Speaker 1: Hey, guys, it's me your old pal Josh, And for
Speaker 1: this week's select, I've chosen our twenty twenty episode on spiritualism, which,
Speaker 1: as you might be able to tell from the first
Speaker 1: couple of minutes, was recorded during the height of the
Speaker 1: COVID pandemic. But that's not why I chose this one.
Speaker 1: I chose it because it's been coming up a lot
Speaker 1: lately for some reason in episode after episode, which I've
Speaker 1: taken as a sign to choose this as a select.
Speaker 1: But it's also kind of made me think about all
Speaker 1: of the back and forth I've gone through in my life.
Speaker 1: Is there an afterlife? Is there not an afterlife? Who knows?
Speaker 1: That's where I'm at right now. Who knows. So maybe
Speaker 1: listen to this episode about the spiritualism movement and see
Speaker 1: what you think about the whole thing. Enjoy.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Speaker 1: Charles W Chuck Bryan over there somewhere in the heart
Speaker 1: of darkness. I'm in the office, dude, where I hear
Speaker 1: your voice, Chuck, but I can't see you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I don't know why people need to
Speaker 2: know the behind the scenes things. But home recording provides
Speaker 2: some challenges and I was getting pretty frustrated. So I
Speaker 2: was like, you know what, I'm going to go to
Speaker 2: the studio yep, because I know it'll sound great in here. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I know there won't be dogs and children and
Speaker 2: everyone should feel good about it because I have not
Speaker 2: seen another human being.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in the building. Didn't a security guard.
Speaker 1: Didn't a security guard try to run you off the
Speaker 1: road when you were parking?
Speaker 2: He didn't try. He stopped me literally in the parking lot.
Speaker 2: I was like, what are you doing here? I was like,
Speaker 2: I'm going to my job, and he said, okay.
Speaker 4: He said stay home, save lives.
Speaker 3: But before we left, I mean I apparently since I left. Uh,
Speaker 3: they have these.
Speaker 2: There's a bottle of microphone sanitizer. Whoa, there are headphone
Speaker 2: sanitized or not sanitized, but just disposable headphone covers. Sweet,
Speaker 2: And I feel more safe here than I do at
Speaker 2: my house.
Speaker 1: What a microphone sanitizer? That sounds really made up?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's We'll go ahead and buzz market. No I
Speaker 2: won't because it smells bad and I didn't want to
Speaker 2: buzz market. And then say it smells bad. It's apple flavor, whoa,
Speaker 2: which would make Emily just like turn over in her bed.
Speaker 1: It's a good, jolly rancher flavor. Not the best scent, though.
Speaker 3: I hate it when they add scent to stuff that
Speaker 3: doesn't need scent.
Speaker 4: Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 3: Try finding an unscented garbage back these days.
Speaker 1: Uh is it tough to Yeah?
Speaker 2: Man, every single one of them. I even got some
Speaker 2: that said unscented and it still smells like.
Speaker 1: You've missed it. In parentheses underneath it says mostly we
Speaker 1: can't help ourselves. Rosemary, Well, I don't have my over
Speaker 1: the ear headphones right now.
Speaker 4: I just yeah, so I'm look one.
Speaker 1: Of Yumy's long scarves wrapped around my head twice to
Speaker 1: keep from your audio bleeding onto the track through my microphone.
Speaker 2: You either look like Lawrence of Arabia or like you
Speaker 2: just wandered in with a head entry.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I had to.
Speaker 1: It kept slipping off with the Lawrence of Arabia looks,
Speaker 1: so I had to do it the other way around.
Speaker 1: So now it looks like I have a nineteenth century toothache.
Speaker 3: Oh man, to me another picture.
Speaker 1: It's not It's not very comfortable. My Adam's apple is
Speaker 1: being pressed towards the back of my throat right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what was the deal with that whole toothache thing?
Speaker 4: Like?
Speaker 3: Was there ice in there or something?
Speaker 2: Or was it just like just tie their gin shut
Speaker 2: and it'll help.
Speaker 1: Knowing that era, there were probably some sort of like
Speaker 1: razor blade and heroin concoction that would just scrape the
Speaker 1: area where the tooth was and inject you with dope
Speaker 1: to keep you from complaining.
Speaker 2: Doctor uh, doctor Payne's new chin wrap now with more leeches.
Speaker 1: All right, from the makers of microphone sanitizer.
Speaker 2: All right, let's get into this. We've already been goofing
Speaker 2: around for too long. Let's just finish. Fine, just get
Speaker 2: this over with.
Speaker 1: Let's get serious and talk about spiritualism, shall we.
Speaker 3: This is a great, great job by Grabster, a great
Speaker 3: idea by you. Yeah, and it'll be a great.
Speaker 4: Episode, yeah, grabs Her.
Speaker 1: We asked them to help us out with this, so
Speaker 1: we put together a world class article for us. And
Speaker 1: when we asked him, we said, hey, how about spiritualism?
Speaker 1: He because my brother wrote his dissertation on that should
Speaker 1: be simple and me.
Speaker 4: Just forwarded us that.
Speaker 1: Right it did. He didn't even like erase his brother's
Speaker 1: first name. He just did a strikethrough and wrote.
Speaker 3: Ed after it easy Money.
Speaker 1: So it is like a really really interesting phenomenon and
Speaker 1: something I think we kind of take for granted because
Speaker 1: it pops up everywhere in our world in pop culture.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just a part of everything from crystal
Speaker 1: balls to seances, to Ouiji boards to tarot cards, all.
Speaker 4: Of this stuff. Movies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as a matter of fact, I ran across so
Speaker 1: you know Dan Akroyd's hugeno UFOs, right.
Speaker 3: I did know that.
Speaker 1: Actually, he's also enormous into spirits and ghosts. It's actually
Speaker 1: one of the impetuses. Yeah, I think so of him
Speaker 1: writing Ghostbusters. He's actually a fourth generation spiritualist with a
Speaker 1: capital S, like the Church spiritualism.
Speaker 4: He was raised that way.
Speaker 1: His father, grandfather, and great grandfather were all spiritualists and
Speaker 1: that's how he was raised as well. So it does
Speaker 1: just kind of it's so permeated our culture. It's weird
Speaker 1: to think of a time when it wasn't there. But
Speaker 1: there actually was this period starting in right about in
Speaker 1: the middle of the nineteenth century going well into the
Speaker 1: twentieth century where there was a movement that basically said,
Speaker 1: the spirit world is there, it exists. When you die,
Speaker 1: your personality survives, and some people actually have a talent
Speaker 1: for communicating with the spirits in the spirit world, and
Speaker 1: we're going to start doing that. And that was spiritualism,
Speaker 1: the spiritualist movement.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Ed pointed out, which we should as well,
Speaker 2: that ghosts and things like that and ghost stories they
Speaker 2: had been around since people had been around. Everyone since
Speaker 2: the dawn of humankind has tried to figure out what
Speaker 2: happens after you die. Do people visit, do they take on,
Speaker 2: you know, other forms or whatever. So that's different than
Speaker 2: what we're talking about. What we're talking about is spiritualism
Speaker 2: in that it became a big scam and way to
Speaker 2: get money out of people who are in pain from
Speaker 2: a friend's or loved one's death.
Speaker 1: Sadly, yeah, yeah, for sure, but there is like a
Speaker 1: throw a thread through there where this same era, the
Speaker 1: same period, and this belief in communicating with the spirits
Speaker 1: and the idea that you could go to a seance
Speaker 1: and talk to your dead loved one or whatever. It
Speaker 1: produced this other group of people who said, yes, there
Speaker 1: are tons of fraudsters and hucksters out there, who are
Speaker 1: taking advantage of this.
Speaker 4: But there's also this real.
