How Spiritualism Works

Something spooky was born on the American frontier in the mid-19th century: the idea that people’s personalities survive death and that some gifted individuals can communicate with them. It developed into a religion that some still practice today.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You should know, a production of five
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Bryan over there
somewhere in the heart of darkness. I'm in the office, dude.

(00:22):
Where I hear your voice, Chuck, but I can't see you. Yeah.
I mean, I don't know why people need to know
the behind the scenes things, but home recording provides some
challenges and I was getting pretty frustrated. So I was like,
you know what, I'm gonna go to the studio. Yeah,
because I know it'll sound great in here, and I

(00:42):
know there won't be dogs and children, and uh, everyone
should feel good about it because I have not seen
another human being. Yeah, in the building. Security didn't a
security guard try to run you off the road when
you were parking. He didn't try. He stopped me literally
in the parking lot. Was like, what are you doing here?
I was like, I'm going to my job, and he

(01:02):
said okay, he said stay home, save lives. But before
we left, I mean apparently since I left. Uh, they
have these. Um, there's a bottle of microphone sanitizer. WHOA,
there are headphone sanitized or not sanitized, but just disposable

(01:24):
headphone covers. Sweet, and I feel more safe here than
I do at my house. What microphone sanitizer that sounds
really made up? Yeah, it's um. We'll go ahead and
buzz market. No I won't because it smells bad, and
I didn't want to buzz market and then say it
smells bad. It's apple flavor, which would make Emily just

(01:46):
like turn over in her bed. It's a it's a
good um jolly rancher flavor. Not the best scent, though.
I hate it when they add sent to stuff that
doesn't need scent. Try finding an unscented garbage back these days. Uh?
Is it tough too? Yeah? Man, every single one of them.
I even got some that said unscented and it still

(02:08):
smells like something you've missed it. In parentheses underneath it
says mostly we can't help ourselves one percent. Rosemary Well,
I don't have my over the ear headphones right now.
I just look one of you mas long scarves wrapped

(02:33):
around my head twice to keep from your audio bleeding
onto the track through my microphone. You either look like
Lawrence of Arabia or like you just wandered in with
a headed tree. Yeah, I had to kept slipping off
with the lawrence of Arabia. Look, so I had to
do it the other way around. So now it looks
like I have a nineteent century toothache. Oh, man, to

(02:57):
me another picture. It's not it's not very comfortable. My
Adam's apple is being pressed towards the back of my
throat right now. Yeah, what was the deal with that
whole toothache thing? Like? Was there ice in there something?
Or was it just like I just die their gin
shutting help? Knowing that era, there were probably some sort
of like razor blade and heroin concoction that would just

(03:20):
scrape the area where the tooth was and inject you
with dope to keep you from complaining. Doctor Dr Payne's
new chin wrap now with more leeches right from the
makers of microphone sanitizer. All right, let's get into this.
We've already been goofing around for too long. Let's just finish,

(03:43):
just get this over with. Let's get serious and talk
about spiritualism, shall we. This is a great, great job
by grab Stir, great idea by you, and it'll be
a great episode. Yeah, grab Stir, We we asked him
to help us out with this, so we put together
a world class article for us, and um, when we
asked him, we said, hey, how about spiritualism because my
brother wrote his dissertation on that should be simple and

(04:06):
I mean just afforded us that it did. It didn't
even like a racist brother's first name. He just did
a strike through and wrote ed after easy Money. So, um,
it is like a really really interesting phenomena and something
I think we kind of take for granted because it

(04:26):
pops up everywhere in our world in pop culture. I mean,
it's just a part of everything from crystal balls to seances,
to Weiji boards to tarot cards, all of this stuff. Movies. Yeah,
as a matter of fact, I ran across so you know,
dan Ackroyd's huge into UFOs, right, I didn't know that. Actually,

(04:46):
he's also enormous into spirits and ghosts. It's actually one
of the impetus is Yeah, I think so of him
writing Ghostbusters. He's actually a fourth generation spiritualist with a
capital at like the Church Spiritualism. He was raised that way.
His his father, grandfather, and great grandfather were all spiritualists

