for divorce. By the way, she did not file for divorce at first.

She filed actually for merely separation without a moony. Um. It made the papers and a lot of people, especially in the spirituous community, were outraged at the charges against this brute, and a lot of her spiritual friends rose up and basically took her under the wing, and um, so the preliminaries were UM taking care of pretty quickly, but the legal difficulties there were drawn out years and years longer. She did not get finally divorced from him

until just before the Civil War. UM claims and counterclaims back and forth during that time, basically after the just after the first separation, Benjamin hatch Um we applied to Cora and her protectors with a long book that accused spiritualists of um the most immoral and lascivious practices, and accusing spiritualists as a whole of of immorality and all kinds of things that would dissolve Christian tradition and so on.

It was clearly he was talking about people finding what they called affinities and um linking up with them, leaving their wives and husbands and sleeping with other people. And while he didn't name Cora as among that group, it was obvious that this was his UM. You know, he was talking about her, and as in the community. You mentioned that Cora develops relationships with a number of other mediums.

You said some of them take her under their wing. UM. Emma Harding is one of those, do you, UM, would you be able to describe their relationship not very well, not very well. I know they were friends, UM, there were co workers, they were co leaders of the movement. UM.

Emma hardened Um. She UM had, at least in her book Modern American Spiritualism, which was a kind of compendium of the history of the movement, was very complimentary to her reproduce this wonderful picture of her with golden ringlets, looking evan ward to the sky and the sun glinting off her face, very when she was fifteen years old. UM, but also regarded her as a as a prime if

not the prime um trans medium of the time. Emma's Emma may have herself UM have done some mediumship, private mediumship, but wasn't one who named names of spirits who controlled her when she gave lectures under spirit inspiration. You might say she didn't UM direct people's attention to necessarily who who it was that was controlling her, which spirit. It was rather more vague than that, but certainly Cora did. She announced beforehand who was going to take control of

her and speak to her. UM. It was really also interesting to discover that through kind of spiritualist goals, including uh Amy post in Rochester, uh Cora got to know Sojourner Truth, who's another person whose story we're following over the course of spiritualism. Uh. And there was a time when when Truth was working in the Freedman's Hospital after the war, that Cora actually came in stayed with Truth uh and and lived with her for a time. And their letters back and forth between her and Amy post

talking about life for sojourn or the Freedman's Hospital. You know, some of these these pieces and storylines that we don't always think of as connected. Uh. Following certain spiritualists like Cora can take us through so many of them, from Mesmerism and Benjamin to reconstruction and so journal Truth and the radicalism of Emmy post Um. So I find Cora fascinating for that reason. She also in later Um there's another connection there. Um. Clara Barton was the voted spiritualized.

I think if visit Clara Barton's house outside d c Um that information is sort of available if you broad the curators in the National Park Service a little bit, but it's not something they necessarily want to proclaim about Clara. But she was a very devoted spiritualist. She attended Cora's seances in Washington. UM. And that's obviously in some kind

of connection with the Freedman's Hospital. Uh. And the Freedman's Bureau itself was one of the centers of the post war government that had a lot of spiritualist assigned to it, not surprisingly because most spiritualists, especially those in Washington, were former abolitionists and were uh working you know, to free

the slaves and so on. In fact, the UM, the head of the the first head of the Colored Schools of Washington, which were set up in conjunction with the Freedman's Bureau, was a very long time spiritualist named Alonso Newton, who was connected of course with John Murray Spears New Motive Project, but he was also the editor of the New England Spiritualist and a co editor of several other spiritualist newspapers. UM. So there's a lot of connections in

Washington if you go down just below the surface. And Cora continues to be involved. Uh. Well, she she has a couple of different husbands. She marries Nathan Daniels travels with him to New Orleans, where he had been stationed during the Civil War and been in command of the

Native Guards, including some New Orleans spiritualists. Um, then he dies there, she returns back north, and really, it seems to me, uh embraces and just dives into her spiritualist connections and continues to be a significant presence in the kind of building a lasting institutional base for spiritualism in the in the later decades. Um, can you talk at all about her involvement in trying to create something stable that would last for spiritualism going forward into the future.