Speaker 1: There's the real version of it actually does exist, and
Speaker 1: we're going to apply this newfangled thing called science to
Speaker 1: investigate it. And that produced that era of people like
Speaker 1: Charles Fort or Harry Price who visited the Borley Rectory,
Speaker 1: the most haunted place in England, or Sir Arthur Conan
Speaker 1: Doyle like those guys. I know, I'm trying, not a
Speaker 1: new version to these guys though they were they believed
Speaker 1: in this stuff and the possibility of it. They also
Speaker 1: believed in the possibility of applying science to it. And
Speaker 1: even if science couldn't explain it, it didn't mean that
Speaker 1: it didn't exist. And then there was another group who
Speaker 1: were what we would recognize today is like pure skeptics,
Speaker 1: like the James Randys of the day, who all followed
Speaker 1: in the footsteps of Harry Houdini. Is we'll see who
Speaker 1: kind of created this. So you had hucksters, believers who
Speaker 1: were skeptical, and genuine pure skeptics who believed none of
Speaker 1: it was correct.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and what I mentioned before, like all the previous
Speaker 2: attempts to do stuff like this pre mid eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: in largely the Northeast United States. It was more religious
Speaker 2: like prophets and shaman and stuff like that. Spiritualism was
Speaker 2: the birth of the Madam Kleios of the world. Ed
Speaker 2: refers to it as a democratization, and that's one way
Speaker 2: to look at it. But it was the idea that hey,
Speaker 2: if you are chosen and you are special, you could
Speaker 2: you know, it's not like you have to be some
Speaker 2: religious leader, you can just be a regular person with
Speaker 2: the gift exactly.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Which was a huge sea change. And there are basically
Speaker 1: a few things that kind of came together for this mentality,
Speaker 1: this fertile kind of imagination of this pocket of America
Speaker 1: and western New York where all of this began to
Speaker 1: kind of take shape. And one of those things was
Speaker 1: the frontier, this frontier mentality. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner
Speaker 1: called it the significance of the frontier in American history,
Speaker 1: and he basically said, man, the people who are living
Speaker 1: out there on the frontier, they're living on the edge
Speaker 1: of civilization, the leading edge right right beyond that what
Speaker 1: they're coming up against. And this is highly debatable because
Speaker 1: part of what they were coming up against was Native America.
Speaker 1: It just wasn't a civilization in the Forum that any
Speaker 1: European had ever encountered before. But the idea was that
Speaker 1: the people who are living on the frontier and expanding
Speaker 1: westward were basically being forced just by virtue of having
Speaker 1: to survive under these weird conditions outside of culture and
Speaker 1: civilization in the European sense, that they were having to
Speaker 1: abandon that culture and basically make it up as they
Speaker 1: went along and recreate a new culture from the frontier,
Speaker 1: and that that just kind of threw the rules out
Speaker 1: the window.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is one of my favorite things when we
Speaker 2: do topics, that when you can look back at a
Speaker 2: movement and point to factors that at any other time
Speaker 2: in history, if just one of these might not have
Speaker 2: taken you know, might not have influenced it, that it
Speaker 2: might not have happened at all. There's something about that
Speaker 2: that I've always really loved. And this is a perfect example.
Speaker 2: The frontier life is one. Religious fervor is another, and
Speaker 2: specifically in New York in the eighteen hundreds, people were
Speaker 2: really caught up on this religious fervor and it kind
Speaker 2: of went from town to town and there was no
Speaker 2: there was no big religious authorities in the area that
Speaker 2: were out on the frontier, they had no structured hierarchy
Speaker 2: of religion, and so again they could just make up stuff.
Speaker 2: And I'm not saying that's not tied to this next sentence,
Speaker 2: because I don't want to turn anyone off, but a
Speaker 2: lot of religions sprang out from this region during that time,
Speaker 2: like Millerism and Mormonism and Quakers and Shakers kind of
Speaker 2: had a resurgence, basically as shot in the arm, just
Speaker 2: because of this fervor going on the time.
Speaker 1: And I couldn't quite put where Millerism why it seems
Speaker 1: so familiar, And then I remember that that was the
Speaker 1: woman who gave birth eventually to the Seventh day Adventists,
Speaker 1: and that popped up in the Kellogg episode. Remember yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Millerism was where it all started. But that was And
Speaker 1: that really kind of indicates I love it when things,
Speaker 1: just things we've talked about before, like have even more
Speaker 1: context from something else. But that just kind of goes
Speaker 1: to show you, like, this is the kind of place
Speaker 1: where somebody could be like I'm in contact with the spirits,
Speaker 1: or Jesus came and hung out with me or whatever,
Speaker 1: and this is what I know, And what I've been told,
Speaker 1: So let's start a religion based on it. And not
Speaker 1: even necessarily just religions too, but also like social movements
Speaker 1: like utopian societies where.
Speaker 3: And chew your food twenty times so you'll poopies here.
Speaker 1: Exactly, or you know, women have equal rights as men,
Speaker 1: which is just completely radical. Or how about fifty of
Speaker 1: us lived and just by the fact that we all
Speaker 1: lived together, we're married according to this utopian society, just
Speaker 1: whatever you wanted to do, you kind of could because
Speaker 1: the frontier threw the rules out the window, or at
Speaker 1: the very least cultural traditions that most people are raised into.
Speaker 1: When that's not there, people make up their.
Speaker 3: Own, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2: And the third big factor that you mentioned was or
Speaker 2: we haven't talked about yet with science, and you talked
Speaker 2: a little bit about science at the beginning, but the
Speaker 2: idea that in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, when
Speaker 2: we're really learning a lot more than we ever have
Speaker 2: about science and things like elect electromagnetism and things that
Speaker 2: you can't see but science.
Speaker 3: Are saying, oh it's there.
Speaker 2: This kind of fed the spiritualist movement because you know,
Speaker 2: that's something else that you can't see, that other people
Speaker 2: are saying is there. So they're like, well, hey, if
Speaker 2: science is saying there are things out there we can't
Speaker 2: quite explain, but trust me it's real, then why shouldn't
Speaker 2: I believe this stuff too?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Or well this electric like electromagnetism, maybe that actually explains
Speaker 1: how spirits survive. After that, it was a really wide
Speaker 1: open time as far as you know, acceptance of possibilities
Speaker 1: rather than no science has said this is not possible,
Speaker 1: or it can't explain this, or you can't see it
Speaker 1: with your own eyes, so it won't. It doesn't, it
Speaker 1: doesn't jibe like. There was a lot more willingness among
Speaker 1: people who were scientifically minded to say, well, maybe this
Speaker 1: is a good explanation of that.
Speaker 4: Let's investigate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the birth of science and medicine was a really
Speaker 3: crazy time.
Speaker 4: It really was. It really was.
Speaker 3: So should we take a break?
Speaker 2: Yes, come on, man, Yes, I think you're You're beard
Speaker 2: Holster is on too tight.
Speaker 1: I haven't been able to feel my nose for about
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2: All right, we'll go rub your nose and bring some
Speaker 2: feeling back, and we'll talk about some of the chiritualists.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm gonna say it spiritualists nice and there there
Speaker 1: was actually so there was a bunch of factors that
Speaker 1: led to the beginning of all of this, including there
Speaker 1: was one that I also came across that we need
Speaker 1: to mention, a guy named Andrew Jackson Davis, who combined
Speaker 1: the ideas of the German hypnotist Franz Mesmer with the
Speaker 1: Swedish philosopher of the soul, Emmanuel Swedenborg. They were both
Speaker 1: eighteen century. He kind of brought him together and he
Speaker 1: was a bit of a nobody, but he emerged very
Speaker 1: very soon after the Fox Sisters became celebrities as a
Speaker 1: founder of the spiritualist movement, almost like he was doing
Speaker 1: it off in isolation at the same time that all
Speaker 1: of us began.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the Fox Sisters figure into this really quite largely.
Speaker 2: And you can even pinpoint a date to what you
Speaker 2: might consider the birth of the modern American spiritualist movement
Speaker 2: is March thirty one, eighteen forty eight, in Hydesville, New York,
Speaker 2: near Rochester, at a farm. This Fox family lived there,
Speaker 2: real people, not a family of cute little red for
Speaker 2: fuzzy creatures.
