SYMHC Classics: Charles Colchester

This 2021 episode covers Colchester, who claimed to be psychic and may have warned President Abraham Lincoln that he was going to be assassinated. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday and happy October. We are kicking off the
month with our episode on spiritualist Charles Colchester, who was
connected to Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln and to John
Wilkes Booth, and who faced various allegations of fraud over
the course of his career. This episode originally came out
on September 20th, 2021. Enjoy! Welcome to Stuff You Missed

(00:28):
in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy B. Wilson.
It's not quite Halloween time yet, but like the rabies
are here. Yeah. Yeah. I have it worse this year

(00:49):
than any previous year, I think. But this isn't quite
a Halloween episode. But periodically, particularly while I'm researching topics
for Halloween, which I was kind of making my preliminary list,
they often veer into discussion of fake mediums. Like, I'll
just run into mentions of that or notes I've made
about it. And a lot of the time, I come

(01:11):
across this mention... of the alleged psychic who warned President
Abraham Lincoln that he was going to be assassinated. If
you do any sort of mediums during the 19th century
in America research, you'll bump up against that mention. And
I keep scribbling notes to myself to look it up.

(01:32):
So I finally did. And I will say this story
took me to some places that I did not anticipate.
Not in any sort of like, scary, creepy Halloweeny way,
but just like there's some fascinating legal stuff that goes on.
As well as just a person who manages to be

(01:52):
kind of elusive in terms of hard details about their life.
So today we are talking about Charles Colchester. That may
or may not have even been his name, but he
became an icon for spiritualism in the U.S. in the
19th century and only to ultimately be rejected by that
same movement. Yeah, so as Holly just alluded to, Colchester's

(02:13):
early life is entirely a mystery. There is a mention
of him in the Detroit Free Press after most of
the events that we're talking about today had already happened.
It is a column titled News Brevities, and that states that, quote,
the real name of Colchester is Sealby or Sealbic. He
is an English imposter, and the spiritualists declare that that

(02:36):
he is a fraudulent trickster and not one of their number. So,
spoiler alert, Colchester gained a significant following as a spiritualist
with some very high-profile patrons, but he was so problematic
that the whole spiritualist movement then tried to distance itself
from him. Yeah, there was a lot of, not one
of us, not one of us, we don't know this person.

(02:58):
I don't know her in the spiritualist meme of the
19th century. What we know, and we got to use
air quotes there about Charles Colchester, is only what he
told us rather than anything that he could substantially prove.
He was English. He claimed that he was a Duke's
son that was born out of wedlock. And he claimed

(03:20):
that he could read sealed letters and also that he
could summon apparitions. He also said that he could produce
words on his body carved in blood by spirits and
and he manifested all of these things in front of audiences.
Although it was not part of this personal story that
he wove, Colchester also drank a lot, and he did

(03:43):
use his alleged connection with the beyond to validate his drinking.
He claimed that the spirits had authorized it, which is
kind of funny to me. Yeah, apparently when people would
ask him, do you want to go get a drink?
He would be like, let me commune with the spirits.
And then he would be like, yes, they say we
should absolutely go have a drink. So after performing seances

(04:08):
for clients in New York and Boston for a few years,
that was really the start of his traceable movement. Colchester
appeared in Washington, D.C. during the Civil War, and he
drew just an impressive audience of the city's elite, including
people like General Grant and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln.
We have talked about Mary Todd Lincoln's fascination with spiritualism

(04:29):
and the afterlife before on the show. She came up
when we covered spirit photographer William Mumler during our Halloween
live show a couple of years back. She was his
most famous client, Mumler's most famous client, hoping that he
could capture her departed husband's ghost on film, and he,
of course, obliged. That was, I mean, there were many
spiritualists in her life, but we really haven't talked about

(04:52):
how she became so very drawn to spiritualism. And the
sad catalyst there was the death of the Lincolns' son, Willie,
who died from typhoid fever at the age of 11
in 1862. The Lincolns each mourned in their own way.
The president spent time alone, was very withdrawn, and grew
frustrated with the ways that people tried to console him

(05:16):
by talking about Willie being in heaven. He eventually turned
his energies to the needs of the country in turmoil. Mary,
on the other hand, was swept up in the growing
spiritualism movement, and it offered her the hope that she
might somehow see or connect to her beloved son once
more in just some form. She was hardly alone in this.