(05:08):
and that's how he was raised as well, um, so
it does this kind of it's so permeated our our culture.
It's weird to think of a time when it wasn't there.
But there actually was this period starting and riot about
in the middle of the nineteenth century going well into
the twentieth century where there was a movement that basically said,

(05:32):
the spirit world is there, it exists. When you die,
your personality survives, and some people actually have a talent
for communicating with the spirits and the spirit world, and
we're going to start doing that. And that was spiritualism,
the spiritualist movement. Yeah. Um, and ed uh pointed out,

(05:54):
which we should as well, that ghosts and things like
that and ghost stories they had been around people have
been around everyone since the dawn of humankind has tried
to figure out like what happens after you die too,
people visit, do they take on, you know, other other
forms or whatever. So that's different than what we're talking about.

(06:14):
What we're talking about is spiritualism in that it became
a a big scam in way to get money out
of people who are in pain for my friends or
loved one's death sadly, Yeah, yeah, for sure. Um, but
there is like a through a thread through there where. Um.

(06:36):
This same era, the same period, in this belief in
communicating with the spirits and the idea that you could
go to a seance and talk to your dead loved
one or whatever. It produced this other group of people
who said, yes, there are tons of fraudsters and hucksters
out there who are taking advantage of this, but there's

(06:56):
also this real, Um, there's a the real version of
of it actually does exist, and we're gonna apply this
new fangled thing called science to investigate it. And that
produced that that era of people like Charles Fort or
Harry Price who visited the Borerley Rectory the most haunted

(07:19):
place in England. Um. Or uh, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Um,
like those guys. I know I'm trying, not a new version. UM.
Like these guys though they they were they they believed
in this stuff and the possibility of it that they
also believed in the possibly of applying science to it,
and even if science couldn't explain it, it didn't mean

(07:41):
that it didn't exist. And then there was another group
who were what we would recognize today is like pure skeptics,
like the James Randy's of the day who all followed
in the footsteps of Harry who DENI is we'll see
who kind of created this. So you had hucksters, believers
who were skeptical and genuine pure skeptic dicks who believed
none of it was correct. Yeah, and what I mentioned before,

(08:04):
like all the previous attempts to do stuff like this,
pre mid eighteen hundreds in largely the Northeast United States,
it was more religious like prophets and shaman and stuff
like that. Spiritualism was the birth of the Madame Cleo's
of the world. Uh Ed refers to it as a democratization,

(08:25):
and that's one way to look at it, but it was.
It was the idea that hey, if you are chosen
and you are special, um, you could you know, it's
not like you have to be some religious leader. You
can just be a regular person with the gift exactly. Yeah,
which was a huge sea change. And um, there are
basically a few things that kind of came together for

(08:46):
this mentality this um this fertile kind of imagination of
this pocket of America and western New York where all
of this began to kind of take shape. And one
of those things was the frontier, this frontier mentality um.
The historian Frederick Jackson Turner called it the significance of

(09:06):
the frontier in American history, and he basically said, man,
the people who are living out there on the frontier,
they're living on the edge of civilization, the the leading
edge right right beyond that what they're coming up against.
And and this is highly debatable because part of what
they were coming up against was Native America. It just

(09:27):
wasn't a civilization in the forum that any European had
ever encountered before. But the idea was that the people
who are living on the frontier and expanding westward were
basically being forced just by virtue of having to survive
under these weird conditions outside of culture and civilization in

(09:47):
the European sense, that that they were having to abandon
that culture and basically make it up as they went
along and recreate a new culture from the frontier, and
that that just kind of through the rules out the window. Yeah,
this is one of my favorite things when we do topics,
that when you can look back at a movement and

(10:10):
point to factors that at any other time in history,
if just one of these might not have taken you know,
might not have influenced it, that it might not have
happened at all. There's something about that that I've always
really loved. And uh, this is a perfect example. The
frontier life is one. Religious fervor is another. Uh. And
specifically in New York in the eighteen hundreds, people were

(10:32):
really caught up on this religious fervor and it kind
of went from town to town and there was no uh,
there was no big religious authorities in the area. They
were out on the frontier. They had no structured hierarchy
of religion, and so again they could just make up stuff. Uh.
And I'm not saying that's not tied to this next sidence,

