July 9, 2025 • 19 mins
George Noory and author Varla Ventura explore the story of a woman who claimed to have contacted the spirit of Mark Twain years after his death via a Ouija board and written a novel with him, the controversy and lawsuits surrounding the novel, and how the author's life ended tragically after the experience.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now Here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back George Nory along with Varla Ventura back
with us. An authored traveler, botanist, and lover of the strange,
she has authored several books on strange and bizarre and
freaky things, from paranormal women's history to werewolves and Benshi's
The Plants that Smelled Like Death. She is a committed supernaturalist, folklorist,
(00:25):
and seeker of those shadowy things that scrape at your window.
With tonight, varlet welcome back. Have you been Ah?
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Thank you, George. I've been well. I've been well. It's
nice to be back with you.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Always great to have you on the program. You're always
in high demand. Varla.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Well, I think that's good.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Let's go back to the beginning. How did Varla get
involved in the strange and unusual?
Speaker 4 (00:49):
Well, you know, I mean, honestly, I was born into it.
I've come to understand that, especially, you know now as
a grown up, I realized that the way that I
was raised was a little bit unconventional. But my mom
was a is a practicing witch and always had unusual
(01:10):
books on her bookshelf and she was like the original
Coast to coast crowd really, George, Yeah, with uh, you know,
we had everything from Dion Fortune to Alista Crowley to
how you know how to interpret you know, how to
how to increase your psychic abilities. Those are the kind
of books that were on my on my mom's bookshelf,
(01:33):
and I was an avid reader. In addition to that,
there was there were always old collections of fairy tales
and a lot of a lot of classic horror on
the shelves. So I always used to picnic in cemeteries.
You know, we celebrated Halloween for months, if not year round,
and so that was sort of the backdrop of my
(01:54):
childhood and I think I just always found comfort and
gravitate toward it.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
And then as I became a grown up and you.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
Know, started writing, I started kind of melding the two
things together. So my love of the bizarre, It just
one day occurred to me, Oh, I could actually write about.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
The things that I love.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
I think I thought a writer needed to be, you know,
a novelist. And then I know that was actually that
first book was the that really kind of broke through,
was the Book of the Bizarre, and I think you
were my first interview ever as an author. Talk got
frying pan into the fire, straight to coast to coast
(02:39):
to talk about were wolves or something like that.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
It was great, it worked well.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Yeah, Barla, there's a book called jap Head One published
in nineteen seventeen by someone who claimed to have been
channeling Mark Twain's goes via Luigi Board. What do we
know about this story?
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Yeah, this is a wonderful story.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
I brief touched on this story when I wrote Paranormal
Parlor a few years ago, but I never it never.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
I couldn't get the full story in there.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
I knew there was a lot more to the story,
and so more recently, just a couple of months ago,
Jeff Ballinger asked me to write a zine for his
new project, which is called Shadow Zine. And this is
a series of sort of old school publications zines, little
toind of mini magazines about different topics. And I said,
(03:31):
I really want to tell this full story of Jacque
Perone and Emily Grant Hutchings and essentially the you know,
as you mentioned, the nutshell is Emily was she attended
a psychic salon and there was a medium there who
(03:51):
had apparently channeled Twain multiple times before, and at this
particular one, the ghost of Twain came through and said,
I want that Hannibal girl to be my scribe, basically
Hannibal meaning Hannibal, Missouri, which is where Emily Grant Hutchings
is from and also where Mark Twain is from. And so,
(04:13):
over the course of about a year and some change,
Emily and the medium who is named Lola B. Hayes,
and she was quite she was quite famous at the
turn of the twentieth century there as she was very
renowned as a medium and was well respected among the
Society for Psyclical Research. And so they sat down and
(04:36):
had sessions probably nearly every day where they were channeling
this novel. Actually they channeled two short stories as an experiment,
and then they dove into the novel via the Ouija board.
And at one point, I mean, how painstaking is that.
