November 7, 2019 • 39 mins
While the papers of the time relegated Rose Mackenberg to a sidekick role as the "girl detective" working with famed skeptic and escape artist Harry Houdini, this spiritualist-turned-spook-spy spent decades busting con artists purporting to be mediums. And, after Houdini's death in 1926, Rose Mackenberg continued her mission, exposing fraudulent ghost racketeers -- a genuine, real-life ghostbuster.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous history is a production of I Heart Radio. If
(00:27):
there's something strange in your neighborhood, who in fact should
you call? If there's something weird and it don't look good,
you just might better call good Ghostbusters. Hi, I'm bad,
I'm an old trademark. Um what is it? Huey Lewis.
Huey Lewis sued was the Roy Parker, Roy Parker, Ray Parker,
(00:51):
Casey on the case with that one that's also a
super producer Casey Pecker double the double sound cute. Yeah,
Ray Parker Junior. Uh, famously sued by Huey Lewis. If
I want a new drug fame, if you want a
fun little side by side, it's uh, don't don't dug it,
dunt dun don't don't dig versus I think I want
(01:13):
a new drug is pretty much that dun't don't right.
But but it's it's more about the chugging little under
there's like stabs that are like dune dunt dunt dunt dune. Well,
thank god that litigation did not sink one of my
favorite childhood franchises of all time, The Ghostbusters. I mean,
(01:35):
it was the most desired Halloween costume by Miles and Miles.
You know, did you have the proton pack? Did you
have the little suit? Yeah? Oh, I had the whole thing.
I had the I had the the station, the firehouse,
you had the firehouse, you had the hearse or ambulance?
What was it? It was a hearse but it was
called it was called the Ecto five. Yeah. I had
(01:57):
a lot wrapped up in the Ghostbusters franchise. Even now,
one of my cats is named Dr Vankman, So I
I carried that. I carried that with me, triumphs and
traumas alike. Well, I'll tell you why that is is
because it was funny, poignant, heartwarming, and I'm most importantly
pretty spooky. Yeah, and I support We're we're continuing with
(02:20):
our Halloween in November behind the curve activity here, which
is again our men's warehouse asked guarantee we will usually
be behind the curve. We hope it's appealing. We were
digging into the concept of Ghostbusters and before we traveled
to today's episode by way of segue, let's just mention
(02:42):
that there was a recent reboot of Ghostbusters where in
the four protagonists were all played by female actors. Do
you remember that. Did you see that one? I did, Um,
I quite enjoyed it. The Internet didn't really like it
very much. But the Internet said, you know, toxic hive
of scum and villainy, as we all know. Yeah, the
Internet is very into not liking things. So so also
(03:08):
its relationship with women is very complicated. I would say,
I would say terrible. It's like saying in cells have
a complicated relationship there. But yeah, I also enjoyed the reboot,
the newest reboot. I hope they do more in that vein.
But this inspired knowl you and I to look into
(03:28):
concepts of ghostbusting, and we found, with the help of
our research associate Gabe, we found a story of someone
who might be called one of the original ghostbusters, a
woman named Rose Macenburg, who was described as a spook
spy yeah, or what we might know now as paranormal investigator. Yeah,
(03:51):
that's a thing. Ghost hunters and the like, and and
the what's the name of the couple from the war
Conjuring films, Yeah, the war Ends they were. They were
actually real folks who made this their life's mission. And
this is a very early example of that, and one
of my favorite historical illusionists, escape artists, Houdini, Harry Judini
(04:11):
is a big part of this story, right, Um, As
you say, Ben Rose Macknburgh considered herself to be a
spook spy and Harry Judini himself referred to her as
his quote girl detective, which is more than a little
bit of a loaded term. Was that him or was
that the media of the day. Yeah, that's a good question.
It's not quite clear, um, But whoever referred to her
(04:33):
as that, it was definitely a name that stuck. Um.
There was at the time, as we discussed in the
last episode, in the early part of the twentieth century,
a renewed interest in spiritualism and spooky stories that was
largely a result of again as we as we mentioned
last episode, Um, you know this new burgeoning middle class
(04:53):
and folks moving from rural areas to more densely populated
city areas and um changing up that routine and living
in these kind of you know, larger houses, et cetera,
and bringing some of those tales that might have been
more folk tales into more of a melting pot situation
and things ended up getting remixed, right absolutely, And if
Harry Houdini's day job and the way he earned his bread,
(05:17):
butter and handcuffs was working as an escape artist, a mentalist.
One of his first loves. In his personal life, one
of his primary hobbies was busting what he and Macknburg
would go on to call the ghost racket. And I
love the idea of a ghost racket. I had afraid
to know ghost racket right. Uh. This was in the
(05:38):
early twentieth century. Again, as you said, Macknburg would travel
to places where Houdini was scheduled to perform, and along
the way she would bust frauds, fake ghosts, uh knor
is pretending to be mediums, and so on. Interestingly enough,
Makenburg was once herself a devout spiritual list, but she
(06:01):
became disillusioned throughout her time investigating these things, and she
ended up becoming even more skeptical than she was at
the beginning. I'm not sure we ever sighted this publication before,
but sci fi dot Com has a pretty cool article
about how Rose Mackinburg became the first female Ghostbusters when
this former believer turned skeptic. And this turn, I don't know,
(06:24):
I think, um, what what was the turn in her
uh in her life that caused her to go from
believer to skeptic. Ben Well, honestly, Nolan, we'll we'll dive
into this a little further Intoday Show. Honestly, it's it's
more a case of constantly searching for something that purports
to be genuine and literally every time seeing it disproven.
(06:47):
You think those Scooby Doo kids would have gotten the
hang of that eventually, right. It's always an old dude
and a mask that owns a private amusement park or
abandoned farmers. You were there when always complaining about this
last week at the local bar. They should just call
it Scooby Doo finds old men. And then once the
(07:07):
blonde guy's name who always has the horribleody, Freddie, who
always has the worst ideas. He's like to know what
gang we should split up? I've got an ascot. I'm
a real hunk. Yeah, you know what I mean. And
it's such a it's such a rip off because it
is so so rarely a supernatural antagonist in Scooby Doo.
(07:28):
It's agist. It never is in the original series. Well,
in the newer series, which is still Cannon, there there
are some supernatural events. But I got so tired of
that where it was this ageist stuff against old men
like you you heard us talking about that. Yeah, it's
all coming back to me now for sure. I believe
we saw a young woman dressed up as Velma and
(07:50):
then it all went from there. And you asked about
was it Fred that was the dumb blonde boy? Yeah, yeah, who.
I'm going to go on record and say that the
Velma is probably the smartest, uh most well adjusted, just
because Thelma is the best member of Scooby Doo, totally
the best non canine member of Scoopy. But she has
a fatal flaw. She always loses her glasses during the
(08:13):
clutch moment where she could really make all the difference.
She's always down on her hands and knees searching around
those glasses. Just get get one of those headbands like
racquetball players have agreed they never really learned their lesson
to do that. But yeah, it's unfortunate because Rose Mackenburg.
There's not a whole lot of info out there about her.
What we do know is that she kind of became
(08:33):
disillusioned with spiritualism after again, like you said, Ben, Scooby
Doo style, constantly being let down and seeing people swindled
um and uh and taking advantage of by folks purporting
to be spiritual advisors or mediums of sorts. And starting
in the nineteen twenties, she began to make this her
(08:55):
life's mission as a private investigator, debunking some of these charlatans. Yes,
and there was no shortage of those aforementioned charlatan's during
the nineteen twenties. The world was still recovering from things
like the First World War, the Spanish flu pandemic, and more.