(10:53):
because I don't want to turn anyone off, but a
lot of religion sprang out from this region during that time,
like Millerism and Mormon is um and uh, Quakers and
Shakers kind of had a a resurgence, basically a shot
in the arm, just because of this fervor going on
at the time. And I couldn't quite put where um Millerism,

(11:13):
why it seems so familiar, And then I remember that
that was the woman who gave birth eventually to the
Seventh day Adventists and that popped up in the Kellogg episode.
Remember yeah, yeah, Millerism was where it all started. But
that was and that really kind of indicates And I
love it when things just things we talked about before,
like have even more context from something else. But that

(11:35):
that just kind of goes to show you, like, this
is the kind of place where somebody could be like
I'm in contact with the spirits or Jesus came and
hung out with me or whatever, and this is what
I what I know and what I've been told. So, um,
let's start a religion based on it, and not even
necessarily just religions too, but also like social movements, like

(11:55):
utopian societies where into your food twenty times, so you'll
poopies here exactly, um. Or you know, women have equal
equal rights as men, which is just completely radical. Or um,
how about fifty of us lived together and just by
the fact that we all lived together were married according
to this utopian society, just just whatever you wanted to

(12:19):
to do, you kind of could because the frontier through
the rules out the window, or at the very least
cultural traditions that most people are raised into. When that's
not there, people make up their own. Yeah, for sure. Uh.
And the third big factor that UM that you mentioned
was we haven't talked about yet with science. And you

(12:40):
talked a little bit about science at the beginning, but
the idea that in the middle of the Industrial Revolution,
when we're really learning a lot more than we ever
have about science and things like electro electromagnetism and things
that you can't see, but science is saying, oh, it's there.
This kind of fed the spiritualist movement because you know,

(13:00):
that's something else that you can't see that other people
are saying is there. So they're like, well, hey, if
science is saying there are things out there we can't
quite explain, but trust me it's real, then why shouldn't
I believe this stuff too? Yeah? Or well this electric
like electro magnetism, maybe that actually explains how spirit survive
after death. It was a really wide open time as

(13:24):
far as you know, um acceptance of possibilities rather than
no science has said this is not possible, or it
can't explain this, or you can't see it with your
own eyes, so it won't It doesn't it doesn't jibe like.
There was a lot more willingness among people who were
scientifically minded to say, well, maybe this is a good

(13:46):
explanation of that. Let's investigate. Yeah, the birth of science
and medicine was a really crazy time. It really was.
It really was. So should we take a break? Yes,
come on, man, Yes, I think you're you're beard holsters
on too tight. I haven't been able to feel my

(14:08):
nose for about fifteen minutes. All right, we'll go, uh
rub your nose and bring some feeling back, and we'll
talk about some of the furty ritualists. Okay, I'm gonna

(14:43):
say it's spiritualists. Nice um. And there there was actually
so there was a bunch of factors that led to
the beginning of all of this, including there was one that,
um that I also came across that we need to mention,
a guy named Andrew Jackson Davis who combined ideas of
the German hypnotist Franz Mesmer with the Swedish philosopher of

(15:05):
the soul, Emmanuel swedenborg Um. They were both eighteenth century.
He kind of brought them together, and he was a
bit of a nobody, but he emerged very very soon
after the Fox sisters became celebrities as a founder of
the spiritualist movement. Almost like he was doing it off
in isolation at the same time that all of us began. Yeah,

(15:27):
so the Fox sisters figure into this really quite largely. Uh.
And you can even pinpoint a date to what you
might consider the birth of the modern American spiritualist movement
is March thirty one, eighty eight in Hydesville, New York,
near Rochester, at a farm. This Fox family lived there,
real people, not a family of cute little red for

(15:50):
fuzzy creatures voiced by George Clooney exactly. Uh. Mr and
Mrs Fox had three daughters. Actually one was much older.
Her name was Leiah. She was nine seen in twenty
three years older. Whow was that funny? Because I saw
a picture of her, and she's like the spitting image
of Jeffrey Ross. You gotta look her up, Jeff That's

(16:13):
that's what Lea Fox looked like. I didn't see. I
saw the picture of the three of him, and I
didn't get a good close up. That's an unfortunate look
for him and her. Yeah, anybody really? Uh? And I
think he would admit that too. Oh yeah, but he's
doing all right there. What if he had really thin skin?
Ros Master he couldn't take a joke against him something.
Have you seen that Bumping Mike show. It's pretty good.