Speaker 1: Voiced by George Clooney exactly.
Speaker 3: Mister missus Fox had three daughters.
Speaker 2: Actually one was much older. Her name was Leah. She
Speaker 2: was nineteen and twenty three years older. Why was that funny?
Speaker 1: Because I saw a picture of her and she's like
Speaker 1: the spitting image of Jeffrey Ross. Look her up, Jeffrey
Speaker 1: Ross's that's what Leah Fox looked like.
Speaker 2: I didn't see. I saw the picture of the three
Speaker 2: of them, and I didn't get a good close up.
Speaker 2: That's an unfortunate look for him and her.
Speaker 4: Yeah, anybody really? Uh?
Speaker 3: And I think he would admit that too. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: he's doing.
Speaker 4: All right though. What if he had really thin skin? Rosmaster?
Speaker 1: He couldn't take a joke against himself. Have you seen
Speaker 1: that bump in Mike Show? It's pretty good?
Speaker 3: Uh? No? Is that the roast competition thing?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 1: He and David Tell just sit there and roast people.
Speaker 1: It's really good.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 3: I used to love David Tel back in the day.
Speaker 1: He has just turned into like the weird like comedy
Speaker 1: genius friend that Jeffrey Ross has.
Speaker 4: And it shines through in this awesome I'll check it out.
Speaker 2: So the Fox family, older daughter Leah was nineteen and
Speaker 2: twenty three years older than younger Kate and Maggie or
Speaker 2: I guess Maggie and Kate if you're going in that order.
Speaker 2: And on that night, on March thirty first, eighteen forty,
Speaker 2: they heard these rapping knocking sounds and they didn't know
Speaker 2: where it was coming from, and that kind of kickstarted
Speaker 2: this whole thing.
Speaker 3: In a weird way, this led and.
Speaker 2: We'll talk about the more specifics, but in a weird way,
Speaker 2: this led to them eventually saying, wait a minute, we
Speaker 2: can make some money if we convince people that young
Speaker 2: Kate and Maggie are a conduit to the other side.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The thing is is like when it went from you know, like, oh,
Speaker 1: there's a ghost rapping or knocking like a poultrygeist kind
Speaker 1: of thing too. This ghost will respond to questions from
Speaker 1: the sisters through rapping and knocking, like how old is
Speaker 1: Maggie and it would rap like fifteen times or something
Speaker 1: like that. And that really caught a lot of people's attention.
Speaker 1: And Maggie and Kate moved in with Leah. And apparently,
Speaker 1: from what I read, it was Leah whose idea it
Speaker 1: was to take the show on the road try to
Speaker 1: scam people out of money. It was not a super
Speaker 1: great person and from what I read.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I just sorry. I was thinking of a rapping
Speaker 3: ghost and right gott sidetracked. I'm the ghost, George Washington.
Speaker 3: I'm here to say I love fruity pebbles in a
Speaker 3: mateor way. You know what's funny is I was going
Speaker 3: to do that exact same thing, but for the Fox family.
Speaker 3: That's like the go to rap for guys like us.
Speaker 4: Oh, it totally is guys who can't wrap.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm here to say something something, something in a
Speaker 3: something way.
Speaker 4: The Zach Morris method, I think, is what that is.
Speaker 2: I wonder if that's based on an actual rap. I
Speaker 2: guess there was one at some point that really did.
Speaker 4: That, right, Yeah, I think Blondie was the popular.
Speaker 3: My name is Blondie.
Speaker 2: I'm here to say I'm gonna try rap because it's
Speaker 2: popular today.
Speaker 4: Exactly.
Speaker 3: So what were you saying? I was laughing. I didn't
Speaker 3: even notice.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Oh, oh, just that it was basically I
Speaker 1: was laying at Leah's feet for corrupting the younger sisters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she kind of. She ended up managing them as
Speaker 2: a unit. I think later on, if I'm not mistaken,
Speaker 2: But there aren't great records of everything going on at
Speaker 2: the time, But the idea was that Kate and Maggie
Speaker 2: were the ones. It wasn't really her parents, but they're
Speaker 2: the ones who could actually communicate with this barn spirit.
Speaker 2: And so they said, you know what, they not only
Speaker 2: can talk to this spirit. Media starts, you know, getting
Speaker 2: a hold of these stories. And obviously back then it
Speaker 2: was a very big deal with something like this coming
Speaker 2: out in the media with not a lot else going on.
Speaker 2: But they moved and would go away to other places
Speaker 2: and said, wherever they go, ghosts are talking to them.
Speaker 2: So you guys, my daughters are talented and gifted. They're
Speaker 2: not just talking to the what we think is a
Speaker 2: murder victim from our previous house.
Speaker 4: Right right, which just changed everything.
Speaker 1: And also other suspiciously, Leah suddenly realized that she was
Speaker 1: able to communicate with spirits too, So all three of
Speaker 1: the sisters were able to But yeah, not just that
Speaker 1: one murder victim in their house that had been the
Speaker 1: original ghost, but just about any ghost. And this was
Speaker 1: the beginning of the spiritualist movement. Basically a trank by
Speaker 1: a couple of teenage girls that got way out of
Speaker 1: hand really fast.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so what do they do they start having
Speaker 2: these private sessions where people would pay money, and they
Speaker 2: would wear these big long dresses that were in fashion
Speaker 2: at the time, and they would no one's exactly sure
Speaker 2: the exact mechanism, but they would do some sort of
Speaker 2: toe knocking or something where they couldn't be seen. And
Speaker 2: that was the Morse code that they said was the
Speaker 2: ghost speaking to them.
Speaker 1: So it it's really they had like a little wooden
Speaker 1: stool under the table with them, and they would take
Speaker 1: off their shoes surreptitiously, and from what I can gather,
Speaker 1: they could pop their knuckle of their toe up and
Speaker 1: down with enough force that it would make a thud
Speaker 1: on that wooden stool.
Speaker 3: That's happy in and of itself.
Speaker 1: It was Yeah, they should have just been like, forget
Speaker 1: all this spirit so bunch, this weird thing.
Speaker 4: But that was the phantom knocking.
Speaker 1: And we know that because Maggie later on confessed to
Speaker 1: the New York Tribune maybe or the Post one of them,
Speaker 1: and said, like, this is how, this is how we
Speaker 1: did it actually in an effort to take her sister
Speaker 1: Leah down, but it ended up taking the spiritualist movement
Speaker 1: down in large part. But that was it, Like thumping
Speaker 1: your knuckle on a wooden stool. They did this for
Speaker 1: forty forty years. They made a living around the world
Speaker 1: doing that and created a new religion from it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and by the time the spiritualism fad sort of
Speaker 2: died away, the two younger sisters were and she recanted
Speaker 2: that confession, by the way, but everyone's like, yeah, you
Speaker 2: already said it, you'd try, right, But the two younger
Speaker 2: sisters and Maggie especially were in pretty bad shape with alcoholism,
Speaker 2: and they died sort of in a call your Brother's esquay,
Speaker 2: very quietly and fairly destitute in New York City in
Speaker 2: the eighteen nineties.
Speaker 1: Trapped under newspapers maybe, but no. They had very interesting
Speaker 1: but also very sad lives. Like I think Maggie married
Speaker 1: a skeptic and.
Speaker 4: He not a good move, right he died.
Speaker 1: He talked to her out of doing spiritualism, but she
Speaker 1: went back after he died. Kate married another spiritualist and
Speaker 1: she had a huge career touring the world as a spiritualist,
Speaker 1: made a lot of money but apparently lost it all.
Speaker 1: And Leah again was just kind of I guess, a
Speaker 1: bit of a villain in this story.
Speaker 3: Where's that movie.
Speaker 1: Man, I was wondering the exact same thing. It's crazy
Speaker 1: it hasn't been made fifty times already, you know, yeah.
Speaker 2: That would be that would be pretty cool. I couldn't
Speaker 2: even find a good documentary on it.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: On them at least. I'm sure there are plenty on
Speaker 2: that they're featured in. But and no give me those
Speaker 2: Fox sisters.