I think Cora, this is my impression, okay. I think Cora always had an eye too getting of the stable position and an eye towards getting a formal leadership in the movement. The movement itself was fairly fragmented. I mean, essentially it was made up of independent minded and from the outside anyway eccentric individuals who UH followed their own ideas and paths. So they spiritual were notorious for being

unable to form lasting institution or association. They'd had several tries at it, extending all the way back to early eighteen fifties, and I think Corus saw her own career as one of taking leadership and as he said, a stable organization and planting something that would last beyond her. Of course, you might say with her as as he had. But anyway, I think that was definitely on her mind

UM towards later in life. UM. She tried several times to establish Spiritualist churches, important Spiritualist churches, with herself as head. And the very fact that I'm calling it a church, you might say, is a something that's came late to the movement, relatively speaking, because it hints that what she's looking at is a sort of denomination UM with definite beliefs.

And of course the early Spiritualists we're all antidenominational, and they didn't really see themselves as just another denomination with

preachers and ministers and so on. She did have a big church, a very popular church in Chicago, UH, for a long time before the National Spiritual Association was formed, but around eighteen two, in conjunction with a very large and in retrospect very influential meeting event that occurred in Chicago, in conjunction with a UM Colombian exhibishop exposition there in eighteen m there was what was called the World's Parliament of Religions, a big ecmnical movement, and there were many

people from different faiths who were invited to participate in this and give speeches and so on. And I think she saw this as a prime time for setting up another, giving another try to forming a lasting organization among spiritualists. I think it was a way you might say, of getting validation for spiritualism as such as a quote real

religion able to step out and walk among the other religions. So, in fact, you know that event happened across town from Cora's spiritual church, and um it is alleged that she gave a translator to the World Parliament of Religion about spiritualism. I myself have been unable to find such evidence as to leave me that she didn't in fact directly address

that World Parliament. But she did also organize the first convention, annual informative Convention of the National Spiritual Association, which happened the next week, the days following the World Problement of Religion. So she was elected vice president and she stayed connected with the organization for many many years. She often gave a keynote address in their annual meetings and so on.

You mentioned earlier a little bit about some of the investigations of spiritualism that we're going on, and we are going to address the Society's for Psychical Research. Uh, some would you be would you be comfortable describing them a little bit and what their approach to spiritualism was. Okay, I can contribute a little bit. It's not exactly the area, I mean, the era that I'm most familiar with, but yeah,

I'm I mean it's obvious. I think it's obvious that such societies were formed, Um, with a view two take the investigation of psychic meaning, including spiritualist phenomena, and put it under scientific scrutiny, which meant controlled conditions, repeated tests, and so on by scientists who are who were trained

to observe and test and eliminate possibilities and so on. Um. And I don't think it's ah, I don't think it's so much that scientists decided to take spiritualism and put it under the microscope, so much as science itself had tracked alongside the way spiritualists themselves thought about these phenomena.

As we've already described spiritualist work. Fellow travelers, if you will, with mesmerists and so on, back and back in the early days, and it became more and more common for spiritualist to think about the phenomenon that was going on as a kind of psychological phenomenon one kind or another. In other words, too except the possibility that what we're exploring was the mind and the powers of the mind for other than some real you might say, objectively, externally,

substantially real afterlife. I think that became an acceptable alternative narrative within spiritualism, and it was because of that. I think that you could think of the Psychical Research Society and so on as an evolution of that tendency within spiritualism itself. Um. Spiritualist I think by that time often resorted to a sort of unspoken acceptance of the idea that I don't know where these things are coming from, and I don't know what's going on exactly, Um, but

they're really interesting, aren't they. And they're uncanny, and they're weird, and somehow the conditions of the mind of the medium and the minds of the spectators are involved in this, and so UM. I think that was an opportunity for scientists who were also interested in the science of the mind and psychology, like William James, for example, to set out UM to see what they could find out about it.

Did this kind of thinking about abnormal psychology and and kind of what started being published from Freud and new ways of thinking about the human mind? Did it sap interest in spiritualism from the outside? What was that kind of what was the influence on maybe like general interest in spiritualism? Just as an intuitive answer, I would say, yes, it did it. It drew people. It certainly drew people

away from UM. The simple explanation of what was going on here was that the spirits of George Washington or your uncle Charlie were speaking directly to you, and that you had nothing to do with it, and that you were just a mirror radio receiver who had been turned and on in your own mind had been turned off, and you were just an automaton if you are a medium.