(09:17):
These sorts of disasters which lead to the breakdown of
institutions and rule of law, lad the masses to look
for a higher law, some sort of involvable system right
that would not be at the mercy of the ebb
and flow of the you know, the chaotic turn of
(09:38):
events that we call day to day mortal life. And
so one of the things people turned to was spiritualism.
Spiritualism was the belief that not only does an afterlife exist,
but that through certain means, anyone, whether through an intermediary
or through a some sort of device or some sort
of ritual, anyone can and communicate beyond that Veil of Tears.
(10:04):
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, you'll recognize him as the mastermind
behind Sherlock Holmes was one of the big time proponents
of spiritualism, and he said, this stuff is great. I know,
you guys have heard of like falling in love and
sliced bread, and those are pretty good, but they're at
(10:25):
best to be plus compared to this new thing that
I call spiritualism. And his influence was countered by another famous,
highly intellectual person, the magician and escape artist Harry Houdini.
And Harry Houdini essentially said, you know, Sir Arthur Cronan Doyle,
was interesting about what you're saying is that it's absolutely
(10:46):
wrong and you're making yourself sound stupid for believing in it.
But I'm not going to stop there. I'm gonna put
together my own kind of Avengers team and we're going
to take it to the streets. We're on a crusade
against the ghost racket. These people are not real mediums.
They do not have the best interests of their clients
at heart. They are con artists and they are out
(11:08):
there to build vulnerable people at the most vulnerable moment
of their lives. And I, by god, I'm going to
put a stop to it. Yeah. And one of the
reasons too, that Hudini had such an issue with this
is even folks like in his profession as illusionists, which
I don't know, like, I don't think anyone purported to
be like I'm a wizard. You know. It's like it
(11:28):
was like Vaudeville. It was meant to be seen as
a craft, you know what I mean, Like you need
to not act as though he were some sort of
divine character, you know, like he was just a performer
who was very, very good at what he did. But
some folks that were in his profession would kind of
become these self styled kind of doctor Strange type figures
(11:49):
and occultists and have these themes behind their shows. Uh.
And maybe they didn't go so far as to say
they were able to manifest spirits or whatever, but they
certainly wouldn't deny that they actually had these powers, these
infernal powers, right, So that rubbed him the wrong way.
And um, I want to make it clear to Rose Macknburg,
it was kind of when she again, like you said, Ben,
(12:11):
she uh kind of had become disillusioned with this. Uh.
The study of spiritualism that she was into as a
teenager when she started seeing it being used in the
same way that Houdini didn't care for, even though his
might have been a little more ego driven than actual benevolence.
Right um. But it was when she did her first
case um investigating spiritual fraud that she really decided, okay, uh,
(12:34):
this is a real problem and I I am now
willing to sacrifice my own beliefs in the service of
helping others. And Houdini himself, you know, you're right. It
was ego driven a bit, but he had a deep
personal beef with people claiming to have this, uh, this
exclusive access to the spirit world. He thought it was
(12:57):
the real thing. At first he did. Yeah. In his
mother passed away and Judini was so deep in the
grief of losing one of the most important people in
his life that he completely stopped performing and he started,
(13:18):
despite you know, the best arguments his rational mind could construct.
In desperation to alleviate this grief, he started seeking out
the Council people purporting to be spiritual mediums, and not
only did he encounter, to his mind, fraud after fraud
after fraud, but he could also see through it, you
(13:41):
know what I mean? He would say, Okay, this person
has their hand under the table and there tapping from
the bottom of the table and pretending to be my
dead mother for what a bit of cash? Yeah, basically,
And I mean a lot of this stuff continues today
with like cold readings and a lot of these techniques
that are have been maybe refined over time, but there's
(14:04):
definitely still a market um largely and maybe television. I
don't know. Well, you know, the thing is, people should
be able to believe what they want and do what
they want, unless they're hurting the others while doing it,
you know. So Judini after seeing this, is incredibly profoundly offended.
(14:30):
He's also concerned that other people may be taken in,
other more credulous folks may be taken in by these
sorts of Shenanigans. Enter Rose Macknburg. Mackinburg grew up in
New York City during the first few decades of the
nineteen hundreds, Like you said, Noel, as a teenager, she
did believe in spiritualism. She caught on it was very popular.
(14:53):
It was in the Zeitgeist, uh not the daily one
daily Zeitgeist. And excellent show. Do check that out. But
in the zeitgeist of the time, and she was introduced
to Harry Houdini probably as close as we can tell
sometime uh in the early nineteen twenties or late nineteen tens,
And when she first encountered Houdini, she had been working
(15:17):
as a p I, a private detective for a number
of years. Their initial meeting came about when she consulted
the magician about one of her own investigations, which involved
the case of spirit fraud. Yeah, he saw something in
her and invited her to join his crack team of
(15:37):
around twenty undercover p i s that he referred to
as his secret service, and they were all paid a
salary and he um enlisted them to travel along actually
ahead of him on his touring spots to kind of
suss out the towns and and sniff out any of
(15:58):
these spiritual frauds that might be there waiting for him,
so they were to symbol a brief for him. They
would find things like table tipping, that's when furniture appears
to move on its own through some sort of ghostly telekinesis.
They would also find things called spirit trumpets. This phenomenon
which was supposed to magnify the ordinarily inaudible whispers of
(16:21):
the dead, but was actually ventriloquism. And table tipping was
kind of like weige aboard stuff controlled by the unconscious
movements of participants. And there was billet breading, where psychics
seemed to know what was inside a sealed envelope. The
thing is the envelope was either sealed by a plant
or a plant was involved in sort of feeding them
(16:44):
the answers. And this wasn't like this was dangerous work.
I mean, these were folks that were actually this was
their their stock and trade. They were making money, uh
in these in these towns, you know, taking advantage of people.
It was sort of elaborate form of huckster is them,
you know, And they wouldn't take kindly to being debunked
(17:04):
in this way, being exposed. I mean, it was the
equivalent of shutting down someone's livelihood. Um, obviously it was
it was deserved. But this was a problem and it
made a Houdini and Rose quite a few uh enemies.
And the thing is, it wasn't just the racketeers that
had a problem with what Rose and Houdini were doing.
(17:25):
It was the ones that actually believed this stuff um
wholeheartedly as well, and it would potentially cause like riots
in the streets between the phony spiritualists, um, the anti spiritualists,
and also the hucksters. Right yeah, yeah, and let maybe
let's say pro spiritualists, because as you said, there were
(17:47):
the true believers and then there were the con artists
were more than willing to get those folks on their side,
right for for these riots. That's the thing. This was
a community. This was not a situation of isolated scam
artists functioning alone. And the fact that was a community
meant that Houdini's Avengers would be eventually recognized. You could
(18:12):
only bust so many scams before a word got around.
Look for this lady, Rose Macknburg, she's after you. And
due to the threat of recognition, due to also, as
you said, the very real sense of physical danger, Rose
and her cohort and her colleagues started wearing disguises. It
(18:35):
got to the point where Mackenburgh's first stop in any
new town was a department store and she didn't just buy,
you know, whatever. She was in the mood to where
she would scope out the area first. This is impressive.
And she would say, Okay, let me get a sense
of the demographics. What do the women in this town where? Uh,
(18:58):
you know, what to the school teachers where? What do
the what do the widows wear? Maybe? What do the
the successful people wear? What do the lower socioeconomic scale where?
And then she would figure out what was appropriate. But
she didn't stop there. She also aged herself with makeup
(19:18):
and I believe that at least a couple of times
she wore a fake hearing aid. Isn't that right? Yeah?