Speaker 1: No matter how you look at it too, whether you
Speaker 1: look at it from the aspect of a believer who
Speaker 1: thinks like this is where it all started, these two sisters,
Speaker 1: and there's plenty of reasons to believe if you're a
Speaker 1: credulous person or confiding, as Mark Twain would put it,
Speaker 1: that you know, like the Andrew Jackson Davis guy who
Speaker 1: kind of started this thing on his own, supposedly wrote
Speaker 1: on March thirty first, eighteen forty eight, that spirit came
Speaker 1: to him and said the work has begun. We just
Speaker 1: started something over here, and then later found out about
Speaker 1: the Fox. There's like, there's all sorts of stuff you
Speaker 1: can believe, and so it's interesting from that respect. But
Speaker 1: also if you're just a pure died in the wolf
Speaker 1: skeptic who do not believe in any kind of afterlife
Speaker 1: or soul or anything like that. It's equally interesting in
Speaker 1: a totally different way that this whole, like almost century
Speaker 1: long movement started from that.
Speaker 4: You know, yeah, it's crazy. It's just love it. I
Speaker 4: love this whole story.
Speaker 2: So it's sweeping the nation at this point by the
Speaker 2: eighteen fifties, and we're going to go over some of
Speaker 2: the different things that they would do, some of the
Speaker 2: methods that they would use to communicate with the other side,
Speaker 2: to fake communicate with the other side. The first one
Speaker 2: is channeling, and these would be trance mediums. So this
Speaker 2: is like when you've seen in a movie when someone
Speaker 2: is just talking, like I am in my regular voice
Speaker 2: and I'm entering the trance and I'm doing a lot
Speaker 2: of showy things to kind of get people, you know,
Speaker 2: pretty pumped up.
Speaker 3: I feel like they're spending their money.
Speaker 4: Well, you get me pumped up, I'll tell you that.
Speaker 2: And all of a sudden, you know, I go into
Speaker 2: this other voice and I'm like a small child. Maybe
Speaker 2: the parents lost a child, or I'm a woman.
Speaker 4: Or I'mammy Davis Junior.
Speaker 3: Hey babe, I just came back to say that don't
Speaker 3: worry about me. This cat is doing just fine.
Speaker 1: I came back to say, I love pretty pebbles in
Speaker 1: a major way.
Speaker 3: He invented rap.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 2: So if you were a good talented medium, that meant
Speaker 2: that you were probably a pretty good actor.
Speaker 3: You could probably do good voices. Sometimes.
Speaker 2: In the case of Corus Scott, who I know, we've
Speaker 2: talked about her before.
Speaker 4: Her name, just can't remember what I have no recollection
Speaker 4: of talking about her.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sounds super familiar.
Speaker 2: But she was one of the top mediums, trance mediums,
Speaker 2: because she was this very sort of demure, attractive young lady,
Speaker 2: and her whole demeanor was about that. And then she
Speaker 2: was apparently a great actor because she would go into
Speaker 2: these big, heavy, gruff voices, and the gulf between who
Speaker 2: she was and who she was imitating was so great
Speaker 2: that everyone was just like, fantastic, Cora Scott, you're a genius.
Speaker 1: Well also, yeah, she was like a little twelve year
Speaker 1: old girl when she started, and supposedly she would take
Speaker 1: the stage and confidently discuss like physics and philosophy and
Speaker 1: all that stuff because there was some authoritative spirit who
Speaker 1: had basically taken possession of her.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I looked up her picture and Kate Winslet
Speaker 2: I think is from my cast in Couch is who
Speaker 2: I would throw in that movie. Okay, Okay, not as
Speaker 2: the twelve year old that would be weird unless they
Speaker 2: do some sort of bad irishman de aging. But she
Speaker 2: looked enough like her and she's a great actor.
Speaker 1: So so that's so channeling is what you kind of
Speaker 1: think of, where somebody becomes possessed, the medium becomes possessed.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's also ones where like they're just saying, like, oh
Speaker 1: I can hear what they're saying, but you can't because
Speaker 1: they're speaking to me through telepathy, right, Okay, that reminds
Speaker 1: me of John Edwards. Remember him crossing over with John Edwards?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can't picture him. I think if I saw
Speaker 2: a picture, I would totally remember, though.
Speaker 4: You would, you would.
Speaker 1: What a weird time the nineties were as far as
Speaker 1: stuff like that goes, although I think his show ran
Speaker 1: from two thousand to two thousand and four.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that can sort of coincide it with the
Speaker 2: Reverend Bob Dobbs and the televangelism and all that good stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was a crazy time.
Speaker 1: So then there's automatic writing was another big one too,
Speaker 1: and all of this should sound familiar again, because the
Speaker 1: stuff just is so permeated in a pop culture.
Speaker 4: It's crazy.
Speaker 1: But automatic writing is instead of the medium's voice being
Speaker 1: taken over, the medium being possessed and speaking as the spirit,
Speaker 1: the spirit took over their hand and they would start writing.
Speaker 1: And so in just the same way chorus Scott would
Speaker 1: have a completely different personality or a different voice or
Speaker 1: different accent or something like that. This, like the handwriting
Speaker 1: or the word usage or anything like that would be
Speaker 1: different than the medium's normal handwriting.
Speaker 4: This is automatic writing.
Speaker 3: And there was that trying to decide if I could
Speaker 3: do that.
Speaker 1: Well, sometimes they would use their non dominant hand, So
Speaker 1: if you want to change your handwriting, just.
Speaker 4: Do that to start. Yeah, I can't some way.
Speaker 1: And then there was a woman named Pearl Curran who
Speaker 1: wrote at least five thousand poems, novels and plays through
Speaker 1: automatic writing, all channeling the spirit of the seventeenth century
Speaker 1: woman from England named Patience Worth.
Speaker 4: Nice. That's prolific. That's a lot of words. And then
Speaker 4: what about direct voice?
Speaker 3: Yeah, direct voices.
Speaker 2: When you are a medium, you contact a spirit and
Speaker 2: the spirit is so powerful that they just speak to
Speaker 2: you directly, like the medium is just sitting there with
Speaker 2: their mouth closed.
Speaker 4: Yea.
Speaker 2: And this happened usually in a dark room where they
Speaker 2: would have a business partner just behind the curtain obviously
Speaker 2: use talking, or maybe they were just doing a bad
Speaker 2: ventriloquist kind of deal where there it's dark enough where
Speaker 2: you can't really see their lips moving throwing their voice.
Speaker 2: There was a woman named Leslie Flint, a medium.
Speaker 4: Oh really, he looked like the old man from up.
Speaker 3: Oh did it make you cry when he.
Speaker 4: Looked at him?
Speaker 3: My daughter did?
Speaker 4: Watched that.
Speaker 2: Here have these balloons, So yeah, Leslie Finch, I actually
Speaker 2: love that name for a man.
Speaker 4: So yeah. And I don't know why I.
Speaker 2: Assumed, but he would recreate famous people like Sammy Davis Junior,
Speaker 2: but wasn't very good at it apparently, which is kind
Speaker 2: of funny. That makes us all a little bit more
Speaker 2: rediculous and fun.
Speaker 1: Well, I was reading obituary about him that was written
Speaker 1: by somebody who attended one of his or a couple
Speaker 1: I think of his seances, and they said things like,
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of times you could tell it,
Speaker 1: like what the trickery was or whatever. But there are
Speaker 1: other times where he would like be speaking over the voice,
Speaker 1: which is tough to do with ventriloquism, or one time
Speaker 1: he was tested, he was made to hold colored water
Speaker 1: in his mouth while the spirit voice was speaking, and
Speaker 1: you're like, wow, you know, that's pretty interesting, and then
Speaker 1: you just think, well, there's there's always an explanation for it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, maybe there was another person who was
Speaker 1: a confederate in the room. Who knows, But it just
Speaker 1: goes to show that even still even today, and this
Speaker 1: guy's obituary that was written in the nineties, the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: that they were like, yeah, you know, he was largely
Speaker 1: considered a trickster or fraud. But they'll still hedge and say,
Speaker 1: you know, but there were a couple of things and
Speaker 1: at the very least it's unexplained, which is pretty interesting
Speaker 1: and neat, But that doesn't necessarily mean that, oh no,
Speaker 1: there really was a spirit that was talking in the
Speaker 1: room thanks to him.