I think that sort of explanation became less and less appealing to people, and as an alternative, they became more and more attracted to this other alternative explanation, that it was an explanation and mysteries of the mind and how

the mind in turn affected external reality. Maybe we could not only read people's minds transferred thoughts, but we could create UM create a world that we could treat anyway as as well as we treated the objective world, or maybe the objective world itself didn't really exist, and we

were all a creation of mind. That was certainly an early position within Spiritualism, and it was something that was emphasized by Mary Baker Eddie informing Christian science, and that continued with UM investigators who call themselves mental scientists, and was a big factor in the creation of a movement that I regard as the successor to Spiritualism, which was

called New Thought. Mind over matter. You can bring success, health, wealth, money, dollars dollars want you, Carl, if you could only create the conditions in your mind that would allow them to form. These were all questions that were you might call UM alternative psychological explanations for psychic phenomenon. So yeah, a lot of people got drawn off into that. There was also in the in the seventies and eighties increasing interest in UH.

What we've talked about the private sciences and the wrappings and the trans lectures, but we also have materialization mediums and UH. And then ectoplasm becomes one of the phenomena that people are coming for UM you know, coming to a science to witness and observed. Can you talk about how some of those changes and what was going on at a sciance changed the meaning of spiritual and the the

social meaning or the religious meaning for some people. I think about that as part of this notion that it the process that was going on in this new era was the elevation of Earth to heaven and the drawing down of Heaven to earth, and the resulting communion of saints where those on earth would be walking with those in heaven. Now, if you think about it, that means that there were some real desire from the very beginning

to make material or bring to earth. Not just the voices were the ideas of those in heaven, but more maybe the endpoint of all this was to materialize Heaven on Earth, to join it together. And you can read in the spiritualist newspapers at the time this sense that there was a progression towards that in which maybe one medium would be able to um produce a materialized filmy fluid um, something that will float around the room, or would be able to push your guitar or a stramat

even though you couldn't see it. But then there was some desire maybe to materialize and make visible a hand hands that would um, stroke a person's head or push your button or something like that. And then there was an arm, and then there was a news article. It

was like a rumor mill in a wave. As I said, you know, these newspapers were social were functioning as a sort of social media in which um news reports would come in and breathlessly report that has been able to not only materialize an arm, but also you know, maybe the full form of a person. UM. So it towards the end of this process you could say that the process was one of making more, more and more material

the things of the spirit. And I actually have joked with one of my magicians associates who I'm working on a project with now that during the same time basically in our if you follow the spiritualists and the professional magicians, what you find is that the spiritualists are trying to make visible bigger and bigger things, more more of the human body, for example, while magicians were trying to make too de materialized per and bigger things, ending up with

the Hoodini on the on the platform of the New York Hypotrome making an elephant disappear UM, you know, starting out with making a rabbit disappeared down down your sleeve and winding up with an elephant. So there there was this question about the relationship between the spiritual and material. But at the same time this obviously was a temptation to produce phenomenon UM that were not real, that could

be reproduced or were being reproduced by UM tricks. So that was that was a part of UM the spiritualist history as well more and more war UH temptations and obvious temptations to expose the mechanical means of producing materialized bodies and actoplasm and so on, and the exposures that came out of that UM definitely affected the reputation of

the movement, and UM set people off. And I think that's in some sense you can see that that was very clearly at work in the UM around By by about eighteen eighty eighteen five, UM spiritualism wasn't the force that it was, And of course Death Blow to Spiritualism is published in which the author recounts Maggie Fox's recantation of her life as a medium. Right, how what what kind of influence did that particular publication with Maggie Fox

being who she was, what influence did that have on spiritualism. Well, it was a big shock. It's being shocked to spiritualists. But I have to say that there were ways to protect yourself from her if you were a spiritual From her recantation, Um, they included the fact that she would become a alcoholic by that time, Mum, they were and undependable. And there was another way to protect yourself that was taken by the editor of the Religio Philosophical Journal, whose

name is John Bundy. Um. After her recantation, he said, it doesn't matter that she recanted uh, and talked about her tricks, because we're standing with a collection of experiences by millions of people over decades that we have confidence in. So in effect, you could write her off as he did.