She had all kinds of props, which is pretty interesting
considering the fakery involved in some of the spiritual um
you know, hoaxes that she was trying to debunk. Right. Absolutely.
There's a great book on her by a guy named
(19:39):
Tony Wolf. The book is called Houdini's Girl Detective, The
Real Life Ghostbusting Adventures of Rose Macenburg, and Wolf says
that during her work for Houdini, Mackenburgh would travel to
these towns and attend as many seances as she could,
disguised as a devout believer. And I hope, folks, I
(19:59):
hope that you love these names as much as I do.
They're terrible, Uh, she would have aliases such as Francis
rod F rod f r a u D, Florence b
Rush or Alicia Bunk all is a Bunk And after
(20:22):
she attended a ton of these seances, she would come
back and report everything she learned to Houdini, and she
would also describe what they were purporting to do and
what she thought the tricks actually were. Then Houdini would
arrive in the same town maybe a week or two
later for his show and boom, boom boom, he would
bust the medium as a fraud. This became his routine
(20:47):
until Harry Houdini died on Halloween in nineteen twenty six
in the most underwhelming way imaginable. Right. You picture a
guy like this who put himself in these deifying situations
all the time, dying in some elaborate way, like falling
from a building to his death or you know, drowning
in one of those glass dunk tank things that he
(21:08):
would always try to escape from. But why did he
ultimately die? I think he asked someone to punch him
in the stomach when when he wasn't expecting it, and
that ultimately is what caused his demise. Yeah, yeah, like
a ab flexing Icarus. Uh, he put his belly too
close to the fist. Is that even true? Though? Ben? Uh?
(21:29):
You know, I just like the Icarus reference. Longtime listeners
will know him fun to that one, But what it
appears to be is more a ruptured appendix. However, according
to multiple sources, the circumstances around how he how he
actually expired are still kind of mysterious and hazy. Today,
(21:52):
we do know that he definitely died on Halloween and
all of this kind of uh was the groundwork for
all this was laid well before Halloween of that year,
when on October eleven UM, he was injured with a
piece of faulty equipment during that very the Chinese water
torture sell stunt that he was so well known for.
(22:14):
And then on October UM, during a lecture actually in
Montreal at McGill University UM, he invited a young man
named Gordon Whitehead to punch him in the stomach. Oh,
he didn't invite him, Jay. Gordon Whitehead was one of
the McGill's students in the dressing room, and Whitehead asked
(22:34):
Judy was like, Hey, is it true that you can
You know, people can punch you, however, they want in
your stomach and he This was a publicly known thing
about Houdini. And then, according to the witness, a guy
named Sam Smillovitz, Houdini said the rumors were true. He
was like, yeah, that's true. And then without any warning,
Whitehead immediately hauled off and punched him multiple time, like
(23:00):
four or five really hard times in his stomach. And
he needed time to prepare to receive those punches because
he was just sort of laying on a couch, and
so because he didn't prepare for it, he was in pain.
He brushed off the incident, but then later that night,
the twenty two, he started to experience stomach cramps and discomfort.
(23:20):
His condition got worse and worse. He took a train
to Detroit. On the train, he developed severe stomach paining,
cold sweats, fatigues. His doctors suspected appendicitis, and it's crazy.
According to history dot com, these kind of really mortal
cases of appendicitis are super rare, uh and there was
(23:40):
a study they cite that they found only a few
dozen over a twenty year period. Um. But Houdini's diagnosis
was pretty much accepted, and his wife even received a
life insurance policy, a double indemnity life insurance payout for
this accidental death because it was connected to the punching
it exactly yet and so he did expire after a
(24:03):
real terrible time on October thirty one, which you know,
Houdini is such a fascinating character, but he wasn't entirely
a villain. And I want to make you know, we
want to make sure that we're fair to Houdini and
to Makenburg and to all their colleagues, because they were
busting con artists, that's exactly what they were doing. But
(24:27):
that doesn't necessarily mean that they were these uh grim
atheist or that they had no belief in the supernatural
because wild people like Tony Wolf, where other historians would
say that Houdini and Makenburg probably didn't have any real
belief and spiritualism, they were always careful to frame themselves
(24:53):
as agnostics when they spoke about this in public. It
was a article for the Saturday Evening Post where where
in Rose Makenburgh said she wasn't really anti spiritualism as
much as anti Charlatan, And we have a quote from
that article. We do, indeed, I do not impugne spiritualism
(25:13):
as a sect or as a sincere religious belief. There
are many intellectually honest persons, some mediums included. Who gets
solace from a belief in contacts with the afterworld? Um,
isn't what what Prince calls it in the speech before
Let's Go Crazy the afterworld? Pretty sure? Oh my gosh,
I love. That's first only other place I've I've seen
(25:35):
it referred to as that I usually see the afterlife.
But link continue, that's not the quote. That's just that's
just you're talking about Prince. This is me talking about Press. Hey,
I'm just talking about Prince. Shut your mouth, my work.
This is the quote, and this article concern only those
mediums who deceive trusting persons. Is there any medium who
can actually call up the spirits of the dead and
put them into verbal communication with the living? I don't know,
(25:58):
there may be. All can testify to is that I
have never met any, which sounds fair, right, It's fair.
It's it's not it's not agro, it's not rude. It's
just that I I don't know whether it exists. I
just haven't found any. So this catches the eye of
(26:23):
Congress to Let's let's backtrack a little bit before Houdini's death.
On Halloween, Houdini eventually went before Congress to testify about
a proposed anti fortune telling bill that was meant to
ban people from pretending to tell fortunes for reward or compensation,
or pretending to unite the separated. That's as described by
(26:47):
William Caluch in his book The Secret Life of Houdini.
So before the first hearing begins on February, Houdini sends
Rose Macknburg to d see and she is tasked with
doing the thing she always does, which is to try
to find some mediums. So she does her bit. She
(27:09):
finds mediums, she figures out what tricks or techniques these
mediums are using, and then Houdini comes into town to
deliver this case He's made. He's done this ted talk
a thousand times right. It's it's part an expose, it's
part snarky entertainment. But word of the anti fortune telling
(27:31):
bill Hr. Eight nine eight nine had spread through again
the spiritualist community, and local mediums turned out in force.
Uh Two of the leaders of the pro spiritualist side
of this argument were a minister named Jane B. Coates
and an astrologer named Marcia Champney. And that bill HR
(27:54):
would have left fine on any quote, any person pretending
to tell fortunes for reward or compensation um. That could
have also been paired with six months in prison um.
And that's in that's within Washington, d C. The nation's capital. Um.
And the bill was essentially built on the foundation of
(28:16):
these assertions that it's just not possible to see the future. Therefore,
it kind of renders the spirituality argument sort of moot, right,
it deflates even the true believers position, which is probably
was controversial I imagine, yeah, yeah. And spiritualist of course
reacted diversely to this. They said, communicating with the dead
(28:40):
is a matter of faith, meaning that it is protected
under the First Amendment. That's a really good point. I mean,
it is separation. How is that any that's like saying,
you know, Jesus wasn't real or like you, if you
believe in Jesus or or or a priest or a preacher,
then you're a fraud or a charlatan. How How is
asking people for alms or for uh, you know, donations
(29:02):
and the collection played at church any different from this
and based on these rules. Yeah, and we have to
remember this is very much a legalistic letter of the
law situation. Rose Macknburg is also in d C with Houdini,
need to testify about the mediums she visited in d
C beforehand. She delivers a bombshell that day. She says
(29:27):
congressman and senators regularly attended seances and one congressman's wife
is in fact a medium. Not only that, she says
these seances have been held at the White House hunt.