(16:36):
Uh No, is that the roast competition thing? Yeah? He
and Davidtel just sit there and roast people. It's really good. Man.
I used to love Davidtel back in the day. He
has just turned into like the weird like comedy genius
friend that that Jeffrey Ross has, and it shines through
in this awesome I'll check it out. So the Fox family,

(16:58):
older daughter Lea was nice teen and twenty three years
older than younger Kate and Maggie or I guess Maggie
and Kate if you're going in that order. And on
that night in March eight, they heard these rapping, knocking
sounds and they didn't know where it was coming from,
and that kind of kick started this whole thing. In

(17:19):
a weird way, this led and we'll talk about the
more specifics, but in a weird way, this led to
them eventually saying, wait a minute, we can make some
money if we convince people that young Kate and Maggie
are a conduit to the other side. Yeah. The the
thing is is like when it went from you know, like, oh,
there's a ghost rapping or knocking like a Poulter guyst

(17:41):
kind of thing too. This ghost will respond to questions
from the sisters through rapping and knocking, like how old
is Maggie? And it would wrap like fifteen times or
something like that. And that that really caught a lot
of people's attention. And Maggie and Kate moved in with Leah.
And apparently, from what I read, it was Leah whose

(18:03):
idea it was to take the show on the road
try to scam people out of money. It was not
a super great person from from what I read. Yeah,
I just sorry. I was thinking of a rapping ghost
and right got sidetracked. George Washington And I'm here to
say I love fruity pebbles in a mate a way.

(18:25):
You know what's funny is I was going to do
that exact same thing, but for the Fox family. That's
like the go to rap for guys like us. Oh,
it totally is guys who can't wrap. Yeah, I'm here
to say something, something something in a something way. The
Zach Morris method, I think, is what that is. I
wonder if that's based on an actual rap. I guess

(18:46):
there was one at some point that really did that, right, Yeah,
I think Blondie was the popular. Um my name is Blondie.
I'm here to say I'm gonna try wrap because it's
popular today. Exactly. So, uh, where what were you saying?
I was laughing. I didn't even notice. I'm sorry, Oh,

(19:08):
just that it was basically I was laying at Leah's
feet for corrupting the younger sisters. Yeah, she kind of.
She ended up managing them as a unit, I think
later on, if I'm not mistaken, But there aren't great
records of everything going on at the time. But um,
the idea was that Kate and Maggie were the ones.
It wasn't really her parents, but they're the ones who

(19:30):
could actually communicate with this barn spirit. And so they said,
you know what, they not only can talk to this spirit.
Media starts, you know, getting ahold of these stories, and
obviously back then that it was a very big deal
with something like this coming out in the media with
not a lot else going on. But they moved and
would go away to other places and said, wherever they go,

(19:54):
ghosts are talking to them. So you guys, my daughters
are talented and gifted. They're not just talking to the
what we think is a murder victim from our previous house,
right right, which which just changed everything. And also rather suspiciously,
Leah suddenly realized that she was able to communicate with

(20:14):
spirits too, So all three of the sisters were able
to But yeah, not just that one murder victim in
their house that had been the original ghost, but just
about any ghost. And this was the beginning of the
spiritualist movement. Basically a trank by a couple of teenage
girls that got way out of hand really fast. Yeah,

(20:34):
and so what do they do. They start having these
uh private sessions where people would pay money, and they
would wear these big long dresses that were in fashion
at the time, and they would no one's exactly sure
the exact mechanism, but they would do some sort of
toe knocking or something where they couldn't be seen. And
that was the Morse code that they said was the

(20:54):
ghost speaking to them. So it was it's really um.
They they had like a little wooden stool under the
table with them and they would take off their shoes surreptitiously,
and from what I can gather, they could pop their
knuckle of their toe up and down with enough force

(21:17):
that it would make a thud on that wooden stool.
It was. Yeah, they should have just been like, forget
all this spirits stuff, but this weird thing, um. But
that that was that was the phantom knocking. And we
know that because Maggie later on confessed to the New