There was a lot of talk around that time by spiritualists that she'd been suborned, that her testimony had been suborned because she decided to convert to Catholicism, and that her new friends had convinced her that this was part of her penance essentially, So there were ways to deal with it. If you're a believer, you can, you know, think of ways to to reconcile it with what you believe without giving up your belief. But it definitely was a big hit, no question. And of course her sister

Leah at this point no longer. I mean, she had main lely a fox for a long time, she's been lea fish, and then at this point she's Leah underhill. She publishes the Missing Lincoln spiritualism and directly addresses uh, Maggie's recantation. And so you even have one of the other Fox sisters who is pushing back against it and and that kind of thing. Uh. And then not much later, Maggie recancer recantation, right, and she says, well, no, that was a lie. How does that feed into this kind

of public discussion? It makes it a big mesk. Nobody knows what's going on at that point. Yeah, I mean, from the very beginning, it seemed to many people that Leah, the older sister, had pushed the younger sisters into a career, uh, and had ginned up a sort of act and was, you know, the controlling spirit here behind everybody else. So, I mean, there's all kinds of ways to look at this. I don't I don't know, but uh, it made it

a big mess in the spiritualist community for sure. UM. So how when we come kind of towards the end of the nineteenth century, you mentioned there was a decline in spiritualism by the eighties. How strong was spiritualism by the time we're stepping into the twentieth century. I don't

think it was. Um, it was a big factor in American thought by There were plenty of spiritual still, But when I say plenty, I don't mean that they dominated intellectual life, or were the attraction or that they that they had been, or the challenge that they had been before. But um, it wasn't all downhill after that. There was a big revival of spiritualism in the post World War One period, and in some sense it's still a part

of UM. You know, what lay at the heart of spiritualism is still in continuity with what we see around us all the time in our own culture. UM. Belief in psychic powers, belief in channeled texts that give some higher revelation. UM. A lot of that interest is now labeled new age UM, which is a term that was, as far as I know, was invented in its original sense or in the sense that we know it now, Um, in the spiritualist community. M Um, you know a lot

of that still with us today. M You've mentioned that some of your recent work, uh really really engages the early days of radio and when they were you know, Vodeville stage mentalists and mind readers and hypnotists who are on the airwaves. Um, how do you relate those two? I mean earlier you were comparing magicians to spiritualists. How do these kind of radio performers and mind readers and

mentalists relate to spiritualist practice? Well, mind readers performing mind readers who call themselves mentalists most often went on the radio big time as soon as it became commercially available, meaning just after World War One, and they saw themselves as part of the professional magic world, but they could not present themselves as doing a trick. Basically, nobody wants to see a fake psychic. Nobody wants to see a fake medium, a mentalist, or a fake medium for that matter.

So unlike a magician who could define his performance space in a way that the audience and he accepted, culturally accepted, and was an implacent part of the act. As an act, it may look wonderful, and you may not be able to figure it out audience. But we all know that this is a trick. A mentalist can't do that. They have to become that persona. They have to their their act is based on developing a relationship and projecting it with the audience itself. They have to get into the

audience's mind. And it seemed to me that that's pretty well known. But it struck me that what they were doing was particularly attuned to the radio because in the radio, unlike TV or visual medium, Unlike in those mediums, you're not provided any visual element. What happens is somebody on the other end of the line is speaking to you,

and they're telling a narrative, and you're participating. In order for this to work, you provide the images, you're already a partner in creating the story and and basically that is the quid pro quo of doing radio work. But at least you know, if you're not doing advertising, you assume that you're getting into people's heads and that they're participating with you and they're helping to create the story as they're listening, which is quite different from TV. In TV,

you're just sitting there letting it wash over. You, and not only is the image being fed to you, but the narrative is quite controlled, so you're more much more of a passive participant. But radio itself is a sort of mentalists paradise. I thought it's much more appropriate and in tune with what mentalists we're doing, which was rejecting persona of relating to one person's mind directly reading it

in communication with it. UM. So I thought I would write a book about that special relationship between performing mentalists. We're on vaudeville and off Vaudeville um and the kinds of things they were doing, and the way they flocked onto the radio between the war. Between World War One

and World War Two. One of the observations that a number of historians who have written about spiritualism have have made is the interest in spiritualism in the wake of the Civil War in the United States, UM, with the scale of of loss and grief and uh the scale of national mourning, and then also looked at the aftermath of World War One as a driving factor for renewed interests in spiritualism. Do you see that same kind of connection.