(05:38):
The massive death toll of the Civil War had created
a whole nation of people who were grieving for lost
loved ones. And it was through Mary's many connections and
invitations to mediums and spiritualists that Charles Colchester... came into
the lives of the Lincolns. And once he did so,
he took full advantage of that proximity to power to

(05:59):
bolster his name. As Mary became ever more devoted to
Colchester seances, the president had felt compelled to accompany her
to visit this compelling spiritualist, not because President Lincoln believed,
but because he wanted to see what exactly was taking
place at these gatherings. Lincoln's relationship with spiritualism has been

(06:20):
written and remarked about many times. A lot of people
have theories and they try to connect him to, you know,
mesmerism or spiritualism and claim that he had this mysticism.
But he seemed above all, if you really look at it,
to want to protect his wife. He never dissuaded her
from this interest because seeing spiritualists and going to seances

(06:41):
seemed to offer her some peace. But the president also
did not want the first lady to be anyone's victim.
So when he saw Colchester's seance, he was mesmerized, but
not in the sense of just being taken in by it.
It was totally the opposite. Abraham Lincoln wanted to figure
out exactly how Colchester's tricks worked. The president got the

(07:04):
Smithsonian Institution's secretary at the time, Joseph Henry, involved in
the investigation. He requested that Colchester submit to an examination
by Henry, which he agreed to. This is, yes, the
same Joseph Henry who introduced Eunice Newton Foote's papers in
that episode. Yeah, there's also an interesting story between Henry

(07:28):
and Lincoln in that they were very much on opposite
ends of the political spectrum, but also respected each other
a lot. And Henry's background was in science, and he
worked a lot in telegraphs specifically. And so for this demonstration,
Henry had Colchester visit the Smithsonian so that this examination

(07:48):
could be conducted in a room that the medium had
not had prior access to. And after the encounter, Henry
came away entirely convinced that Colchester was a charlatan. But
he couldn't prove it. He had very clearly discerned that
there was an otherworldly clicking sound. These were supposed to
be evidence of spirits being called by the man, but

(08:11):
that it was clear to him they were emanating from
Colchester's person and presumably some sort of device. But Colchester
would not consent to having his clothes removed for examination.
And that was that. Incidentally, though, Joseph Henry supposedly did
uncover the origins of these sounds totally by accident much later.

(08:33):
He's said to have met a man on a train
and started just idly talking to him. In this marvelous
bit of happenstance, this man had engineered a telegraphic device
that spiritualists used for exactly this purpose. They wore it
around their biceps, and so the user would flex a muscle,
and that would produce this clicking sound. Henry asked this

(08:55):
young man if he had sold such a device to
Charles Colchester, and the guy said yes. He reported this
information back to the president, who was apparently pleased to
know about it, but he did not put a stop
to the First Lady's meetings with Colchester. Something much darker
ultimately took place to sever that relationship. Yeah, Abraham Lincoln,

(09:18):
I think, just liked being in on the secret. But ultimately,
what happened was that Colchester blackmailed Mary Todd Lincoln, or
at least he tried to. He wanted the War Department
to issue him a free railroad pass so he could
travel to New York easily. This might sound like a
fairly benign request, but at the time, the war had

(09:38):
led to a move on General Sherman's part to severely
limit and regulate civilian travel by rail and so that
that mode of transport could be dedicated to the movement
of troops and material. Even people with ticketed travel could
board only if it did not interfere with the needs
of the Union Army. Initially, in this whole system, train
passes were fairly readily available. People at all levels of

(10:01):
the military would just write them, even if those people
were not really authorized to do so. But this, of course,
became a problem, and regulations got tighter and tighter to
try to curtail needless travel. So by the time this
all happened, in asking for a pass issued by the
War Department, Colchester was attempting to sidestep a whole lot

(10:23):
of regulations. And he almost got what he wanted because
he told the First Lady that he would publicly share
some of the privileged and presumably embarrassing information that he
had learned while working with her. So that was how
Noah Brooks was called upon to help. The First Lady
turned to Brooks for help over this blackmail attempt, and

(10:44):
Brooks was a close friend of the Lincolns and also
a journalist. He had dealings with Colchester before because of
his concerning influence over the First Lady. He wrote about
this in his book, Washington in Lincoln's Time. And the
person that he's describing in this was named Elizabeth Keckley. So, quote,
A seamstress employed in the White House had induced Mrs.

(11:08):
Lincoln to listen to the artful tales of a so-called
spiritual medium who masqueraded under the name of Colchester and
who pretended to be the illegitimate son of an English duke.
The poor lady at that time was well-nigh distraught with
grief at the death of her son, Willie. By playing
on her motherly sorrows, Colchester actually succeeded in inducing Mrs.