(21:37):
York Tribune maybe or the Post one of them, um
and and said like, this is how, this is how
we did it actually in an effort to take her
sister Lea down. UM. But it ended up taking the
spiritualist movement down in large part. But that was it,
like thumping your knuckle on a wooden stool. They did

(21:59):
this for forty forty years. They made a living around
the world doing that and created a new religion from it. Yeah,
and the UM. By the time the spiritualism fad sort
of died away, the two younger sisters were and she
recanted that confession, by the way, but everyone's like, yeah,

(22:19):
you already said it could try, um. But the two
younger sisters uh and Maggie especially were in pretty bad
shape with alcoholism. And they died sort of in a
call your brother's sq way, very quietly and uh, fairly
destitute in New York City in the eighteen nineties, trapped
under newspapers maybe, but now they they had very interesting

(22:43):
but also very sad lives like Um, I think Maggie
married a skeptic and he not not a good move,
right he died. He talked her out of doing spiritualism,
but she went back after he died. Kate married another
spiritual since she had a huge career um touring the

(23:03):
world as a spiritualist, made a lot of money, um,
but but apparently lost it all. And Leah again was
just kind of I guess, a bit of a villain
in this story. Where's that movie? Man? I was wondering
the exact same thing. It's crazy it hasn't been made
fifty times already, you know, Yeah, that would be that
would be pretty cool. I couldn't even find a good

(23:24):
documentary on it. Oh yeah, on them at least. I'm
sure there are plenty on that they're featured in. But
and no matter how you look at it too, whether
you look at it from the aspect of a believer
who thinks like this is where it all started, these
two sisters, and there's plenty of reasons to believe if

(23:46):
you're a credulous person or um confiding, as Mark Twain
would put it, that, you know, like the the Andrew
Jackson Davis guy who who kind of started this thing
on his own, supposedly wrote on March thirty one, eighty eight,
that spirit came to him and said, the work has begun. Um,

(24:06):
we just started something over here, and then later found
out about the Fox sisters. Like, there's all sorts of
stuff you can believe, and so it's interesting from that respect.
But also if you're just a pure gied in the
Wold skeptic who do not believe in any kind of
afterlife or soul or anything like that, it's equally interesting
in a totally different way that this whole like almost

(24:29):
century long movement started from that. You know, Yeah, I
just love it. I love this whole story. So it's
sweeping the nation at this point by the eighteen fifties,
and uh, we're gonna go over some of the different
things that they would do, some of the methods that
they would use to communicate with the other side, to
fake communicate with the other side. Uh. The first one

(24:52):
is channeling um and these would be trance mediums. So
this is like when you've seen in a movie when
someone is just talking like I am in my regular
voice and I'm entering the trance and I'm doing a
lot of a lot of showy things, uh, to kind
of get people, you know, pretty pumped up. I feel
like they're spending their money. Well, you giving me pumped up,

(25:13):
I'll tell you that. And all of a sudden, you know,
I go into this other voice and I'm like a
small child. Uh, maybe the parents lost a child, or
I'm a woman, or I'm Davis Jr. Hey, Brad, I
just came back to say that, don't worry about me.
This cat is doing just fine. I came back to

(25:34):
say I love pretty pebbles in a major way. Invented rap.
That's right. So, uh, if you were a good talented medium,
that that meant that you were probably a pretty good actor.
You could probably do good voices. Um. Sometimes in the
case of course Scott, who I know, we've talked about
her before, her name, can't remember what, I have no

(25:56):
recollection or talking about her. Yeah, it sounds super familiar.
But she was one of the top mediums trans mediums
because she was this very sort of demure, attractive young
lady and her whole demeanor was about that. And then
she was apparently a great actor because she would go
into this these big, heavy, gruff voices, and the gulf

(26:17):
between who she was and who she was imitating was
so great that everyone was just like, fantastic, Corra Scott,
you're a genius. Well also, yeah, she was like a
little twelve year old girl when she started, and supposedly
she would take the stage and confidently discuss like physics
and philosophy and all that stuff because there was some
authoritative spirit who had basically taken possession of her. Yeah,

(26:42):
and uh, I looked up her picture and Kate Winslet
I think is from my casting couches, who I would
throw in that movie. Okay, not not as the twelve
year old that would be weird unless they do some
sort of bad irishman d aging. But she looked enough
like her, and she's a she's a great actor. So
um So that's so. So. Channeling is what you kind