Her testimony rocked Washington. The White House was not happy
(29:48):
about this because clearly they you know, they were not
an objective party here, and they immediately denied this accusation.
But at the end it didn't matter because the bill
never really passed due to some of the you know,
the greater concerns we just outlined. And then, as we said,
(30:10):
Judini passes away in Halloween of six. But this is
not the end of Rose Macenburg. She continues her career afterwards. Right. Yeah,
it's crazy she was with him right up until that
is his last breath, because she was there with him
in Montreal and was participating in the lectures that he
was giving, which which which the contents were largely about
(30:32):
this kind of stuff, debunking these these fraudsters. Um. And
there is footage of this that is in a Hudini
documentary that Unitpix Productions put out, which I have not seen,
what I would love to. You can read a little
bit more about this on the Magic Detective dot com
in the article Hudini's Mysterious Girl Detective. Um that that
(30:52):
that didn't appear to be a moniker that stuck. Um.
There's a really interesting detail or really interesting little bit
of trivia here. A guy named Julian Proskauer who was
another one of these ghost racket investigators. He estimated in
nineteen thirty two that the number of people taken in
(31:13):
by these hoaxes were about thirty million a year. And uh,
at the cost personally to these individuals of a hundred
and twenty five million dollars, that's insane. That's a huge industry.
That's like the economy of scale in those days. That's insane. Man. Yeah,
it's a huge industry. And also keep in mind that's
(31:34):
a five million total at thirty millions a year, and
that's still that's nineteen thirty two dollars. Rose continued pursuing
this line of work. This was a passion project for her.
It was a personal vocation and she pursued it throughout
the Great Depression. She investigated on behalf of insurance companies,
law firms, better business bureaus, newspapers, other other institutions of
(32:01):
that sort. She was the guide to the Chicago Tribunes
approached the spiritualist underworld of Chicago, and she wrote a
bunch of cv nex moose articles. She would do demonstrations
of common con artists tricks for nonprofits. And she lived
(32:23):
long enough to see the cycle continued. Time as a wheel,
time as a flat circle. All things come back around again.
So the Second World War ushers in another revival of spiritualism,
and then she sees it again during the Korean War.
And in nineteen fifty one, during an interview, she estimates
(32:44):
that there are some hundred and fifty thousand mediums active
in the US, and she said the number will continue
to rise as long as the war continues. So she
had been interviewed in a number of different publications American magazine,
Call Yours, Popular Science, and so on. She had eventually
(33:07):
given up or retired from investigating this sort of activity
because she had quote grown tired of sitting in dark rooms.
She said that no number of exposures seemed to shake
the faith of believers, and it turns out she was right.
As of the modern American psychic services industry is estimated
(33:28):
to be worth slightly over to billion dollars. But you know,
we should say it's changed as well. There are not
many people attempted to use ectoplasm and stuff like that, no,
because I mean people are largely because of the you know,
things like the Internet and the proliferation of information and
people being able to kind of check behind some of
(33:48):
these things. Unless you really want to believe and be
willfully ignorant, it's a lot harder to get taken in
by some of these these tricks, you know. But then
you have folks like, um, what's the guy's name crossing over?
John John Edwards. I mean, I've I've witnessed situations where
I felt as though there was something a little more
(34:08):
uh intense than just cold reading techniques going on. I
Who am I to say? You know that there isn't
uh the ability for someone to have a stronger sense
for these kinds of things. And then, you know, with
our other show that we do stuffing. I want you
to know we run into things like this all the time,
and we always have to kind of hedge our bets
without coming down too hard and saying no, this is
all poppy cock versus you know. Yeah, there's things that
(34:31):
we don't fully understand. And I kind of sit somewhere
in the middle of those two camps. What what what do
you think, ben? So, it's profoundly arrogant and very very
human to imagine that we as a species, whereas individuals
understand the totality of reality, you know what I mean,
We're a species that burned people alive for saying the
(34:55):
earth orbits the sun like not that long ago. When
you look at time as a big picture, yeah, fingersnap
of humanity. One of the best analogies for it is
is the following. So our understanding of the world in
which we live, and indeed our understanding ourselves, is akin
to a guttering sputtering match in the universe, And the
(35:18):
universe is a dark room and it's so big that
we cannot see the corners. All we can see is uh,
the match and maybe part of our hands holding it.
So to assume that we know anything about the darkness
beyond the little bit of light we have is again
just the word I keep coming back to is arrogant. However,
it's also true that our species will rip off each
(35:41):
other whatever the opportunity presents itself, you know what I mean,
Whether it's magical water that will make you live forever,
whether it's a belief system that is impossible to disprove, right,
or whether it's you know, a car that runs on
positive thinking. There's there's no shortage of examples. That sounds nice.
(36:04):
Then it does sound nice, right, and just saying that,
would you know, get you some better mileage. But in
this case, what we see is uh, the story of
one person's crusade, which was to a large degree effective.
And and again it sounds like you and I are
kind of on on the same page. There's there's more
(36:27):
to the workings of reality and the universe than humans
currently understand. And anyone who's listening to this podcast thousands
of years from now, we envy you. Hopefully, hopefully the
house of cards called civilization is not collapsed, and you've
learned a lot about the world beyond the one in
(36:47):
which we currently live. And hey, you know, what the
weird trippy thing is. If any of this afterlife after
world stuff turns out to be true, then the people
listening to this from thousands of years in the future,
as linear times can, they don't have to hit our
social meats man, they can just call us up directly,
like invoc us electric word life. It means forever and
(37:08):
that's a mighty long time. But I'm here to tell
you there's something else the afterworld, a world of never
ending happiness. You can always see the sun day or night.
So when you call up that shrink in Beverly Hills,
you know the one doctor, everything will be all right.
Instead of asking him how much of your time has left,
ask him how much of your mind? Baby? Because in
this life things are much harder than in the after world.
In this life you're on your own, and if the
(37:31):
elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy. I wanted
to jump in. Uh. The only other abuse of after
world that immediately jumped to mind for me, give me
a Leonard Cohen after world. So I ken's I eternally
That is Penny Royalty by Nirvana. Al Right, well, we
got some literature in there, we got some science we've
(37:51):
got some spirituality. We got one of our favorite troops
are ridiculous History. Uh, good old fashioned con artistry. I
think that makes this our episode. Thank you so much
for tuning in everybody. By the way Makenburgh did inherit
Judini's crystal Ball, you don't need a crystal ball to
get in contact with us before our next episode. You
(38:13):
can find us on everybody's favorite technological impression of clair voyance,
the Internet, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Ridiculous History is all over it.
We highly recommend one of our favorite sites on the internet,
which is our Facebook community page, or Ridiculous Historians. But
we're not just a show. We're also individual people and
(38:34):
you can find us online as ourselves. It's sure. You
can find me exclusively on Instagram where I am at
how Now Noel Brown, and you can find me on
Twitter where I am Ben bolland hs W. Or you
can find me on Instagram where I am named as
I like to say in a burst of creativity at
Ben Boland spelled how it sounds huge. Thanks to super
(38:55):
producer Casey Pegram, Alex Williams, who composed our theme, Christopher
haciotas here in Spirit, Gabe Louisier Research Associate eve's Jeff Cote,
Jonathan Strickland, a k a. The Quister Dr Vankman, both
the character played by Bill Murray and my cat shout
out to you. I can go to the Carpathian Vigo,
the Carpathia, what is it? The sorrow of Carpathia, the
(39:19):
scourge of Moldolva. I think that's the one I got close.