Speaker 3: Amazing.
Speaker 2: So we had table turning. This is at a you know,
Speaker 2: this isn't like a theatrical performance. This is in a
Speaker 2: small room. Everyone and this kind of think wija board
Speaker 2: with this. It's the same sort of thing, except the
Speaker 2: wija board would be the actual table that you're sitting at.
Speaker 2: Everyone would put their hands on the table and then
Speaker 2: the table would move or tilt or something when you're
Speaker 2: asking questions, So it's inhabiting the furniture. Of course, what's
Speaker 2: going on here is either like knee movements, or sometime
Speaker 2: they had these rings on the medium's finger that were
Speaker 2: slotted and could move the table around without anyone noticing.
Speaker 2: Just another little parlor trick.
Speaker 1: Basically, yeah, or you know the idea that you're moving
Speaker 1: the table yourself like a Oigi board.
Speaker 4: I can't remember what it's.
Speaker 1: Called, but basically, your your body is moving without your
Speaker 1: brain being aware of it. And then there's also just
Speaker 1: the straight up power of suggestion, and this applies to
Speaker 1: table turning in a lot of other stuff. But if
Speaker 1: you're saying, like if you're the medium at a seance
Speaker 1: and you said the table is rising, it's rising people
Speaker 1: who are willing to believe, a lot of people who
Speaker 1: went to seance is wanted to believe. We're already believed
Speaker 1: in this stuff. Just the power of suggestion could be like, oh,
Speaker 1: it is raising a little bit, I can feel it.
Speaker 1: I can tell kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my favorite and I bet your favorite too is
Speaker 2: ectoplasmic manifestations.
Speaker 4: That's a good one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's pretty good.
Speaker 2: This is when you would actually, as a spiritualist, produce
Speaker 2: something physical, something would manifest itself, an actual substance, and
Speaker 2: it was They called it ectoplasm, and they could pull
Speaker 2: it from their body and it was just basically something
Speaker 2: that they would make beforehand.
Speaker 3: Out of whatever. I mean, they would make it out
Speaker 3: of all kinds of things.
Speaker 2: There was one story about someone who was actually gluing
Speaker 2: cut out faces from a magazine onto dolls and those
Speaker 2: were ectoplasm spirits. But they would hide these things sometimes
Speaker 2: like up their butt or in their other body cavities,
Speaker 2: and they would pull these things out. And some of
Speaker 2: the pictures that you see online if you look up
Speaker 2: ectoplasm eighteen hundred's seance is just the pictures themselves are
Speaker 2: hysterical and frightening all at the same time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, especially now when you look back and see them,
Speaker 1: you're like, how did anybody fall for that? And it's
Speaker 1: really important to keep in mind one they wanted to believe,
Speaker 1: but two these seances would be carried out in dark
Speaker 1: rooms to where you couldn't see much at all. You
Speaker 1: just suddenly see some luminous cloth or something that you
Speaker 1: were led to believe was ectoplasm kind of what looked
Speaker 1: like floating in the middle of the table or something
Speaker 1: like that. It's stuff that's really easy to explain. But
Speaker 1: in a darkened room that you been sitting in for
Speaker 1: three hours communicating with spirits, you might be a lot
Speaker 1: more prone to buy into it than under normal circumstances.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure, maybe you're a little.
Speaker 4: Drunk right tipsy on Chinnap's.
Speaker 2: Levitation was another big one, nice little party trick. I
Speaker 2: actually could sort of do this for a little while.
Speaker 2: The David Blaine method. I don't know if you ever
Speaker 2: saw his when he made himself levitate.
Speaker 4: It's just kind of hopping up and down in air.
Speaker 3: Right, No, it's it's you're thinking of trampolines.
Speaker 4: Oh, that's not the same thing.
Speaker 3: No, people can see those.
Speaker 2: Oh No, it's all about the angle with the David
Speaker 2: Blaine method of getting them to see you from the
Speaker 2: right angle to where what you're really doing is you're
Speaker 2: rising your body up with just one like just your
Speaker 2: first three toes on your right foot, and you're hiding
Speaker 2: that with your other foot, so it looks like you're
Speaker 2: just sort of levitating a few inches off the ground
Speaker 2: and then you act like you're unsteady and then you
Speaker 2: land back.
Speaker 3: Down and go oh boy, that was a good one.
Speaker 3: That was pretty powerful.
Speaker 1: So wait a minute, David Blaine can raise his entire
Speaker 1: body weight with three toes.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean he's on his toes. I just I
Speaker 2: mean I could do it at the time too. This
Speaker 2: is in the nineties.
Speaker 4: Man, that's impressive.
Speaker 1: I don't think I've ever had the kind of toe't
Speaker 1: strength that is required to do that.
Speaker 3: You can raise yourself up with one foot.
Speaker 4: In a seated position.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, you're standing uh.
Speaker 4: Oh oh oh, I got you.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So what you're doing is you're standing there and then
Speaker 2: you raise yourself off the ground with just the toes
Speaker 2: on your right foot, let's say, and you're keeping your
Speaker 2: left foot is shielding that so you can't quite see it.
Speaker 4: Yeah. No, I've got it.
Speaker 2: And it just creates if you got someone at the
Speaker 2: right angle. And I got pretty good at it. My
Speaker 2: roommate Justin was like, you're getting better, mate.
Speaker 4: Right, oh, I'm getting drunker.
Speaker 3: Well, both of those things are happening.
Speaker 1: I thought you were talking about like you know, like
Speaker 1: a fake here or something like that where they're sitting
Speaker 1: cross legged and they're levitating. I was like, to do
Speaker 1: that with just three toes. That in and of itself
Speaker 1: is pretty impressive, but it's pretty good, all right.
Speaker 3: What are the other There's another couple of things they
Speaker 3: did too, What are.
Speaker 4: The beer photography?
Speaker 1: Pretty straightforward stuff where you know, this is the very
Speaker 1: beginnings of photography. So people didn't understand double exposures unless
Speaker 1: you were a photographer. But if you were, you could
Speaker 1: do all sorts of neat stuff like double exposed something
Speaker 1: to put a ghostly face in the background over someone's shoulder.
Speaker 4: I saw one.
Speaker 1: I saw a spirit photograph where it was a ghostly arm.
Speaker 1: It also could have been a genie coming out of
Speaker 1: a bottle. One of the two. It looked exactly the same,
Speaker 1: but it was like that it was on a table,
Speaker 1: so they were like, this is a spirit arm, levitating table.
Speaker 1: So they're like tying three things together. Table turning, levitating
Speaker 1: and spirit photography.
Speaker 3: Those are great.
Speaker 2: I think the spirit photography just because they were taking
Speaker 2: advantage of this new technology people did not even understand.
Speaker 4: Right, it was like the deep fake of the time.
Speaker 3: And they were probably like everybody, we got maybe three.
Speaker 4: Years, Yeah, we ready to get prolific.
Speaker 3: And then everyone's going to be like, oh, that's just
Speaker 3: double exposure.
Speaker 1: Right, and then people like I said earlier too, a
Speaker 1: lot of the New Age stuff that's tied into spiritualism today,
Speaker 1: like tarot readings or oh, I don't know, astrological that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff that had nothing to do with this
Speaker 1: because spiritualists, all of it grew out of Christianity. So
Speaker 1: there was some Christian basis to all of the spiritualist practices.
Speaker 1: And even though in a lot of ways it was
Speaker 1: extraordinarily heretical. There was no religious leader in charge of anything.
Speaker 1: There was no scripture, doctrine or anything like that. It
Speaker 1: was still very much tied into and born out of Christianity.