At one point they painted characters onto the board with
(05:01):
india inks such as parentheses semi Colin's M dashes and
M dashes to in order to expedite because he was
spelling out this is a parenthetical statement and that was
taking extra time. So they came up with this like
psychic keyboard shortcut and sort of turned the wachboard into
(05:25):
a kind of psychic typewriter. Really, this book was actually published.
It was published by a pretty a pretty well known
New York publisher named Mitchell Kennerley and the Harper and Brothers,
which is, you know the original who started out Harper
(05:45):
Collins Publishing company. That it was the three Harper brothers
and the daughter of Mark Twain, Clara Clemens, found out
about this and actually the Harper brothers sued Mitchell Kennerley
and the publisher of Jack Berne for copyright infringement for
(06:06):
the use of Mark Twain's likeness.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Yeah, they were claiming Mark Twain did not write this
book from the other side.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
They were saying not only did he not write the
book from the other side, but that even if he did,
they couldn't say he did because they actually the reason
it ended up being copyright is because Mark Twain is
a pen name that is copyrighted, and that copyright was
held by the Harper brothers and the daughter received the
(06:37):
proceeds to that. And interestingly, George, there were at least
two other novels that were published or one was like
kind of a longer essay, But there was another novel
published two years prior to Emily's nineteen fifteen. Twain died
in nineteen ten, So nineteen fifteen a woman published a novel,
(06:58):
but she self published it, and I think it just
kind of went saying that this was a channeled through
Mark Twain. I think this one she did like automatic
writing or something like that, but it never didn't cause
a stir well, partially, I think she self published it
because you know that then it didn't get quite the distribution.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Then, and.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
I'm not exactly sure why they didn't catch on to
that one, but I do know that during the course
of Emily's sessions, there was a man who kept attending
and taking notes and he during and I learned this
part of the story when I was researching for the shadowscene.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
He was taking.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
Notes throughout the sessions, and then he started writing to
Clara Clements and asking her to verify details such as,
what was your grandfather's middle name?
Speaker 3 (07:59):
And did he have this kind of appearance?
Speaker 4 (08:01):
And so he was kind of going behind their back
talking to Clara Clements trying to quote unquote prove these details,
and it irritated Clara. I mean wouldn't it irritate you? You know,
someone's harassing you years after your loved one's death and
asking you to verify these ridiculous details that don't matter
to you.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
That you would claim would be none of their business exactly.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
And so apparently he wrote to her multiple times, and
her response to the last time was you could talk
to my lawyers. So by the time the book came out,
this same man gave it a wonderful review, but he
was kind of he was kind of responsible for its
downfall and away because he drew this attention to it,
(08:45):
and she was irritated because ultimately there was quite a
bit of controversy around it. You know, the more scathing
reviews said something like, if this is the best Twain
can do from the afterlife, he should stand down, or
something like that.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
But other people said, you know, this was actually a
wonderful novel.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
It's too bad she didn't just publish it and not
add this claim to it.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
So there's just all of these elements to the story
like that. There was, so they went to.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
The Supreme Court. There's all kinds of articles published. We
put some imagery of the articles in the zine so
you can see these headlines. It's like Twain's ghosts wrote
a story. And one of the funnier tidbits about the
lawsuit was, at one point a journalist was saying that
(09:40):
something like the proof of existence of afterlife will not
be discussed in psychic parlors, that will be discussed by
lawyers in a courtroom.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
And there was even talk at one point.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
That they were going to bring a board into the
courtroom and have Emily make contact with Twain as like proof,
but that unfortunately never manifested because that would have been
that would have been another amazing part of the story.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Well, Hachen's agreed to destroy all the existing copies of
the book and to cease publication, so they dropped the lawsuit.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Right right, they dropped the lawsuit. However, not all copies
were destroyed.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Ah uh huh.
Speaker 4 (10:24):
Because if you went to all that trouble and you
wrote a book and you were told to destroy all copies,
I think you wouldn't destroy all the copies. So we
know that a few copies remained. One because there's a fascimile.