That's a great speech. And of course, Yadush, lovely, lovely, Nash.
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from
My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
(39:40):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous history is a production of I Heart Radio. If
(00:27):
there's something strange in your neighborhood, who in fact should
you call? If there's something weird and it don't look good,
you just might better call good Ghostbusters. Hi, I'm bad,
I'm an old trademark. Um what is it? Huey Lewis.
Huey Lewis sued was the Roy Parker, Roy Parker, Ray Parker,
(00:51):
Casey on the case with that one that's also a
super producer Casey Pecker double the double sound cute. Yeah,
Ray Parker Junior. Uh, famously sued by Huey Lewis. If
I want a new drug fame, if you want a
fun little side by side, it's uh, don't don't dug it,
dunt dun don't don't dig versus I think I want
(01:13):
a new drug is pretty much that dun't don't right.
But but it's it's more about the chugging little under
there's like stabs that are like dune dunt dunt dunt dune. Well,
thank god that litigation did not sink one of my
favorite childhood franchises of all time, The Ghostbusters. I mean,
(01:35):
it was the most desired Halloween costume by Miles and Miles.
You know, did you have the proton pack? Did you
have the little suit? Yeah? Oh, I had the whole thing.
I had the I had the the station, the firehouse,
you had the firehouse, you had the hearse or ambulance?
What was it? It was a hearse but it was
called it was called the Ecto five. Yeah. I had
(01:57):
a lot wrapped up in the Ghostbusters franchise. Even now,
one of my cats is named Dr Vankman, So I
I carried that. I carried that with me, triumphs and
traumas alike. Well, I'll tell you why that is is
because it was funny, poignant, heartwarming, and I'm most importantly
pretty spooky. Yeah, and I support We're we're continuing with
(02:20):
our Halloween in November behind the curve activity here, which
is again our men's warehouse asked guarantee we will usually
be behind the curve. We hope it's appealing. We were
digging into the concept of Ghostbusters and before we traveled
to today's episode by way of segue, let's just mention
(02:42):
that there was a recent reboot of Ghostbusters where in
the four protagonists were all played by female actors. Do
you remember that. Did you see that one? I did, Um,
I quite enjoyed it. The Internet didn't really like it
very much. But the Internet said, you know, toxic hive
of scum and villainy, as we all know. Yeah, the
Internet is very into not liking things. So so also
(03:08):
its relationship with women is very complicated. I would say,
I would say terrible. It's like saying in cells have
a complicated relationship there. But yeah, I also enjoyed the reboot,
the newest reboot. I hope they do more in that vein.
But this inspired knowl you and I to look into
(03:28):
concepts of ghostbusting, and we found, with the help of
our research associate Gabe, we found a story of someone
who might be called one of the original ghostbusters, a
woman named Rose Macenburg, who was described as a spook
spy yeah, or what we might know now as paranormal investigator. Yeah,
(03:51):
that's a thing. Ghost hunters and the like, and and
the what's the name of the couple from the war
Conjuring films, Yeah, the war Ends they were. They were
actually real folks who made this their life's mission. And
this is a very early example of that, and one
of my favorite historical illusionists, escape artists, Houdini, Harry Judini
(04:11):
is a big part of this story, right, Um, As
you say, Ben Rose Macknburgh considered herself to be a
spook spy and Harry Judini himself referred to her as
his quote girl detective, which is more than a little
bit of a loaded term. Was that him or was
that the media of the day. Yeah, that's a good question.
It's not quite clear, um, But whoever referred to her
(04:33):
as that, it was definitely a name that stuck. Um.
There was at the time, as we discussed in the
last episode, in the early part of the twentieth century,
a renewed interest in spiritualism and spooky stories that was
largely a result of again as we as we mentioned
last episode, Um, you know this new burgeoning middle class
(04:53):
and folks moving from rural areas to more densely populated
city areas and um changing up that routine and living
in these kind of you know, larger houses, et cetera,
and bringing some of those tales that might have been
more folk tales into more of a melting pot situation
and things ended up getting remixed, right absolutely, And if
Harry Houdini's day job and the way he earned his bread,
(05:17):
butter and handcuffs was working as an escape artist, a mentalist.
One of his first loves. In his personal life, one
of his primary hobbies was busting what he and Macknburg
would go on to call the ghost racket. And I
love the idea of a ghost racket. I had afraid
to know ghost racket right. Uh. This was in the
(05:38):
early twentieth century. Again, as you said, Macknburg would travel
to places where Houdini was scheduled to perform, and along
the way she would bust frauds, fake ghosts, uh knor
is pretending to be mediums, and so on. Interestingly enough,
Makenburg was once herself a devout spiritual list, but she
(06:01):
became disillusioned throughout her time investigating these things, and she
ended up becoming even more skeptical than she was at
the beginning. I'm not sure we ever sighted this publication before,
but sci fi dot Com has a pretty cool article
about how Rose Mackinburg became the first female Ghostbusters when
this former believer turned skeptic. And this turn, I don't know,
(06:24):
I think, um, what what was the turn in her
uh in her life that caused her to go from
believer to skeptic. Ben Well, honestly, Nolan, we'll we'll dive
into this a little further Intoday Show. Honestly, it's it's
more a case of constantly searching for something that purports
to be genuine and literally every time seeing it disproven.
(06:47):
You think those Scooby Doo kids would have gotten the
hang of that eventually, right. It's always an old dude
and a mask that owns a private amusement park or
abandoned farmers. You were there when always complaining about this
last week at the local bar. They should just call
it Scooby Doo finds old men. And then once the
(07:07):
blonde guy's name who always has the horribleody, Freddie, who
always has the worst ideas. He's like to know what
gang we should split up? I've got an ascot. I'm
a real hunk. Yeah, you know what I mean. And
it's such a it's such a rip off because it
is so so rarely a supernatural antagonist in Scooby Doo.
(07:28):
It's agist. It never is in the original series. Well,
in the newer series, which is still Cannon, there there
are some supernatural events. But I got so tired of
that where it was this ageist stuff against old men
like you you heard us talking about that. Yeah, it's
all coming back to me now for sure. I believe
we saw a young woman dressed up as Velma and
(07:50):
then it all went from there. And you asked about
was it Fred that was the dumb blonde boy? Yeah, yeah, who.
I'm going to go on record and say that the
Velma is probably the smartest, uh most well adjusted, just
because Thelma is the best member of Scooby Doo, totally
the best non canine member of Scoopy. But she has
a fatal flaw. She always loses her glasses during the
(08:13):
clutch moment where she could really make all the difference.
She's always down on her hands and knees searching around
those glasses. Just get get one of those headbands like
racquetball players have agreed they never really learned their lesson
to do that. But yeah, it's unfortunate because Rose Mackenburg.
There's not a whole lot of info out there about her.
What we do know is that she kind of became
(08:33):
disillusioned with spiritualism after again, like you said, Ben, Scooby
Doo style, constantly being let down and seeing people swindled
um and uh and taking advantage of by folks purporting
to be spiritual advisors or mediums of sorts. And starting
in the nineteen twenties, she began to make this her
(08:55):
life's mission as a private investigator, debunking some of these charlatans. Yes,
and there was no shortage of those aforementioned charlatan's during
the nineteen twenties. The world was still recovering from things
like the First World War, the Spanish flu pandemic, and more.