Speaker 1: So stuff like occult things would have, yeah, it would
Speaker 1: have been very much frowned upon by spiritualists totally.
Speaker 3: Should we take another break, I think we should. All right,
Speaker 3: We'll take.
Speaker 2: Another break and tell you about what the Civil War
Speaker 2: had to do with all of this, right after this,
Speaker 2: all right, So, pre Civil War in the United States,
Speaker 2: spiritualism was popular. It was booming, but it was more
Speaker 2: like the kind of thing that you did in a
Speaker 2: theater and you would go see it as a curiosity
Speaker 2: or you might just maybe even knew it was fake
Speaker 2: and it was just attainment.
Speaker 3: There was a lot going on back then, kind.
Speaker 1: Of like looking at penguins in a zoo today, like
Speaker 1: you know they're fake, but it's still fun to look at.
Speaker 2: Right, Why not go pay a nickel to see madam
Speaker 2: whatever do her little? Do her a little erotic because
Speaker 2: we'll get into that. The'se got a little sexy at
Speaker 2: times too.
Speaker 4: A little ghost shimmy.
Speaker 3: This is part of the part of the draw, the
Speaker 3: ghost shimmy.
Speaker 2: But you need to talk about a couple of things here.
Speaker 2: The Civil War for sure, but one of the things
Speaker 2: that was going on. You know, we've been talking about
Speaker 2: a lot about the northeastern United States, and there's a
Speaker 2: very good reason it didn't take hold in the South.
Speaker 3: It's because.
Speaker 2: The way Christianity was, and some might argue still is
Speaker 2: in the South didn't leave a lot of room. The
Speaker 2: hierarchy didn't leave a lot of room for other schools
Speaker 2: of thought. And it was basically, even though it wasn't
Speaker 2: necessarily a cult, it was just shut down kind of
Speaker 2: from the beginning in.
Speaker 1: The South, they're like, we'll stick to our voodoo, thank
Speaker 1: you very much, exactly, keep that spiritualism stuff out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it was just not a big thing in
Speaker 2: the South. The mediums at the time would move off
Speaker 2: the stage sometimes and have these private seances.
Speaker 4: Yea.
Speaker 2: Sometimes they would get in touch with a family member,
Speaker 2: but oftentimes it would just be kind of the same
Speaker 2: in the state as the stage show. They would say, like,
Speaker 2: I'm going to get in touch with Sammy Davis Junior
Speaker 2: or whatever. The popular dead figure at the time.
Speaker 1: Was Sure, but that was for like pre Civil War,
Speaker 1: it was an entertainment, it was an amusement. But when
Speaker 1: the Civil War came, a lot of people died in
Speaker 1: the Civil War, and that means that a lot of
Speaker 1: people who survived the Civil War lost a loved one.
Speaker 1: And these might have been people who you know, went
Speaker 1: off to fight and just never came back, never heard
Speaker 1: from again, no nothing, have no.
Speaker 4: Idea where they died, where they were buried.
Speaker 1: And so that kind of grief, you know, that transcends
Speaker 1: any kind of time or place, and it created a
Speaker 1: lot of people, a large population of people who were
Speaker 1: very interested in getting in touch with their dead relative,
Speaker 1: and it just so happened that at the time there
Speaker 1: was a movement afoot that said, oh, well, this guy
Speaker 1: over here is actually really good at getting in touch
Speaker 1: with the dead. Why don't you have a seance with him.
Speaker 1: You just have to, you know, pay him to do
Speaker 1: this work, because it does a lot of work. Whether
Speaker 1: you are a believer and a skeptic, it's a lot
Speaker 1: of work to have been a medium during this time.
Speaker 1: And so they would be paid and they would make
Speaker 1: a living like this, and so these seances, these performances
Speaker 1: were decreased in size, but vastly increased in frequency.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot more spiritualists doing smaller mediums for families
Speaker 2: or smaller seances for families, And the same thing happened
Speaker 2: after World War One as well. So it's you know,
Speaker 2: it's kind of all fun and games until it gets
Speaker 2: to this level. If it's a big theater show, fine, whatever,
Speaker 2: go pay your money and get entertained for an hour.
Speaker 2: But when you are taking people's money who have lost
Speaker 2: loved ones in battle, then that's when it gets kind
Speaker 2: of really ugly if you ask.
Speaker 4: Me, right.
Speaker 1: And that's where I think a lot of the genuine
Speaker 1: skeptics who who beat this kind of stuff to a pulp.
Speaker 1: That's the place that they're coming from. You know, not
Speaker 1: necessarily that it's like an affront to science or reason
Speaker 1: or common sense or anything like that, but that there
Speaker 1: are a lot of people who have parted money from
Speaker 1: people who were bereaved at the time, and you just
Speaker 1: you don't take advantage of people who are undergoing grief.
Speaker 4: That's a pretty shod thing to do.
Speaker 1: That's a life lesson right there for everybody listening, especially
Speaker 1: with youngsters.
Speaker 2: Not only that, not only taking their money, but I
Speaker 2: imagine in a lot of cases people made real life
Speaker 2: decisions based on things that would happen in these seances.
Speaker 2: You know, right, it's true, sell the family farm like
Speaker 2: stuff like that.
Speaker 4: Oh God, thought about that.
Speaker 1: And not only sell the family farm, sell it to
Speaker 1: me the medium. That's what your dead brother wants you
Speaker 1: to do.
Speaker 3: For what something's coming through. They're saying pennies on the dollar.
Speaker 4: That's great.
Speaker 3: Oh wait so yeah, yeah, that's terrible.
Speaker 2: So by the end of the twentieth century, things started
Speaker 2: to decline a bit. One was just pure greed. There
Speaker 2: were too many of them out there. They were all
Speaker 2: trying to outdo one another. They were trying to draw
Speaker 2: bigger crowds and more money, and they were getting more
Speaker 2: outrageous by doing so, and that meant, just like anything,
Speaker 2: when you try and do that, the bigger, you try
Speaker 2: to force something to be Sometimes that can lead to
Speaker 2: its kind of early death.
Speaker 1: I guess, yeah, go big or go home, But eventually
Speaker 1: you're going to go home anyway.
Speaker 4: That's the end of that saying. I love it right.
Speaker 1: So part of it was that they were making more
Speaker 1: and more audacious claims, but also there were more and
Speaker 1: more scientists like those that that open minded scientific approach
Speaker 1: had become a lot more hardened toward spiritualism and mediums
Speaker 1: because so many had been investigated and found to just
Speaker 1: be total frauds. Most of the time, the outcome was
Speaker 1: the medium couldn't reproduce this ectoplasm or get in touch
Speaker 1: with the spirit when they were under controlled conditions, or
Speaker 1: they went for it and they were found to be
Speaker 1: a fraud, like the knuckle of their toe was found
Speaker 1: to be wrapping on a stool or something like that.
Speaker 1: And so as these reports kept coming out, more and
Speaker 1: more these scientific investigators were like, I don't think any
Speaker 1: of this is real, and they would be interviewed in newspapers,
Speaker 1: and the papers would run these articles, and so over
Speaker 1: time just the general public kind of turned away from
Speaker 1: spiritualism as hocum and bunk. But the thing is is
Speaker 1: not everyone did. Even still today. Go ask Dan Aykroyd.
Speaker 1: There is a group of people who adhere to spiritualism as.
Speaker 3: A religion, no for sure.
Speaker 2: And one of the big reasons that it didn't completely
Speaker 2: go away was Spiritualists were very smart in that they
Speaker 2: would use influencers of the day in their act. They
Speaker 2: would seek out these well known people. They would tour
Speaker 2: the world, sometimes tour Europe and do seances with like
Speaker 2: royal families of various countries. The newspapers write about this.
Speaker 2: They would get a quote or maybe demand a quote
Speaker 2: from someone like well known and they would say, all right,
Speaker 2: I'll come to a seiance, but you got to give
Speaker 2: me a quote that I can use my flyer or whatever.
Speaker 4: What's it called quote?