I think there was renewed in just because simply there was a lot of people dying, and particularly dying early, So there was a sharp sense of injustice there and how it could it be reconciled with divine justice. But I'm not so much one who connects it with a way to deal with national grief, individual or countrywide grief. I think it was there, and you can see it intertwined with with the movement, but I don't I think he would be in error if you just assigned it

all to either individual or national tragedy. There was a much wider movement than that, as I you know, as I tried to say, it wasn't just that people were looking for to make contact to make sure that there dead husband or son, we're still in a happy place after life. But it was an entire revisioning of the relationship between heaven and Earth and the possibilities of human evolution and progression and what people needed to do here on this earth in order to turn this earth more

into a heaven. That's a big that's a big thing. So there was some relationship between the wars and grief, but it was a much bigger project than that. M hm hm um. Maybe to wrap up our conversation, if you're thinking about what you would hope that we would communicate to our listeners about spiritualism. M And you know, our goal is to go back to the middle of the nineteenth century and uh, to let the dead speak as best we can. And Brodie's phrase, the historians work

is the spiritualists work. You know, we're trying to let the dead speak. Um. What is it that you would hope that listeners to our documentary that's going to be a narrative history of spiritualism. What do you hope they will hear? I hope they will hear that the history of our country during that time was influenced deeply by a set of ideas that were expressed very well by spiritualism. And what they need to know, this is my special

message to the listeners. What they need to know is that that profound influence that they exerted on the national life was deliberately written out of histories of reform movements like the women's movement, the labor movement, the politics, history of the politics of the period, the intellectual history, history of of the novel and poetry, and on and on, that those things were modified so that you hardly see

it any reference to it. Anymore. And I have found that particularly in the movement, the labor movement, for example, and the Women's Movement UM, that the writing out happened deliberately. The labor movement, it's easy to see marks in the international kicked out a bunch of spiritistum in and everybody that was had previously gotten along splendidly under that umbrella suddenly had to be a materialist and therefore spiritualists was spiritualist or on the out, and that hardly has been

that story has hardly been told. Very recently. It started to the same thing happened with the Women's Movement UM and the five volume history of the Women's Suffrage Movement that was written by Matilda, Jocelyn Engage, Elizabeth Katie Stan and so on, that also was worked on, and it was there was some strategy to this. Basically, they didn't want to ally themselves with a lot of people and ideas that mainstream America thought were crazy and they were

out of bounds. They had specific political aims, aims that included legislation that had to be passed and so on. So they were claiming the largest possible platform and brought us view that they could but if I think a few historians have of late been trying to resurrect the influence of spiritualism during this time, And if you want a good view, you know on and Browd's words, Yes, you need to resurrect these people and what was going on with them and how they influenced society in order

to really understand the nuts and bolts of nine century America. Hey, folks, it's Aaron here. I hope today's interview helped you deepen your understanding of every thing involved in the world of spiritualism. But we're not done yet. We have more interviews to share with you, so stick around after this brief sponsor break to hear a preview of next week's interview. Next

time on Obscured. Edmonds was a judge in the New York State Supreme Court, and he was in charge for many years of the condition of prisoners in New York prisons, which was miserable, utterly miserable. So he had a vocational interest in what happens to bad people in the afterlife. So if everybody's going to heaven, then you're going to end up with criminals. And what do you do with

your criminals in the afterlife what happens to them? So he led many years science circle in which they routinely talked to dead criminals, and he brought back some reports from these folks, mostly men, but not always crime. In Edmunds, heaven is very very gendered, So men are murderers and brutes and rapists and drunkards, and women are sexually permissive and murder children. Lot Obscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh

Thane in partnership with I Heart Radio. Research in writing for this season is all the work of my right hand man Carl Ellis 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 Minkey. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.