(09:17):
These sorts of disasters which lead to the breakdown of
institutions and rule of law, lad the masses to look
for a higher law, some sort of involvable system right
that would not be at the mercy of the ebb
and flow of the you know, the chaotic turn of
(09:38):
events that we call day to day mortal life. And
so one of the things people turned to was spiritualism.
Spiritualism was the belief that not only does an afterlife exist,
but that through certain means, anyone, whether through an intermediary
or through a some sort of device or some sort
of ritual, anyone can and communicate beyond that Veil of Tears.
(10:04):
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, you'll recognize him as the mastermind
behind Sherlock Holmes was one of the big time proponents
of spiritualism, and he said, this stuff is great. I know,
you guys have heard of like falling in love and
sliced bread, and those are pretty good, but they're at
(10:25):
best to be plus compared to this new thing that
I call spiritualism. And his influence was countered by another famous,
highly intellectual person, the magician and escape artist Harry Houdini.
And Harry Houdini essentially said, you know, Sir Arthur Cronan Doyle,
was interesting about what you're saying is that it's absolutely
(10:46):
wrong and you're making yourself sound stupid for believing in it.
But I'm not going to stop there. I'm gonna put
together my own kind of Avengers team and we're going
to take it to the streets. We're on a crusade
against the ghost racket. These people are not real mediums.
They do not have the best interests of their clients
at heart. They are con artists and they are out
(11:08):
there to build vulnerable people at the most vulnerable moment
of their lives. And I, by god, I'm going to
put a stop to it. Yeah. And one of the
reasons too, that Hudini had such an issue with this
is even folks like in his profession as illusionists, which
I don't know, like, I don't think anyone purported to
be like I'm a wizard. You know. It's like it
(11:28):
was like Vaudeville. It was meant to be seen as
a craft, you know what I mean, Like you need
to not act as though he were some sort of
divine character, you know, like he was just a performer
who was very, very good at what he did. But
some folks that were in his profession would kind of
become these self styled kind of doctor Strange type figures
(11:49):
and occultists and have these themes behind their shows. Uh.
And maybe they didn't go so far as to say
they were able to manifest spirits or whatever, but they
certainly wouldn't deny that they actually had these powers, these
infernal powers, right, So that rubbed him the wrong way.
And um, I want to make it clear to Rose Macknburg,
it was kind of when she again, like you said, Ben,
(12:11):
she uh kind of had become disillusioned with this. Uh.
The study of spiritualism that she was into as a
teenager when she started seeing it being used in the
same way that Houdini didn't care for, even though his
might have been a little more ego driven than actual benevolence.
Right um. But it was when she did her first
case um investigating spiritual fraud that she really decided, okay, uh,
(12:34):
this is a real problem and I I am now
willing to sacrifice my own beliefs in the service of
helping others. And Houdini himself, you know, you're right. It
was ego driven a bit, but he had a deep
personal beef with people claiming to have this, uh, this
exclusive access to the spirit world. He thought it was
(12:57):
the real thing. At first he did. Yeah. In his
mother passed away and Judini was so deep in the
grief of losing one of the most important people in
his life that he completely stopped performing and he started,
(13:18):
despite you know, the best arguments his rational mind could construct.
In desperation to alleviate this grief, he started seeking out
the Council people purporting to be spiritual mediums, and not
only did he encounter, to his mind, fraud after fraud
after fraud, but he could also see through it, you
(13:41):
know what I mean? He would say, Okay, this person
has their hand under the table and there tapping from
the bottom of the table and pretending to be my
dead mother for what a bit of cash? Yeah, basically,
And I mean a lot of this stuff continues today
with like cold readings and a lot of these techniques
that are have been maybe refined over time, but there's
(14:04):
definitely still a market um largely and maybe television. I
don't know. Well, you know, the thing is, people should
be able to believe what they want and do what
they want, unless they're hurting the others while doing it,
you know. So Judini after seeing this, is incredibly profoundly offended.
(14:30):
He's also concerned that other people may be taken in,
other more credulous folks may be taken in by these
sorts of Shenanigans. Enter Rose Macknburg. Mackinburg grew up in
New York City during the first few decades of the
nineteen hundreds, Like you said, Noel, as a teenager, she
did believe in spiritualism. She caught on it was very popular.
(14:53):
It was in the Zeitgeist, uh not the daily one
daily Zeitgeist. And excellent show. Do check that out. But
in the zeitgeist of the time, and she was introduced
to Harry Houdini probably as close as we can tell
sometime uh in the early nineteen twenties or late nineteen tens,
And when she first encountered Houdini, she had been working
(15:17):
as a p I, a private detective for a number
of years. Their initial meeting came about when she consulted
the magician about one of her own investigations, which involved
the case of spirit fraud. Yeah, he saw something in
her and invited her to join his crack team of
(15:37):
around twenty undercover p i s that he referred to
as his secret service, and they were all paid a
salary and he um enlisted them to travel along actually
ahead of him on his touring spots to kind of
suss out the towns and and sniff out any of
(15:58):
these spiritual frauds that might be there waiting for him,
so they were to symbol a brief for him. They
would find things like table tipping, that's when furniture appears
to move on its own through some sort of ghostly telekinesis.
They would also find things called spirit trumpets. This phenomenon
which was supposed to magnify the ordinarily inaudible whispers of
(16:21):
the dead, but was actually ventriloquism. And table tipping was
kind of like weige aboard stuff controlled by the unconscious
movements of participants. And there was billet breading, where psychics
seemed to know what was inside a sealed envelope. The
thing is the envelope was either sealed by a plant
or a plant was involved in sort of feeding them
(16:44):
the answers. And this wasn't like this was dangerous work.
I mean, these were folks that were actually this was
their their stock and trade. They were making money, uh
in these in these towns, you know, taking advantage of people.
It was sort of elaborate form of huckster is them,
you know, And they wouldn't take kindly to being debunked
(17:04):
in this way, being exposed. I mean, it was the
equivalent of shutting down someone's livelihood. Um, obviously it was
it was deserved. But this was a problem and it
made a Houdini and Rose quite a few uh enemies.
And the thing is, it wasn't just the racketeers that
had a problem with what Rose and Houdini were doing.
(17:25):
It was the ones that actually believed this stuff um
wholeheartedly as well, and it would potentially cause like riots
in the streets between the phony spiritualists, um, the anti spiritualists,
and also the hucksters. Right yeah, yeah, and let maybe
let's say pro spiritualists, because as you said, there were
(17:47):
the true believers and then there were the con artists
were more than willing to get those folks on their side,
right for for these riots. That's the thing. This was
a community. This was not a situation of isolated scam
artists functioning alone. And the fact that was a community
meant that Houdini's Avengers would be eventually recognized. You could
(18:12):
only bust so many scams before a word got around.
Look for this lady, Rose Macknburg, she's after you. And
due to the threat of recognition, due to also, as
you said, the very real sense of physical danger, Rose
and her cohort and her colleagues started wearing disguises. It
(18:35):
got to the point where Mackenburgh's first stop in any
new town was a department store and she didn't just buy,
you know, whatever. She was in the mood to where
she would scope out the area first. This is impressive.
And she would say, Okay, let me get a sense
of the demographics. What do the women in this town where? Uh,
(18:58):
you know, what to the school teachers where? What do
the what do the widows wear? Maybe? What do the
the successful people wear? What do the lower socioeconomic scale where?
And then she would figure out what was appropriate. But
she didn't stop there. She also aged herself with makeup
(19:18):
and I believe that at least a couple of times
she wore a fake hearing aid. Isn't that right? Yeah?
She had all kinds of props, which is pretty interesting
considering the fakery involved in some of the spiritual um
you know, hoaxes that she was trying to debunk. Right. Absolutely.