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, that fallacy, the logical fallacy, appeal
Speaker 1: to authority.
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, yeah, the appeal to authority, sure, okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: which you know makes a lot of sense that people see,
Speaker 2: oh well, they did a sands for the Prince of
Speaker 2: Monaco or Sammy Davis Junior, then it's got to be
Speaker 2: good enough for me. It's not pseudoscience at all, because
Speaker 2: why would Sammy Davis Junior believe in pseudoscience?
Speaker 1: Right, He's just a Satanist. He didn't care about pseudoscience,
Speaker 1: that's right. So one of the other authorities that they
Speaker 1: would appeal to, Chuck, was what this one. There's an
Speaker 1: expose written in eighteen ninety seven, and by god if
Speaker 1: I can't I can't find it anywhere in my tabs.
Speaker 1: But it was basically, uh oh, Revelations of a Spirit
Speaker 1: Medium is what it was called. And it was written
Speaker 1: anonymously by a medium, a huckster, a fraud, and I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure it was published in eighteen ninety seven, and
Speaker 1: it is like four hundred pages exposing all the tips
Speaker 1: and all that stuff, all the tricks. But one there's
Speaker 1: a glossary of like nineteenth century slang words among hoasters.
Speaker 4: It's amazing.
Speaker 1: But one of them was the heavy, and that was
Speaker 1: a scientist who was over credentialed. They had all these
Speaker 1: PhDs and everything like that, so they were BookSmart, but
Speaker 1: they were super gullible and if you could get a
Speaker 1: top heavy to basically say, like I can't explain it,
Speaker 1: science can't explain it. That would go a very long
Speaker 1: way to bolstering your career.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even if you talked to one hundred scientists and
Speaker 2: one of them was a top heavy who'd said something
Speaker 2: valuable to you, that's the only one. You're the tenth
Speaker 2: dentist of the nine out of ten dentists.
Speaker 1: Right, exactly exactly, and that's all you need, especially if
Speaker 1: the other nine dentists just keep their traps shut because
Speaker 1: they have better things to do. But there were a
Speaker 1: bunch of people who would not keep their traps shut.
Speaker 1: I guess actually one of a legendary top heavy, even
Speaker 1: though he wasn't a scientist, credential or otherwise, was Sir
Speaker 1: Arthur Kunnan Doyle. I don't know what's wrong with me.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, Sir Arthur cohnin do yell.
Speaker 2: By the way, before I forget, If there's not a
Speaker 2: band called the tenth Dentist out there, then I don't
Speaker 2: know what to think anymore.
Speaker 1: That's a good one. Remember those Trident commercials. I think
Speaker 1: it was four out of five dentists.
Speaker 4: One of them.
Speaker 3: I was it four out of five.
Speaker 1: He was bit on the testicles by a squirrel before
Speaker 1: he could pronounce how, before he could recommend denteen or
Speaker 1: trident or something like that.
Speaker 2: Maybe it should be the fifth. It is four out
Speaker 2: of five us, it's not nine out of ten.
Speaker 4: Do you remember that though? No, it was that great?
Speaker 3: The uh? What was the what was the was it?
Speaker 3: We make holes and teeth? Oh?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Remember that the cartoon that was Crest.
Speaker 1: Okay, do you want to hear you want to hear
Speaker 1: the pinnacle of eighties marketing to kids. My third grade
Speaker 1: maybe fourth grade class put on a play about toothpaste, yes,
Speaker 1: and cavities sponsored by Crest.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They had a big pushback then for taking over the
Speaker 2: minds of American children.
Speaker 4: Well it worked.
Speaker 1: What's funny is I now use Aquafresh the orange tube.
Speaker 1: Oh man, if there is a favorite toothpaste that any
Speaker 1: boy in America has ever had, that is it in
Speaker 1: its mind?
Speaker 3: That was from the eighties?
Speaker 4: No, it is now.
Speaker 1: But I'm saying the Crest takeover of my mind didn't work. Gotcha,
Speaker 1: I'm an Aquafresh boy now?
Speaker 3: Is that the one with the tricolor?
Speaker 4: Yeah, which is another very appealing part of it.
Speaker 3: Man, you'd buy it all, don't you.
Speaker 4: I do so gullible. Yeah, I am a little gullible.
Speaker 3: You're like an Arthur Conan Doyle.
Speaker 1: So he if you recognize his name, he was the
Speaker 1: author of Sherlock Holmes. Of course, he was super into this.
Speaker 1: He joined the Society for Psychical Research, which was an
Speaker 1: early skeptical slash believer society, and he always he bought
Speaker 1: into this. He was just convinced. But on the other
Speaker 1: side of the equation, we're skeptics who were not convinced,
Speaker 1: who basically didn't keep their mouths shut. They were the
Speaker 1: other four who would say, like, no, oh, everybody, actually,
Speaker 1: this guy's wrong. My esteemed colleague has been taken. But
Speaker 1: then the head of those guys was Harry Houdini. Amazingly enough, yeah, Houdini.
Speaker 2: Which makes it super ironic that at the Magic Castle
Speaker 2: in Los Angeles they have long had Harry Houdini seance nights.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, where you can.
Speaker 2: Go into the Harry Houdini Room and do a seance,
Speaker 2: which is, you know, it's all for fun. But it
Speaker 2: is kind of funny that he was very much against
Speaker 2: this stuff. Although supposedly if you go to the Magic castle,
Speaker 2: they'll tell you that he did, and he may have
Speaker 2: really done. This is told his wife before he died that, hey, listen,
Speaker 2: if I was wrong, I'll come back and I'll contact
Speaker 2: you and let you know.
Speaker 4: You're right.
Speaker 1: And he came back and he said, I've got good
Speaker 1: news and I've got bad news. The good news is
Speaker 1: there is a heaven. The bad news is you're scheduled
Speaker 1: to pitch there tonight. Do you remember that Scary Stories
Speaker 1: of Telling the Dark book?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Where was that? What that was from?
Speaker 1: It was like two friends who played baseball together. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they had a pack to like Harry Houdini and his wife.
Speaker 4: Apparently.
Speaker 3: I think that's a there's different versions of that joke though.
Speaker 4: Man, the illustrations in that book were just barre on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was great stuff. And by the way, we
Speaker 2: should give a big rest in peace to mister Mort
Speaker 2: Drucker who passed away. Oh yeah, a couple of weeks
Speaker 2: ago in real time. But that was that was a
Speaker 2: big one. We talk about Mad Magazine a lot, and
Speaker 2: Mort Drucker was my number one with a bullet favorite
Speaker 2: artist and he passed on and he was one of
Speaker 2: the greats.
Speaker 4: He definitely shaped my childhood in a very large way. Yeah,
Speaker 4: big time with his drawings. Yeah. Nice, we'll hear from
Speaker 4: you soon, right. He's like, you guys are pitching tonight.
Speaker 3: Oh no, both of us.
Speaker 4: So so Harry Houdini.
Speaker 1: He's like, yeah, Josh is gonna flowb it and Chuck's
Speaker 1: gonna have to be brought in for the safe. So
Speaker 1: Harry Harry Houdini created this long standing tradition of stage
Speaker 1: magicians exposing the fraud of spiritualism.
Speaker 4: Basically, yeah, because they were.
Speaker 3: They're like, they're stealing our tricks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's pretty cool, Like he would incorporate into
Speaker 1: his stage shows a lot of these things that spiritualists
Speaker 1: were doing to show how they did it.
Speaker 4: And he was relentless at it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was very relentless.
Speaker 1: But it was very cool and the fact that it's
Speaker 1: still going on today. Richard Wiseman, who's come up a
Speaker 1: few times. He was in the Sheldrake episode. He was
Speaker 1: in the Ghosts episode, and I think we somehow misconstrued
Speaker 1: as research in the ghost episode to suggest that he
Speaker 1: had proven ghosts exists. I don't remember exactly the details
Speaker 1: of it, but we got that one wrong. But in
Speaker 1: this case, he has recreated seances from the nineteenth century
Speaker 1: and has shown how willing people are to totally miss
Speaker 1: report the events that went on in the seance, to
Speaker 1: say that, yes, you know, the table did levitate or
Speaker 1: all the stuff that he's studying under these controlled conditions,
Speaker 1: and it's basically shown not just that the medium himself
Speaker 1: or more often herself as we'll see, was engaging in fraud,
Speaker 1: but also that the audience had a willing suspension of disbelief.