(11:32):
Lincoln to receive him in the family residence at the
soldier's home, where, in a darkened room, he pretended to
produce messages from the dead boy by means of scratches
on the wainscoting and taps in the walls and furniture. Mrs.
Lincoln told me of these so-called manifestations and asked me
to be present in the White House when Colchester would

(11:54):
give an exhibition of his powers. Yeah, we're going to
quote a lot from Noah Brooks because his is one
of the few accounts by a contemporary that actually had
direct dealings with Colchester and was close enough to the
Lingans to really understand kind of how this was playing out.
And initially he told the First Lady that he did
not want to go to this seance at the White House.

(12:15):
He doesn't say as much in his book, but it
kind of seems like he didn't want to embarrass her
because he did want to see what Colchester was all about.
And he got his chance shortly thereafter to attend a
paid sitting that one of Colchester's other wealthy followers was hosting.
So Brooks paid $ 1 to go and see the medium

(12:37):
for himself. We'll talk about what happened when Noah Brooks
met Charles Colchester after we pause for a quick sponsor break.
Music In his biography of Lincoln, Brooks detailed his encounter

(12:57):
with Colchester at the seance that he attended and paid for, writing,
after the company had been seated around the table in
the usual approved manner and the lights were turned out,
the silence was broken by the thumping of a drum,
the twanging of a banjo, and the ringing of bells,
all of which instruments had been laid on the table
ready for use. Brooks, who was obviously not the least

(13:20):
bit taken in by Colchester's theatricalities, decided to find the
real source of the noises. He went on to say, quote,
Loosening my hands from my neighbors who were unbelievers, I

(13:44):
rose and, grasping in the direction of the drumbeat, grabbed
a very solid and fleshy hand in which was a
handbell that was being thumped on a drumhead. I shouted,
strike a light. My friend, after what appeared to be
an unconscionable length of time, lighted a match, but meanwhile,
somebody had dealt me a severe blow with the drum,

(14:05):
the edge of which cut a slight wound in my forehead.
When the gas was finally lighted, the singular spectacle was
presented of the son of the Duke firmly grasped by
a man who was covered with blood, while the arrested
scion of nobility was glowering at the drum and bells
which he still held in his hands. Colchester ran from

(14:29):
the room and he refused to return. The host of
the whole event, said that he was outraged at having
been so insulted. It was only a couple of days
after that that Colchester made his blackmail attempt on the
First Lady. What unpleasant things that Colchester was planning to reveal,
we don't really know. Presumably, he wanted to get out

(14:50):
of Washington, D.C. in a hurry and to avoid any
additional entanglements. But when Mary Todd Lincoln brought the matter
to Noah Brooks, he decided to confront Charles Colchester and
expose him as a fraud to put an end to
the blackmail and hopefully also get him out of the
White House for good. And so to accomplish this, Brooks
concocted a plan that required Mrs. Lincoln to invite the

(15:12):
medium to the White House once more. The idea here
is that Colchester would presume that she had his railroad
pass and wanted him to come and get it. And
this plan kind of seems like it all hinged on
Colchester not having gotten a good look at Brooks during
the seance. As you recall, they had been seated in
the dark and even once the gas lamp was lighted,
Brooks's face had been covered in blood. But it is

(15:35):
also possible that the hope was that Colchester would just
be too embarrassed when confronted to run into Brooks in
front of the First Lady to say like, oh yes,
you caught me faking at my seance the other night.
So when the spiritualist arrived, Mrs. Lincoln introduced Colchester to
her friend, Noah Brooks, and then left the room as

(15:58):
though she was going to get the pass. Once she
had gone, Brooks lifted up the hair that had been
swept over his forehead, and that revealed the cut from
the drum strike that had happened at the seance. He asked,
do you recognize this? Colchester once again muttered about being
insulted before Brooks told him, quote, you know that I know.

(16:18):
You are a swindler and a humbug. Get out of
the city at once. If you are in Washington tomorrow
afternoon at this time, you will be in the old
Capitol prison. Interestingly, John Wilkes Booth was drawn to Charles
Colchester for the very same reason that had brought Mary
Todd Lincoln into the spiritualist's orbit, and that was personal loss.