There's a great book on her by a guy named
(19:39):
Tony Wolf. The book is called Houdini's Girl Detective, The
Real Life Ghostbusting Adventures of Rose Macenburg, and Wolf says
that during her work for Houdini, Mackenburgh would travel to
these towns and attend as many seances as she could,
disguised as a devout believer. And I hope, folks, I
(19:59):
hope that you love these names as much as I do.
They're terrible, Uh, she would have aliases such as Francis
rod F rod f r a u D, Florence b
Rush or Alicia Bunk all is a Bunk And after
(20:22):
she attended a ton of these seances, she would come
back and report everything she learned to Houdini, and she
would also describe what they were purporting to do and
what she thought the tricks actually were. Then Houdini would
arrive in the same town maybe a week or two
later for his show and boom, boom boom, he would
bust the medium as a fraud. This became his routine
(20:47):
until Harry Houdini died on Halloween in nineteen twenty six
in the most underwhelming way imaginable. Right. You picture a
guy like this who put himself in these deifying situations
all the time, dying in some elaborate way, like falling
from a building to his death or you know, drowning
in one of those glass dunk tank things that he
(21:08):
would always try to escape from. But why did he
ultimately die? I think he asked someone to punch him
in the stomach when when he wasn't expecting it, and
that ultimately is what caused his demise. Yeah, yeah, like
a ab flexing Icarus. Uh, he put his belly too
close to the fist. Is that even true? Though? Ben? Uh?
(21:29):
You know, I just like the Icarus reference. Longtime listeners
will know him fun to that one, But what it
appears to be is more a ruptured appendix. However, according
to multiple sources, the circumstances around how he how he
actually expired are still kind of mysterious and hazy. Today,
(21:52):
we do know that he definitely died on Halloween and
all of this kind of uh was the groundwork for
all this was laid well before Halloween of that year,
when on October eleven UM, he was injured with a
piece of faulty equipment during that very the Chinese water
torture sell stunt that he was so well known for.
(22:14):
And then on October UM, during a lecture actually in
Montreal at McGill University UM, he invited a young man
named Gordon Whitehead to punch him in the stomach. Oh,
he didn't invite him, Jay. Gordon Whitehead was one of
the McGill's students in the dressing room, and Whitehead asked
(22:34):
Judy was like, Hey, is it true that you can
You know, people can punch you, however, they want in
your stomach and he This was a publicly known thing
about Houdini. And then, according to the witness, a guy
named Sam Smillovitz, Houdini said the rumors were true. He
was like, yeah, that's true. And then without any warning,
Whitehead immediately hauled off and punched him multiple time, like
(23:00):
four or five really hard times in his stomach. And
he needed time to prepare to receive those punches because
he was just sort of laying on a couch, and
so because he didn't prepare for it, he was in pain.
He brushed off the incident, but then later that night,
the twenty two, he started to experience stomach cramps and discomfort.
(23:20):
His condition got worse and worse. He took a train
to Detroit. On the train, he developed severe stomach paining,
cold sweats, fatigues. His doctors suspected appendicitis, and it's crazy.
According to history dot com, these kind of really mortal
cases of appendicitis are super rare, uh and there was
(23:40):
a study they cite that they found only a few
dozen over a twenty year period. Um. But Houdini's diagnosis
was pretty much accepted, and his wife even received a
life insurance policy, a double indemnity life insurance payout for
this accidental death because it was connected to the punching
it exactly yet and so he did expire after a
(24:03):
real terrible time on October thirty one, which you know,
Houdini is such a fascinating character, but he wasn't entirely
a villain. And I want to make you know, we
want to make sure that we're fair to Houdini and
to Makenburg and to all their colleagues, because they were
busting con artists, that's exactly what they were doing. But
(24:27):
that doesn't necessarily mean that they were these uh grim
atheist or that they had no belief in the supernatural
because wild people like Tony Wolf, where other historians would
say that Houdini and Makenburg probably didn't have any real
belief and spiritualism, they were always careful to frame themselves
(24:53):
as agnostics when they spoke about this in public. It
was a article for the Saturday Evening Post where where
in Rose Makenburgh said she wasn't really anti spiritualism as
much as anti Charlatan, And we have a quote from
that article. We do, indeed, I do not impugne spiritualism
(25:13):
as a sect or as a sincere religious belief. There
are many intellectually honest persons, some mediums included. Who gets
solace from a belief in contacts with the afterworld? Um,
isn't what what Prince calls it in the speech before
Let's Go Crazy the afterworld? Pretty sure? Oh my gosh,
I love. That's first only other place I've I've seen
(25:35):
it referred to as that I usually see the afterlife.
But link continue, that's not the quote. That's just that's
just you're talking about Prince. This is me talking about Press. Hey,
I'm just talking about Prince. Shut your mouth, my work.
This is the quote, and this article concern only those
mediums who deceive trusting persons. Is there any medium who
can actually call up the spirits of the dead and
put them into verbal communication with the living? I don't know,
(25:58):
there may be. All can testify to is that I
have never met any, which sounds fair, right, It's fair.
It's it's not it's not agro, it's not rude. It's
just that I I don't know whether it exists. I
just haven't found any. So this catches the eye of
(26:23):
Congress to Let's let's backtrack a little bit before Houdini's death.
On Halloween, Houdini eventually went before Congress to testify about
a proposed anti fortune telling bill that was meant to
ban people from pretending to tell fortunes for reward or compensation,
or pretending to unite the separated. That's as described by
(26:47):
William Caluch in his book The Secret Life of Houdini.
So before the first hearing begins on February, Houdini sends
Rose Macknburg to d see and she is tasked with
doing the thing she always does, which is to try
to find some mediums. So she does her bit. She
(27:09):
finds mediums, she figures out what tricks or techniques these
mediums are using, and then Houdini comes into town to
deliver this case He's made. He's done this ted talk
a thousand times right. It's it's part an expose, it's
part snarky entertainment. But word of the anti fortune telling
(27:31):
bill Hr. Eight nine eight nine had spread through again
the spiritualist community, and local mediums turned out in force.
Uh Two of the leaders of the pro spiritualist side
of this argument were a minister named Jane B. Coates
and an astrologer named Marcia Champney. And that bill HR
(27:54):
would have left fine on any quote, any person pretending
to tell fortunes for reward or compensation um. That could
have also been paired with six months in prison um.
And that's in that's within Washington, d C. The nation's capital. Um.
And the bill was essentially built on the foundation of
(28:16):
these assertions that it's just not possible to see the future. Therefore,
it kind of renders the spirituality argument sort of moot, right,
it deflates even the true believers position, which is probably
was controversial I imagine, yeah, yeah. And spiritualist of course
reacted diversely to this. They said, communicating with the dead
(28:40):
is a matter of faith, meaning that it is protected
under the First Amendment. That's a really good point. I mean,
it is separation. How is that any that's like saying,
you know, Jesus wasn't real or like you, if you
believe in Jesus or or or a priest or a preacher,
then you're a fraud or a charlatan. How How is
asking people for alms or for uh, you know, donations
(29:02):
and the collection played at church any different from this
and based on these rules. Yeah, and we have to
remember this is very much a legalistic letter of the
law situation. Rose Macknburg is also in d C with Houdini,
need to testify about the mediums she visited in d
C beforehand. She delivers a bombshell that day. She says
(29:27):
congressman and senators regularly attended seances and one congressman's wife
is in fact a medium. Not only that, she says
these seances have been held at the White House hunt.