There's a scan of one that you can find online
on Gutenberg dot org, which is a wonderful resource for
(10:46):
public domain works. And then during the course of writing
the zine, Jeff went to the Salem Witchboard Museum and
the curator of that museum he had a copy of
it actually, so there's actual photos of it in the
(11:07):
zine that they took of this very novel. I have
this fantasy that one day I'm going to be in
a used bookstore and it's just going to be there,
marked down to five dollars.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
No one's going to know what it is.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
And I'm just gonna, you know, say it cool and
get the copy of that book. But there are copies
out there that exist, and yeah they're rare. I'm sure
you can go on eBay and dig one up or something,
but that's not as fun as finding your own out
in the real world.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Well, this is was very popular then. Ouiji boards were
hot items, and the fact that Mark Twain, through the
other side wrote it got a lot of people interested
in it.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
Yeah, it actually, you know, it stood to it really
stood to be a success.
Speaker 4 (11:56):
And one of the elements of the story that doesn't
always come across when people tell the story is sort
of the position that Emily was in at the time.
So one of the accusations toward her has been that
it was a publicity stunt, and if it was, it
was a great one in some ways, right, because it
(12:19):
actually really drew a lot more attention to this. Right,
what's the saying, there's no such thing as bad publicity
because it draws attention to it. But you know, at
the she was actually a very successful writer at the time.
And keep in mind, you know, the early nineteen hundreds,
women couldn't vote yet, so they're options for what they
(12:39):
could do for a quote unquote for a living usually
revolved around waiting. You know, they do something for a
while and then they get married or so. She was
actually a pretty successful journalist and maintained an independent career
during that time, which is sort of unusual, and she
published a lot of mainstream publics. In fact, she had
(13:02):
a column that was a little bit like an advice column,
a little bit like she appeared as this woman who
would I forget the character's name, but she would you know,
it was like Lady something or other, and she would
respond to sort of a Missmanners type type of column.
She would respond to questions and stuff. So she actually
had a lot to lose by purporting something that would
(13:26):
damage her reputation and so called you know, you know,
upstanding society. And so I sort of reject the notion
that she was doing it just just to get attention.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
The other the other.
Speaker 4 (13:40):
Suggestion has been she had a friend has had a
friend named Pearl Kuran, and Pearl channeled through originally made
contact through a wigiboarg with Emily, actually with Emily's board,
but she made contact with this entity from the sixteen
hundreds named Patients Worth, and she went on to use
(14:03):
mostly automatic writing and some spirit board channeling to write
several volumes of poetry and novels from this spirit Patient's Worth.
And so Pearl Kouran had great success as this, and
she received like wonderful reviews and she won awards. And
so I've heard the theory that Emily was like, oh,
(14:27):
it worked for her, I want to do it too.
But in fact, if you look at the timeline, they
would have had no way of knowing how successful the
other would have been because they were actually doing these
projects simultaneously. So Pearl's success was at the same time
or just after, Emily had already ventured into this project.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
So again I kind of like I don't think that
that's now.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
I don't know if she really made contacts with the
ghost of Twain, but I do believe that she sat
down and used a wig aboard every day for a
better part of a year and made contact with something
and turned that into a story.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
And the book was two hundred and forty five pages long.
That's pretty good.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Yeah, it's a full length novel.
Speaker 4 (15:17):
And so what they said they would do is they
would usually they had somebody. Sometimes it was that guy
that got them into trouble, but they usually had somebody
taking notes, right, they had like the two women would
be at the board and then someone would take notes.
Sometimes it was Emily's husband, sometimes it was a member
of the Cyclical Research Society, and that then they would
(15:38):
take that handwritten thing, and then Emily, who was a
writer and an editor, she would do like light edits
to it, and then they would actually read it back.
While Emily and Lola were on the board. They would
read it back and the ghost would interject if.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
He didn't like any of the changes.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
I love.
Speaker 4 (16:01):
Quite a laborious process, but you know, you've written books, George,
not that much more laborious than you know, being copy edited.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Well, what got you to write Mark Twain's Luigi Mystery?
Why did you key in on this story?