(16:39):
When Booth's sister-in-law Molly died, the actor started attending seances
hosted by various mediums in an effort to make contact
with her. And that eventually led him to Colchester. But
then Colchester and Booth became close friends outside of any
mystical setting. According to witnesses, they spent a lot of
time together. They were described as both friends and associates

(17:02):
by people who witnessed them. particularly as the two of
them came and went at the National Hotel, which is
where Booth stayed in the weeks leading up to the
assassination of President Lincoln. Historian Terry Alford, in his Booth biography,
Fortune's Fool, suggests that Booth's attachment to Colchester may have
been rooted in the medium's claim to be able to

(17:23):
see the future. He may have been hoping for some
sort of sign or reassurance regarding his intentions toward the president.
We have no idea. if Booth clearly disclosed those intentions
to Colchester. But Charles J. Colchester felt compelled to warn
Abraham Lincoln that something bad was going to happen. Lincoln

(17:43):
is actually said to have mentioned Colchester's warning to an associate,
but that is the only information we have regarding any
actual communication between the two of them. And this was
actually one of many warnings that various alleged psychics offered
to the president in the time when spiritualism was popular
throughout the U.S. and within the White House, thanks to

(18:04):
the First Lady. After the president was shot and died
from his wounds in April of 1865, Colchester's association with
Booth was something that was just at the forefront of investigators' minds. Yeah,
they were looking for any accomplices, anyone involved involved. in
what had happened, and Colonel Henry H. Wells was a

(18:25):
lawyer before joining the Union Army, and he was investigating
and attempted to meet with Charles Colchester as part of
that investigation. He had tracked him from the National, where
he had been staying, to the Washington Hotel, to which
he had moved, but he wasn't there either. If the
medium had stayed in the city, he had done a
really good job of hiding. He was never located for

(18:47):
questioning in the official investigation. It's a little unclear exactly
when Colchester may have issued his warning to the president
in relation to when he had his run in with
Noah Brooks. So whether he did leave town right after
being exposed as a fraud or if he stuck around
and then ran right after the assassination is a little
bit unclear. Even though Colchester left Washington, he certainly did

(19:11):
not banish off the face of the earth. He was
moving around and performing his seances and readings and then
popped up in the papers again in the second half
of 1865. We'll get to that after we hear from
the sponsors that keep Stuff You Missed in History Class going.
Colchester was arrested in New York in August 1865 for

(19:32):
what may seem on the surface to be an odd charge.
According to a newspaper account, quote, Charles J. Colchester, a
leading medium and only second to the famous Hume in
notoriety as a spiritualist, has been arrested on complaint of
the collector of internal revenue for the 28th District of

(19:55):
New York on a charge of practicing jugglery without a license. Okay,
if that made you giggle a little, and it did
me when I read it, jugglery in this case does
not mean literal juggling, although that is certainly a way
that word can be used. It is referring to trickery
or manipulation, and in Colchester's case, sleight of hand specifically.

(20:16):
So Colchester was taken in for tax evasion because he
refused to register his profession as a juggler. Colchester had
been practicing in the Rochester area in the spring of
1865 when the Assessor of Internal Revenue, William H. Rogers,
instructed him to take out a license as a juggler.
Colchester refused, although he offered to take out a license

(20:38):
as a spiritual medium. There was no license for that,
and Rogers told him that based on the information he had,
Colchester was indeed a juggler. Colchester was arrested, and a
complaint was filed with the U.S. Commissioner. The medium appeared
before a grand jury and was indicted, and the case
was sent to trial. His defense was that he was

(20:59):
not in any way a magician or juggler, but a
legitimate spiritualist, and so he should not have to register
as something he was not. This really kind of turned
the trial into an instance where spiritualism itself was being debated.
As the same write-up put it, quote, as a result
of the trial... will be a legal decision as to

(21:20):
whether the phenomena of spiritualism are supernatural or mere feats
of juggler, it will be a very interesting one and
strongly contested. The prosecutors planned on calling a range of
presidigitators to confirm that Colchester was indeed a sleight of
hand man, and the defense planned to bring in spiritualists
to testify to Colchester's legitimate abilities. Colchester's claim was mainly

(21:45):
that he was closer to being a member of the
clergy than a trickster. When the case began on August 19, 1865,
the district attorney opened by laying out the question of
whether Colchester should or shouldn't be registered as a juggler
and made it clear that in his mind, spiritualism itself
was not on trial. He also managed to get in

(22:07):
a dig at the press for suggesting that this was
the case. He said, quote, The performance of singular and
extraordinary feats of wrappings, answering questions enclosed in envelopes and
the like publicly and for fee and reward, will not
be seriously contested, perhaps admitted, The peculiar defense of the
prisoner I can only gather from newspaper reports and public