(27:03):
of think of, where somebody becomes possessed, the medium becomes possessed. Right. Yeah.
There's also ones where like they're they're just saying like,
oh I can hear what they're saying, but you can't
because they're speaking to me through telepathy, right, Okay, that
that reminds me of John Edwards. Remember him crossing over
with John Edwards? Yeah, I can't picture him. I think

(27:26):
if I saw a picture I would totally remember, though
you would he would. What a weird time the nineties
were as far as stuff like that goes, although I
think his show ran from two thousand to two thousand four. Yeah,
but that can sort of coincided with the uh Reverend
Bob Dobbs and the televangelism and all that good stuff.
Um time. So then there's automatic writing was another big

(27:48):
one too, And all of this should sound familiar again
because the stuff just is so permeated in a pop
culture it's crazy. But automatic writing is instead of the
medium's voice being taken over, the medium being possessed in
and speaking as the spirit, um, the spirit took over
their hand and they would start writing and so in

(28:10):
just the same way Corus Scott would um have a
completely different personality or a different voice or different accent
or something like that. This, like the handwriting or the
word usage or anything like that would be different than
the medium's normal handwriting. This is automatic writing and there
was I'm trying to decide if I could do that. Well,

(28:31):
sometimes they would use their non dominant hands, So if
you want to change your handwriting, just do that to start.
And then uh. There was a woman named Pearl Curran
who wrote at least five thousand poems, novels and plays
through automatic writing, all channeling the spirit of a seventeenth

(28:52):
century woman from England named patients Worth. That's prolific. That's
a lot of words. And then what about direct voice? Yeah,
direct voices When you are a medium, you contact a
spirit and the spirit is so powerful that they just
speak to you directly, like the medium is just sitting

(29:14):
there with their mouth clothes. Uh. And this happened usually
in a dark room where they would have a business
partner just behind the curtain obviously use talking, or maybe
they were just doing a bad ventriloquist kind of deal
where they're it's dark enough where you can't really see
their lips moving throwing their voice. There was a woman

(29:34):
named Leslie Flint is a medium. Oh really he looked
like the old man from up. Oh did it make
you cry when you looked at him? My daughter watch that?
Here have these balloons? So yeah, Leslie. I actually love

(29:55):
that name for a man, so and I don't know
why I assumed, but he would recreate famous people like
Sammy Davis Jr. But was it very good at it apparently,
which is kind of funny. That makes us a little
bit more ridiculous and fun Well, I was reading um
obituary about him that was written by somebody who attended
one of his or a couple I think of his seances,

(30:18):
and they said things like, you know a lot of
times you could tell it like what the trickery was
or whatever, but there are other times where he would
like be speaking over the voice, which is tough to
do with ventriloquism. Or one time he was tested, he
was made to hold colored water in his mouth while
the spirit voice was speaking, and you're like, wow, you

(30:39):
know that's pretty interesting. And then you just think, well,
there's there's always an explanation for it, um, And you know,
maybe there's another person who who was a Confederate in
the room who knows, but um, it just goes to
show that even still even today, and this guy's obituary
that was written in the nineties the nines um that
they were like, yeah, you know, he was largely considered

(31:01):
a trickster fraud. But they'll still hedge and say, you know,
but there were a couple of things and at the
very least it's unexplained, which is pretty interesting and neat,
but that doesn't necessarily mean that, Oh no, there really
was a spirit that was talking in the room thanks
to him. Amazing. So we had table turning. Uh, this
is at a you know, this isn't like a theatrical performance.

(31:24):
This is in a small room. Everyone and this kind
of think wegia board with this. It's the same sort
of thing, except the wigia board would be the actual
table that you're sitting at. You and everyone would put
their hands on the table and then the table would
move or tilt or something when you're asking questions. So
it's inhabiting the furniture. Of course, what's going on here
is either like knee movements or sometime they had uh

(31:47):
these rings on the medium's finger that were slotted and
could move the table around without anyone noticing. Just another
little parlor trick basically, yeah, or you know the idea
that in your moving the table yourself like AUGI board. Um,
I can't remember what it's called, but basically your your
body is is moving without your brain being aware of it.