Speaker 4 (16:16):
So I stumbled upon the story years ago when I
was researching some paranormal parlor projects for Wiser Books, and
it always kind of stuck with me. And then when
I wrote the Paranormal Parlor book, I kind of have
a whole chapter in there about women of the paranormal
and you know, kind of the context of the spiritualist
(16:37):
movement and Emily's story. It just there were a few
things about it and what the sources that were available
that didn't I knew there was more to it, and
there were everything that I read was taking history into
you know, it was either written from the point of view.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Of a skeptic.
Speaker 4 (16:58):
And like a skeptical history story and who didn't necessarily
believe in, you know, ghosts, or was written from like
sort of a Twain scholar point of view and as
sort of like as a Twain adjacent story, and what
hadn't existed was somebody who kind of I'm not I'm
(17:19):
not a Twain scholar, but I am a scholar of
the of paranormal and paranormal women's history certainly, and also
I've used Ouija board. I know that they that things happen,
so I'm less of a less of a skeptic. But ultimately,
for me, it wasn't about whether or not Twain came through.
(17:39):
It was really about the story of Emily and who
she was and what happened to her and what happened
to you know, and the fact that there.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Was this this lawsuit.
Speaker 4 (17:49):
And and then she was sort of erased from history
after that, even though she had contributed all of these
other things, and and in fact, some of you know,
for example, Pearl Kuran, it was Emily who got the
board and dragged her friend. They were both housewives, and
(18:10):
Saint Louis dragged her friend to this salon with her
and they started experimenting together. So when Jeff approached me
and said, hey, do you know I'm starting this new
zine called Shadow Zine, and we're going to you know,
just kind of dive deep into paranormal stories, and I said,
I have always wanted because every time I would think
(18:33):
about it, I would find out something else. For example,
her ashes were never claimed, which I think is such
an odd thing, right, And of course, you know, you
you know how it goes, you find out this stuff,
like you know, I found that out two years after that.
I had written the story in the in the book,
so I just know so much more about it now,
(18:55):
and I just want to tell the full encompassing story
and talk about the context of what she was up against,
what she what she succeeded, what were the failures, and
then why, you know, why did she kind of get
erased from history to the point where her ashes remained unclaimed.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Listen to more Coast to Coast a m. Every weeknight
at one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to
coastam dot com for more
Now Here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back George Nory along with Varla Ventura back
with us. An authored traveler, botanist, and lover of the strange,
she has authored several books on strange and bizarre and
freaky things, from paranormal women's history to werewolves and Benshi's
The Plants that Smelled Like Death. She is a committed supernaturalist, folklorist,
(00:25):
and seeker of those shadowy things that scrape at your window.
With tonight, varlet welcome back. Have you been Ah?
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Thank you, George. I've been well. I've been well. It's
nice to be back with you.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Always great to have you on the program. You're always
in high demand. Varla.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Well, I think that's good.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Let's go back to the beginning. How did Varla get
involved in the strange and unusual?
Speaker 4 (00:49):
Well, you know, I mean, honestly, I was born into it.
I've come to understand that, especially, you know now as
a grown up, I realized that the way that I
was raised was a little bit unconventional. But my mom
was a is a practicing witch and always had unusual
(01:10):
books on her bookshelf and she was like the original
Coast to coast crowd really, George, Yeah, with uh, you know,
we had everything from Dion Fortune to Alista Crowley to
how you know how to interpret you know, how to
how to increase your psychic abilities. Those are the kind
of books that were on my on my mom's bookshelf,
(01:33):
and I was an avid reader. In addition to that,
there was there were always old collections of fairy tales
and a lot of a lot of classic horror on
the shelves. So I always used to picnic in cemeteries.
You know, we celebrated Halloween for months, if not year round,
and so that was sort of the backdrop of my
(01:54):
childhood and I think I just always found comfort and
gravitate toward it.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
And then as I became a grown up and you.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
Know, started writing, I started kind of melding the two
things together. So my love of the bizarre, It just
one day occurred to me, Oh, I could actually write about.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
The things that I love.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
I think I thought a writer needed to be, you know,
a novelist. And then I know that was actually that
first book was the that really kind of broke through,
was the Book of the Bizarre, and I think you
were my first interview ever as an author. Talk got
frying pan into the fire, straight to coast to coast
(02:39):
to talk about were wolves or something like that.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
It was great, it worked well.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
Yeah, Barla, there's a book called jap Head One published
in nineteen seventeen by someone who claimed to have been
channeling Mark Twain's goes via Luigi Board. What do we
know about this story?