Speaker 1: And we're part of this too by saying, like I
Speaker 1: felt the phantom arm tap me on the shoulder. The
Speaker 1: medium didn't have anything to do with that. That was
Speaker 1: just something that kind of came out of the environment
Speaker 1: that was produced in the seance.
Speaker 4: You know, yeah, pretty interesting. It is pretty interesting.
Speaker 2: So we'll finish up here with this. I thought this
Speaker 2: was very interesting, actually, the social implications of this. Most
Speaker 2: of the not all, but a lot of these spiritualists
Speaker 2: were women in the nineteenth century. For some practical reasons,
Speaker 2: they could wear these long dresses that could hide talented
Speaker 2: toe knuckles. They were not because of the time, they
Speaker 2: wouldn't get like searched too closely, obviously, because you wouldn't
Speaker 2: do that if you were a scientist trying to examine
Speaker 2: whether or not a spiritualist was real or not, and
Speaker 2: that led to there were men for sure, But that
Speaker 2: led to this kind of interesting side note. One is
Speaker 2: that women could make their own money, and so it's
Speaker 2: easy to poopoo something like this. But I'm sure those
Speaker 2: Fox sisters made a lot more dough than they ever
Speaker 2: could have, as you know, doing anything else offered and
Speaker 2: available to them at the time. So that's a good thing.
Speaker 2: They gave them some agency. But these it was no
Speaker 2: coincidence that sometimes the voice from the other side would
Speaker 2: champion sort.
Speaker 3: Of progressive views, because this.
Speaker 2: Turned out to be a chance to sort of reshape
Speaker 2: policy in a way. If you were a woman and
Speaker 2: you were a spiritualist, it would be very easy to say,
Speaker 2: you know, they're saying that women should have more rights,
Speaker 2: and if not, they will come back and haunt you,
Speaker 2: all right, And that kind of ended up happening in
Speaker 2: some ways.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was a huge connection between spiritualism and spiritualist
Speaker 1: movement and abolitionism, the women's suffrage movement, the women's or
Speaker 1: the temperance movement, a lot of these progressive movements, workers'
Speaker 1: rights and you know, if you were an abolitionist and
Speaker 1: you didn't believe this kind of thing, you might be like,
Speaker 1: I'm not really happy about that. But at the same
Speaker 1: time it kind of whipped up this fervor in that
Speaker 1: some people would like their spirits that were being channeled
Speaker 1: by the medium were saying things like you guys better
Speaker 1: get on the train of abolitionism, you better get rid
Speaker 1: of slavery. And it actually did, especially in these theatrical settings,
Speaker 1: have a widespread influence on getting the message out there
Speaker 1: through the spirit communication.
Speaker 2: Weirdly enough, Yeah, it's almost like one could say anything
Speaker 2: at all. It's something like, oh, I don't know, a
Speaker 2: campaign rally, and people would believe it if they were
Speaker 2: an ardent enough believer in the.
Speaker 1: Speaker exactly, especially if they'd attach their ego to you
Speaker 1: and your success.
Speaker 4: Very strange.
Speaker 1: So I just wanted to give two shouts out, one
Speaker 1: to the probably the greatest ghost movie that involved seances.
Speaker 3: Ever Ghost No would be Goldberg.
Speaker 4: No, all right?
Speaker 1: The others with Nicole, Yeah, that was good, it was
Speaker 1: so good, and then spoil it. The greatest short story
Speaker 1: involving seances in the spiritualist movement, written by arguably the
Speaker 1: greatest American writer of all time, Joyce Carol Oates. It's
Speaker 1: called night Side. It's a short story. It's the same
Speaker 1: title as a collection of her short stories from the seventies,
Speaker 1: I think nineteen seventy seven night Side. Look it up
Speaker 1: and thank me later. It's seriously just bone chilling how
Speaker 1: good it is.
Speaker 3: I wonder if we could get in touch with her
Speaker 3: and read that for our Halloween episode.
Speaker 1: I tweeted to her once kind of crassly and never
Speaker 1: heard anything back. Even though you're like Twitter, I know
Speaker 1: she saw that tweet.
Speaker 3: Hey at Joyce Carol Loats, you think you're so cool?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: I would love to read that one. There's another one too.
Speaker 1: She's probably not just the greatest American writer, but the
Speaker 1: greatest American horror writer too.
Speaker 4: She's great, She's so wonderful. I would read.
Speaker 1: Any of her stories. So, if you out there know
Speaker 1: Joyce Carol Oates, in contact with her or her publisher, please,
Speaker 1: we would love to read in our ad free episode
Speaker 1: one of her short stories for Halloween.
Speaker 3: That's right, so I think she might like that aspect.
Speaker 4: Okay, Oh, one last thing, Chuck.
Speaker 1: There's a place called lily Dale in New York, appropriately enough,
Speaker 1: which is basically a spiritualist community where you can go
Speaker 1: basically be among spiritualists as a religion. Today wonderful since
Speaker 1: I said today it's time for listening that.
Speaker 3: I'm going to call this.
Speaker 2: We haven't gotten emails in two weeks from people because
Speaker 2: something's wrong with our email server. So it's on bidets again.
Speaker 2: You're going to get a couple on bidays.
Speaker 4: I think.
Speaker 2: All right, Hey, guys, listening to your recent episode on
Speaker 2: bidays reminded me of a funny story I thought you
Speaker 2: might like. Two thousand and four, my family bought a
Speaker 2: new house in the suburbs of Detroit. It was designed
Speaker 2: and built by an exceptionally pragmatic, efficient yet lacking an
Speaker 2: esthetic appreciation engineer. To our surprise my husband's delight, as
Speaker 2: he is from Spain, the master bathroom included a separate
Speaker 2: bidet unit. And remember this is two thousand and four
Speaker 2: and people were not as familiar in this country. Most
Speaker 2: people that visited our home had no idea what it was.
Speaker 2: And we also made the decision to not give advanced
Speaker 2: notice when they to the bathroom. Invariably, people would emerge
Speaker 2: from the bathroom trip either a little wet, or with
Speaker 2: an embarrassed look on their face as they confessed having
Speaker 2: explored the contraption and released a stream of water onto
Speaker 2: themselves and into our bathroom.
Speaker 3: Was always good for a laugh. I sure appreciate you guys.
Speaker 2: When we moved from Michigan to the South Carolina.
Speaker 1: What was she once missed South Carolina, because that would
Speaker 1: explain that last bit.
Speaker 2: No, I thought it was she met the South and
Speaker 2: I didn't see on the next line it said Carolina.
Speaker 3: So that was just me.
Speaker 4: Oh okay.
Speaker 2: Your voices accompanied us as we made many twelve hour
Speaker 2: trips back and forth. We enjoyed the knowledge and the tangents,
Speaker 2: even the tangents, and now you continue to soothe and
Speaker 2: educate me as I go on my four to five
Speaker 2: mile recreational walks during the pandemic quarantine and temporary hopefully furlough.
Speaker 2: And that is from Michelle Salcedo.
Speaker 4: Nice.
Speaker 1: Thanks a lot, Michelle. We're glad to know that you're
Speaker 1: doing okay there hanging out waiting for things to get.
Speaker 3: Back to normal in the South Carolina.
Speaker 1: That's right, Chuck, And as it will eventually go back
Speaker 1: to normal, and in the meantime, if you want to
Speaker 1: get in touch with us, like Michelle did to let
Speaker 1: us know some silly story.
Speaker 4: About a Biday or what have you.
Speaker 1: You can get in touch with us send us an
Speaker 1: email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3: You Know Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4: For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 4: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.