Her testimony rocked Washington. The White House was not happy
(29:48):
about this because clearly they you know, they were not
an objective party here, and they immediately denied this accusation.
But at the end it didn't matter because the bill
never really passed due to some of the you know,
the greater concerns we just outlined. And then, as we said,
(30:10):
Judini passes away in Halloween of six. But this is
not the end of Rose Macenburg. She continues her career afterwards. Right. Yeah,
it's crazy she was with him right up until that
is his last breath, because she was there with him
in Montreal and was participating in the lectures that he
was giving, which which which the contents were largely about
(30:32):
this kind of stuff, debunking these these fraudsters. Um. And
there is footage of this that is in a Hudini
documentary that Unitpix Productions put out, which I have not seen,
what I would love to. You can read a little
bit more about this on the Magic Detective dot com
in the article Hudini's Mysterious Girl Detective. Um that that
(30:52):
that didn't appear to be a moniker that stuck. Um.
There's a really interesting detail or really interesting little bit
of trivia here. A guy named Julian Proskauer who was
another one of these ghost racket investigators. He estimated in
nineteen thirty two that the number of people taken in
(31:13):
by these hoaxes were about thirty million a year. And uh,
at the cost personally to these individuals of a hundred
and twenty five million dollars, that's insane. That's a huge industry.
That's like the economy of scale in those days. That's insane. Man. Yeah,
it's a huge industry. And also keep in mind that's
(31:34):
a five million total at thirty millions a year, and
that's still that's nineteen thirty two dollars. Rose continued pursuing
this line of work. This was a passion project for her.
It was a personal vocation and she pursued it throughout
the Great Depression. She investigated on behalf of insurance companies,
law firms, better business bureaus, newspapers, other other institutions of
(32:01):
that sort. She was the guide to the Chicago Tribunes
approached the spiritualist underworld of Chicago, and she wrote a
bunch of cv nex moose articles. She would do demonstrations
of common con artists tricks for nonprofits. And she lived
(32:23):
long enough to see the cycle continued. Time as a wheel,
time as a flat circle. All things come back around again.
So the Second World War ushers in another revival of spiritualism,
and then she sees it again during the Korean War.
And in nineteen fifty one, during an interview, she estimates
(32:44):
that there are some hundred and fifty thousand mediums active
in the US, and she said the number will continue
to rise as long as the war continues. So she
had been interviewed in a number of different publications American magazine,
Call Yours, Popular Science, and so on. She had eventually
(33:07):
given up or retired from investigating this sort of activity
because she had quote grown tired of sitting in dark rooms.
She said that no number of exposures seemed to shake
the faith of believers, and it turns out she was right.
As of the modern American psychic services industry is estimated
(33:28):
to be worth slightly over to billion dollars. But you know,
we should say it's changed as well. There are not
many people attempted to use ectoplasm and stuff like that, no,
because I mean people are largely because of the you know,
things like the Internet and the proliferation of information and
people being able to kind of check behind some of
(33:48):
these things. Unless you really want to believe and be
willfully ignorant, it's a lot harder to get taken in
by some of these these tricks, you know. But then
you have folks like, um, what's the guy's name crossing over?
John John Edwards. I mean, I've I've witnessed situations where
I felt as though there was something a little more
(34:08):
uh intense than just cold reading techniques going on. I
Who am I to say? You know that there isn't
uh the ability for someone to have a stronger sense
for these kinds of things. And then, you know, with
our other show that we do stuffing. I want you
to know we run into things like this all the time,
and we always have to kind of hedge our bets
without coming down too hard and saying no, this is
all poppy cock versus you know. Yeah, there's things that
(34:31):
we don't fully understand. And I kind of sit somewhere
in the middle of those two camps. What what what do
you think, ben? So, it's profoundly arrogant and very very
human to imagine that we as a species, whereas individuals
understand the totality of reality, you know what I mean,
We're a species that burned people alive for saying the
(34:55):
earth orbits the sun like not that long ago. When
you look at time as a big picture, yeah, fingersnap
of humanity. One of the best analogies for it is
is the following. So our understanding of the world in
which we live, and indeed our understanding ourselves, is akin
to a guttering sputtering match in the universe, And the
(35:18):
universe is a dark room and it's so big that
we cannot see the corners. All we can see is uh,
the match and maybe part of our hands holding it.
So to assume that we know anything about the darkness
beyond the little bit of light we have is again
just the word I keep coming back to is arrogant. However,
it's also true that our species will rip off each
(35:41):
other whatever the opportunity presents itself, you know what I mean,
Whether it's magical water that will make you live forever,
whether it's a belief system that is impossible to disprove, right,
or whether it's you know, a car that runs on
positive thinking. There's there's no shortage of examples. That sounds nice.
(36:04):
Then it does sound nice, right, and just saying that,
would you know, get you some better mileage. But in
this case, what we see is uh, the story of
one person's crusade, which was to a large degree effective.
And and again it sounds like you and I are
kind of on on the same page. There's there's more
(36:27):
to the workings of reality and the universe than humans
currently understand. And anyone who's listening to this podcast thousands
of years from now, we envy you. Hopefully, hopefully the
house of cards called civilization is not collapsed, and you've
learned a lot about the world beyond the one in
(36:47):
which we currently live. And hey, you know, what the
weird trippy thing is. If any of this afterlife after
world stuff turns out to be true, then the people
listening to this from thousands of years in the future,
as linear times can, they don't have to hit our
social meats man, they can just call us up directly,
like invoc us electric word life. It means forever and
(37:08):
that's a mighty long time. But I'm here to tell
you there's something else the afterworld, a world of never
ending happiness. You can always see the sun day or night.
So when you call up that shrink in Beverly Hills,
you know the one doctor, everything will be all right.
Instead of asking him how much of your time has left,
ask him how much of your mind? Baby? Because in
this life things are much harder than in the after world.
In this life you're on your own, and if the
(37:31):
elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy. I wanted
to jump in. Uh. The only other abuse of after
world that immediately jumped to mind for me, give me
a Leonard Cohen after world. So I ken's I eternally
That is Penny Royalty by Nirvana. Al Right, well, we
got some literature in there, we got some science we've
(37:51):
got some spirituality. We got one of our favorite troops
are ridiculous History. Uh, good old fashioned con artistry. I
think that makes this our episode. Thank you so much
for tuning in everybody. By the way Makenburgh did inherit
Judini's crystal Ball, you don't need a crystal ball to
get in contact with us before our next episode. You
(38:13):
can find us on everybody's favorite technological impression of clair voyance,
the Internet, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Ridiculous History is all over it.
We highly recommend one of our favorite sites on the internet,
which is our Facebook community page, or Ridiculous Historians. But
we're not just a show. We're also individual people and
(38:34):
you can find us online as ourselves. It's sure. You
can find me exclusively on Instagram where I am at
how Now Noel Brown, and you can find me on
Twitter where I am Ben bolland hs W. Or you
can find me on Instagram where I am named as
I like to say in a burst of creativity at
Ben Boland spelled how it sounds huge. Thanks to super
(38:55):
producer Casey Pegram, Alex Williams, who composed our theme, Christopher
haciotas here in Spirit, Gabe Louisier Research Associate eve's Jeff Cote,
Jonathan Strickland, a k a. The Quister Dr Vankman, both
the character played by Bill Murray and my cat shout
out to you. I can go to the Carpathian Vigo,
the Carpathia, what is it? The sorrow of Carpathia, the
(39:19):
scourge of Moldolva. I think that's the one I got close.
That's a great speech. And of course, Yadush, lovely, lovely, Nash.
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from
My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
(39:40):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Noel Brown
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