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Yeah, this is a wonderful story.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
I brief touched on this story when I wrote Paranormal
Parlor a few years ago, but I never it never.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
I couldn't get the full story in there.
Speaker 4 (03:09):
I knew there was a lot more to the story,
and so more recently, just a couple of months ago,
Jeff Ballinger asked me to write a zine for his
new project, which is called Shadow Zine. And this is
a series of sort of old school publications zines, little
toind of mini magazines about different topics. And I said,
(03:31):
I really want to tell this full story of Jacque
Perone and Emily Grant Hutchings and essentially the you know,
as you mentioned, the nutshell is Emily was she attended
a psychic salon and there was a medium there who
(03:51):
had apparently channeled Twain multiple times before, and at this
particular one, the ghost of Twain came through and said,
I want that Hannibal girl to be my scribe, basically
Hannibal meaning Hannibal, Missouri, which is where Emily Grant Hutchings
is from and also where Mark Twain is from. And so,
(04:13):
over the course of about a year and some change,
Emily and the medium who is named Lola B. Hayes,
and she was quite she was quite famous at the
turn of the twentieth century there as she was very
renowned as a medium and was well respected among the
Society for Psyclical Research. And so they sat down and
(04:36):
had sessions probably nearly every day where they were channeling
this novel. Actually they channeled two short stories as an experiment,
and then they dove into the novel via the Ouija board.
And at one point, I mean, how painstaking is that.
At one point they painted characters onto the board with
(05:01):
india inks such as parentheses semi Colin's M dashes and
M dashes to in order to expedite because he was
spelling out this is a parenthetical statement and that was
taking extra time. So they came up with this like
psychic keyboard shortcut and sort of turned the wachboard into
(05:25):
a kind of psychic typewriter. Really, this book was actually published.
It was published by a pretty a pretty well known
New York publisher named Mitchell Kennerley and the Harper and Brothers,
which is, you know the original who started out Harper
(05:45):
Collins Publishing company. That it was the three Harper brothers
and the daughter of Mark Twain, Clara Clemens, found out
about this and actually the Harper brothers sued Mitchell Kennerley
and the publisher of Jack Berne for copyright infringement for
(06:06):
the use of Mark Twain's likeness.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Yeah, they were claiming Mark Twain did not write this
book from the other side.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
They were saying not only did he not write the
book from the other side, but that even if he did,
they couldn't say he did because they actually the reason
it ended up being copyright is because Mark Twain is
a pen name that is copyrighted, and that copyright was
held by the Harper brothers and the daughter received the
(06:37):
proceeds to that. And interestingly, George, there were at least
two other novels that were published or one was like
kind of a longer essay, But there was another novel
published two years prior to Emily's nineteen fifteen. Twain died
in nineteen ten, So nineteen fifteen a woman published a novel,
(06:58):
but she self published it, and I think it just
kind of went saying that this was a channeled through
Mark Twain. I think this one she did like automatic
writing or something like that, but it never didn't cause
a stir well, partially, I think she self published it
because you know that then it didn't get quite the distribution.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Then, and.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
I'm not exactly sure why they didn't catch on to
that one, but I do know that during the course
of Emily's sessions, there was a man who kept attending
and taking notes and he during and I learned this
part of the story when I was researching for the shadowscene.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
He was taking.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
Notes throughout the sessions, and then he started writing to
Clara Clements and asking her to verify details such as,
what was your grandfather's middle name?
Speaker 3 (07:59):
And did he have this kind of appearance?