(22:29):
rumor which assert that the prisoner will prove or attempt
to prove that in the performance of those feats of
apparent legerdemain he is the mere instrument of spiritual control
and that he does not practice sleight of hand. While
I concede the inestimable value of the press, I cannot
forbear the remark that that it has been made the

(22:52):
instrument of magnifying the case into undue proportions and to
cause the public to believe that it is a contest
between the United States and a large body of citizens
calling themselves spiritualists and an endeavor on the part of
the former to crush out a religious sect and to
expose its heresies if it has any, and that the
result of this trial will establish the fact whether spiritualism

(23:14):
is true or false. Nothing can be further from the truth.
The result of this trial can accomplish no such thing.
It is a simple inquiry whether Charles J. Colchester is
practicing sleight of hand under the guise of spiritual control,
and if he is, it is quite as important to
profess spiritualist that he should be exposed as it is

(23:36):
to the public whom he is deluding and to the
government which he is defrauding. Over the course of the trial,
many of Colchester's high-profile clients, a lot of them politicians,
testified that they believed entirely in his abilities as a medium.
But the damning testimony came from people who knew magic,

(23:56):
including from a man named James Rogers, a magician's assistant
who had worked with Colchester briefly. He told the court
that he had seen Colchester using his foot to create
a rapping sound by striking the legs of tables. But
he also said that Colchester himself had told him it was,
in the parlance of the day, humbug. According to Rogers' account,

(24:18):
Colchester was holding eight to ten seances a day, making
one or two dollars for each one, and restricting attendance
to only one or two people per sitting, presumably so
they would be unable to detect his farce. Another witness,
James Connolly, testified that he had, as a client, witnessed
Colchester switching out envelopes that contained questions for him and

(24:40):
were supposed to remain sealed. and surreptitiously opening the original
question so he could answer and appear psychic. Another witness,
which is a physician named Walter M. Fleming, saw Colchester
on several occasions, witnessing, among other things, the blood writing
upon his arm. The witness at one point presented Colchester
with questions sealed up in cans to see if he

(25:02):
could answer them, but Colchester, on consecutive days of trying,
told Fleming that spiritual conditions were not favorable for answering them.
The case proceeded on in this way, with character witnesses
for Colchester and detractors describing his trickery for what it was.
On August 23rd, the jury, after hearing the case, returned

(25:23):
their verdict. They found that Charles Colchester was a juggler.
And this verdict actually kicked off a lot of fear
in the spiritualism community, even though the district attorney had
said that was not the intent at all. But a
lot of practitioners worried that they too would be tried
by the government over taxes and discredited in the process.

(25:44):
There were queries as well as to whether Colchester had
been given a fair trial or if the whole thing
had been framed in bias from the beginning, despite those
remarks to the contrary at the opening of the arguments.
To be clear, spiritualists were not aggrieved at Colchester being
called a fraud. They were just worried that the manner
in which his trial was conducted could similarly find any

(26:06):
of them frauds, whether that had any basis or not.
Their own examination of the matter came to the conclusion, however,
that he was undeniably and truly a juggler. After all
of that, the sentence was just a financial one. Colchester
had to pay a $ 40 fine. and the court costs

(26:26):
of $ 473. Those sums were paid by his supporters, and
that matter was then concluded. If the trial results dinged
Colchester's confidence at all, it was not for long. Soon
he was on tour touting his skills and looking for clients.
In an ad that appeared in the Cleveland Daily Leader
in December of 1865, it said,' Colchester, the wonderful Colchester,'

(26:50):
the incomprehensible Colchester, the medium.' can be consulted at his
room's American house for a few days only. But even
though he kept working, from the moment the trial ended,
there were then people constantly looking for proof that Colchester
was a fraud. And stories kept popping up in the
papers about it. One particularly charming one from the Boston

(27:13):
Evening Transcript on October 10, 1865, reads, quote, A correspondent
of the Hartford Times says that Colchester, the juggling medium,
was detected by him at a circle in Hartford in
a feat of jugglery, where a number sitting in the
dark with joined hands were touched by spirit hands on
their faces. When one seized the hand with his teeth

(27:36):
and discovered that it was a tallow candle, which Colchester
had blown out when the circle was arranged. He was
once again in hot water with the U.S. Commissioner in
April of 1866, this time in Louisville, Kentucky, for the
same charge, this time just pertaining to the performance of
jugglery without a license in the state of Kentucky. This time,