Speaker 4 (08:01):
And so he was kind of going behind their back
talking to Clara Clements trying to quote unquote prove these details,
and it irritated Clara. I mean wouldn't it irritate you? You know,
someone's harassing you years after your loved one's death and
asking you to verify these ridiculous details that don't matter
to you.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
That you would claim would be none of their business exactly.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
And so apparently he wrote to her multiple times, and
her response to the last time was you could talk
to my lawyers. So by the time the book came out,
this same man gave it a wonderful review, but he
was kind of he was kind of responsible for its
downfall and away because he drew this attention to it,
(08:45):
and she was irritated because ultimately there was quite a
bit of controversy around it. You know, the more scathing
reviews said something like, if this is the best Twain
can do from the afterlife, he should stand down, or
something like that.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
But other people said, you know, this was actually a
wonderful novel.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
It's too bad she didn't just publish it and not
add this claim to it.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
So there's just all of these elements to the story
like that. There was, so they went to.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
The Supreme Court. There's all kinds of articles published. We
put some imagery of the articles in the zine so
you can see these headlines. It's like Twain's ghosts wrote
a story. And one of the funnier tidbits about the
lawsuit was, at one point a journalist was saying that
(09:40):
something like the proof of existence of afterlife will not
be discussed in psychic parlors, that will be discussed by
lawyers in a courtroom.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
And there was even talk at one point.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
That they were going to bring a board into the
courtroom and have Emily make contact with Twain as like proof,
but that unfortunately never manifested because that would have been
that would have been another amazing part of the story.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Well, Hachen's agreed to destroy all the existing copies of
the book and to cease publication, so they dropped the lawsuit.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Right right, they dropped the lawsuit. However, not all copies
were destroyed.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Ah uh huh.
Speaker 4 (10:24):
Because if you went to all that trouble and you
wrote a book and you were told to destroy all copies,
I think you wouldn't destroy all the copies. So we
know that a few copies remained. One because there's a fascimile.
There's a scan of one that you can find online
on Gutenberg dot org, which is a wonderful resource for
(10:46):
public domain works. And then during the course of writing
the zine, Jeff went to the Salem Witchboard Museum and
the curator of that museum he had a copy of
it actually, so there's actual photos of it in the
(11:07):
zine that they took of this very novel. I have
this fantasy that one day I'm going to be in
a used bookstore and it's just going to be there,
marked down to five dollars.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
No one's going to know what it is.
Speaker 4 (11:21):
And I'm just gonna, you know, say it cool and
get the copy of that book. But there are copies
out there that exist, and yeah they're rare. I'm sure
you can go on eBay and dig one up or something,
but that's not as fun as finding your own out
in the real world.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Well, this is was very popular then. Ouiji boards were
hot items, and the fact that Mark Twain, through the
other side wrote it got a lot of people interested
in it.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
Yeah, it actually, you know, it stood to it really
stood to be a success.
Speaker 4 (11:56):
And one of the elements of the story that doesn't
always come across when people tell the story is sort
of the position that Emily was in at the time.
So one of the accusations toward her has been that
it was a publicity stunt, and if it was, it
was a great one in some ways, right, because it
(12:19):
actually really drew a lot more attention to this. Right,
what's the saying, there's no such thing as bad publicity
because it draws attention to it. But you know, at
the she was actually a very successful writer at the time.
And keep in mind, you know, the early nineteen hundreds,
women couldn't vote yet, so they're options for what they
(12:39):
could do for a quote unquote for a living usually
revolved around waiting. You know, they do something for a
while and then they get married or so. She was
actually a pretty successful journalist and maintained an independent career
during that time, which is sort of unusual, and she
published a lot of mainstream publics. In fact, she had
(13:02):
a column that was a little bit like an advice column,
a little bit like she appeared as this woman who
would I forget the character's name, but she would you know,
it was like Lady something or other, and she would
respond to sort of a Missmanners type type of column.
She would respond to questions and stuff. So she actually
had a lot to lose by purporting something that would
(13:26):
damage her reputation and so called you know, you know,
upstanding society. And so I sort of reject the notion
that she was doing it just just to get attention.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
The other the other.