(27:58):
Colchester did not really argue the matter. There was, once again, testimony,
which according to an article in the Buffalo Commercial on
April 6th, quote, A confederate of Colchester admitted on the
examination that the manifestations were produced by mechanical agencies, and
this was not denied by the former. In that case,

(28:19):
Colchester was allowed by the commissioner to file his license
as a juggler. In late May 1866, a story ran
in papers across the country titled Spiritualism Done For, and
it had the subheader, Colchester Thoroughly Exposed, His Spirit Manifestations
Shown to be Tricks, deceptions and the vilest impositions. And

(28:40):
this article was an open letter written by a man
named D.A. McCord, who had briefly been Colchester's agent. While
Colchester had been widely exposed already, this particular missive was penned,
according to McCord, quote, from a sense of justice, seeming
in some ways to need to unburden himself for his
part in any of it. He writes, quote, I was

(29:00):
his agent for a few weeks and was compelled to
leave him, detecting his deceptions with his drunkenness, disorderly conduct,
and other vices. The confessional states that McCord witnessed Colchester
using his foot against a table leg to produce a
rapping sound and read billets through trickery. But the one
component of Colchester's act which had continued to befuddle even

(29:24):
detractors was the, quote, purported spirit writing on his armpits.
And McCord spilled the beans on that, too. Quote, he
uses a short lead pencil, number two. He prefers the
corner of a room. In the evening time, a light
sitting by him. In the day, a window behind him.
He chooses thin printing paper because easily and noiselessly opened.

(29:47):
The investigators write questions and names of deceased friends upon billets.
He manipulates them, having his blank previously prepared. which he
holds in the hollow of his hand by the third
and fourth fingers. This he exchanges for one of the
written billets. Then perhaps he may request all to write
another question or name, during which he dexterously reads the

(30:11):
billet by holding it in his lap behind the table spread. Yeah,
basically he has them write those questions so they'll be occupied,
and then he can do his other stuff without them noticing. Yeah.
McCord further explained that even though there was the illusion
of randomness in which Colchester had someone select a billet
from a hat, he always used sleight of hand to

(30:32):
ensure that he knew which one was going to be selected.
And then, as he employed various theatrical tricks of dramatic misdirection,
he would use the pencil to write on his arm.
According to McCord, he then, quote, bears his arm, rubs
it slightly with dampened fingers, causing the blood to rush
into the pencil indentations, producing the wonderful blood-red writing under

(30:55):
the cuticle. Anybody can do this with little practice. McCord
concludes with a list of eight rules to employ if
you want to visit Colchester to ensure that you see
all that he does. and concludes with, quote, I make
this exposure not to injure him, but to keep others
from being injured and defrauded by villainous impostors. He then

(31:16):
lists his address and invites anyone to visit if they
have more questions. What a quaint practice. Here's my home address.
Here's my home address printed in papers across the country. Yeah,
those eight rules I didn't list out because they're pretty,
they're pretty common sense-y. It's kind of like, Make sure

(31:38):
that you sit in a place where you can see
his hands the whole time. Make sure that you, like,
mark your... Like, they're very, very simple things. Another agent, J.M. Mabbitt,
also wrote an open letter that stated that he had
been acting in good faith while working with Colchester... as
a true believer in spiritualism, and that once the deception

(31:59):
was detected, he took his leave of the fraud. These
letters were often printed together. He stated in his letter, quote,
and yet how the spirits can control a man so immoral,
so given to drunkenness, deception, and a non-payment of board
and printing bills to say nothing of other vices still
lower is to me a mystery. Colchester continued to roam

(32:23):
after this, plying his trade, but really not for very long.
In early May of 1867, a year after his two
former agents had debunked his last wisps of credibility, Charles
Colchester died in Keokuk, Iowa. He had sat in the
White House just a few years earlier and had influence
over the first family, and his trial for jugglery had

(32:44):
been widely reported in detail. But by that time, his
death ran in papers as just a one-liner. Sort of
in aggregated columns of miscellaneous stuff. Yeah, it was kind
of like, Charles Colchester, medium, died in Keokuk. That was
like it. That was it? Some had a few additional,

(33:06):
you know, sentences about who he was, but it was
very low-key at that point. I did not anticipate when
starting this that I would end up in the middle
of the jugglery trial. Yeah! Yeah! which is pretty interesting
to me. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.

(33:30):
If you'd like to send us a note, our email
address is historypodcast at iheartradio.com. And you can subscribe to
the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.