Speaker 4 (13:40):
Suggestion has been she had a friend has had a
friend named Pearl Kuran, and Pearl channeled through originally made
contact through a wigiboarg with Emily, actually with Emily's board,
but she made contact with this entity from the sixteen
hundreds named Patients Worth, and she went on to use
(14:03):
mostly automatic writing and some spirit board channeling to write
several volumes of poetry and novels from this spirit Patient's Worth.
And so Pearl Kouran had great success as this, and
she received like wonderful reviews and she won awards. And
so I've heard the theory that Emily was like, oh,
(14:27):
it worked for her, I want to do it too.
But in fact, if you look at the timeline, they
would have had no way of knowing how successful the
other would have been because they were actually doing these
projects simultaneously. So Pearl's success was at the same time
or just after, Emily had already ventured into this project.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
So again I kind of like I don't think that
that's now.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
I don't know if she really made contacts with the
ghost of Twain, but I do believe that she sat
down and used a wig aboard every day for a
better part of a year and made contact with something
and turned that into a story.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
And the book was two hundred and forty five pages long.
That's pretty good.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
Yeah, it's a full length novel.
Speaker 4 (15:17):
And so what they said they would do is they
would usually they had somebody. Sometimes it was that guy
that got them into trouble, but they usually had somebody
taking notes, right, they had like the two women would
be at the board and then someone would take notes.
Sometimes it was Emily's husband, sometimes it was a member
of the Cyclical Research Society, and that then they would
(15:38):
take that handwritten thing, and then Emily, who was a
writer and an editor, she would do like light edits
to it, and then they would actually read it back.
While Emily and Lola were on the board. They would
read it back and the ghost would interject if.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
He didn't like any of the changes.
Speaker 1 (16:00):
I love.
Speaker 4 (16:01):
Quite a laborious process, but you know, you've written books, George,
not that much more laborious than you know, being copy edited.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
Well, what got you to write Mark Twain's Luigi Mystery?
Why did you key in on this story?
Speaker 4 (16:16):
So I stumbled upon the story years ago when I
was researching some paranormal parlor projects for Wiser Books, and
it always kind of stuck with me. And then when
I wrote the Paranormal Parlor book, I kind of have
a whole chapter in there about women of the paranormal
and you know, kind of the context of the spiritualist
(16:37):
movement and Emily's story. It just there were a few
things about it and what the sources that were available
that didn't I knew there was more to it, and
there were everything that I read was taking history into
you know, it was either written from the point of view.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
Of a skeptic.
Speaker 4 (16:58):
And like a skeptical history story and who didn't necessarily
believe in, you know, ghosts, or was written from like
sort of a Twain scholar point of view and as
sort of like as a Twain adjacent story, and what
hadn't existed was somebody who kind of I'm not I'm
(17:19):
not a Twain scholar, but I am a scholar of
the of paranormal and paranormal women's history certainly, and also
I've used Ouija board. I know that they that things happen,
so I'm less of a less of a skeptic. But ultimately,
for me, it wasn't about whether or not Twain came through.
(17:39):
It was really about the story of Emily and who
she was and what happened to her and what happened
to you know, and the fact that there.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Was this this lawsuit.
Speaker 4 (17:49):
And and then she was sort of erased from history
after that, even though she had contributed all of these
other things, and and in fact, some of you know,
for example, Pearl Kuran, it was Emily who got the
board and dragged her friend. They were both housewives, and
(18:10):
Saint Louis dragged her friend to this salon with her
and they started experimenting together. So when Jeff approached me
and said, hey, do you know I'm starting this new
zine called Shadow Zine, and we're going to you know,
just kind of dive deep into paranormal stories, and I said,
I have always wanted because every time I would think
(18:33):
about it, I would find out something else. For example,
her ashes were never claimed, which I think is such
an odd thing, right, And of course, you know, you
you know how it goes, you find out this stuff,
like you know, I found that out two years after that.
I had written the story in the in the book,
so I just know so much more about it now,
(18:55):
and I just want to tell the full encompassing story
and talk about the context of what she was up against,
what she what she succeeded, what were the failures, and
then why, you know, why did she kind of get
erased from history to the point where her ashes remained unclaimed.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Listen to more Coast to Coast a m. Every weeknight
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George Noory
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