(32:11):
And then there's also just the straight up power of suggestion,
and this applies to table turning in a lot of
other stuff. But if you're saying, like if you're the
medium at a seance and you said the table is rising,
it's rising people who are willing to believe, a lot
of people who went to seance is wanted to believe.
We're already believed in this stuff. Just the power of

(32:31):
suggestion could be like, oh, it is raising a little bit,
I can feel it. I can tell kind of thing. Yeah.
My favorite, and uh, I bet your favorite too is
ectoplasmic manifestations. Yeah, it's pretty good. This is when you
would actually, as a spiritualist, produce something physical, something would

(32:52):
manifest itself, uh, an actual substance. And it was they
called it ectoplasm, and they could pull it from their
boy and it was just basically something that they would
make beforehand, um out of whatever. I mean, they would
make out out of all kinds of things. It was
one story about someone who was actually gluing cut out

(33:13):
faces from a magazine onto dolls and those were ectoplasm spirits.
But they would hide these things sometimes like up their
butt or in their other body cavities, and they would
pull these things out. And some of the pictures that
you see online if you look up ectoplasma eighteen hundreds
seance is just the pictures themselves are hysterical and frightening

(33:36):
all at the same time. Yeah, and especially now when
you look back and see them, you're like, how did
anybody fall for that? And it's really important to keep
in mind one they wanted to believe, but two, these
seances would be carried out in dark rooms to where
you couldn't see much at all. Um, you just suddenly
see some luminous you know, cloth or something that you

(33:59):
were led to believe was ectoplasm kind of what looked
like floating in the middle of the table or something
like that. It's stuff that's that's really easy to explain.
But in a darkened room that you've been sitting in
for three hours communicating with spirits, you might be a
lot more prone to to buy into it than under
normal circumstances. Yeah, for sure. Uh, maybe you're a little drunk,

(34:23):
right tipsy. Levitation was another big one, nice little uh
party trick. Um. I actually could sort of do this
for a little while. The David Blaine method. I don't
know if you ever saw his when he made himself levitate.
It's just kind of hopping up and down and air right. No,
it's it's you're thinking of trampolines. Oh, that's not the

(34:47):
same thing. People, people can see those. Uh No, it's
all about the angle with the David Blaine method um
of getting them to see you from the right angle
to where what you're really doing is you're rising your
body up with just one, like just your first three
toes on your right foot, and you're and you're hiding

(35:07):
that with your other foot, so it looks like you're
just a sort of levitating a few inches off the ground,
and then you act like you're unsteady, and then you
land back down and go, oh boy, that was a
good one. That was pretty powerful. So wait a minute,
David Blaine can raise his entire body weight with three toes, well,
I mean he's on his toes. I just I mean

(35:29):
I could do it at the time too. This is
in the nineties. Man, that's impressive. I don't think I've
ever had the kind of toe strength there that is
required to do that. You can raise yourself up with
one foot in a seated position. No, no, no, you're standing.
Oh oh yeah. So what you're doing is you're standing
there and then you raise yourself off the ground with

(35:51):
just the toes on your right foot, let's say, and
you're keeping your left foot is shielding that so you
can't quite see it, and it just creates if you
got someone at the right angle. And I got pretty
good at it. My roommate Justin was like, you're getting
bet a mate, right, Oh, I'm getting drunk. Well, both
of those things were happening. I thought you were talking about, like,
you know, like a fake here or something like that

(36:13):
where they're sitting cross legged in their avocating I was like,
to do that with just three toes, That in and
of itself is pretty impressive, but it's all right, What
are the other There's another couple of things they did too,
What are the photography? Pretty pretty straightforward stuff where you know,
this is the very beginnings of photography. So people didn't

(36:36):
understand double exposures unless you're a photographer. But if you were,
you could do all sorts of neat stuff like double
exposed something to put a ghostly face in the background
over someone's shoulder. U. I saw one. I saw a
spirit photograph where it was a ghostly arm. It also
could have been a genie coming out of a bottle.

(36:57):
One of the two. It looked exactly the same, but
it was like that it was on a table, so
they were like, this is a spirit arm levitating the table.
So they're like tying three things together. Table turning, levitating
and spirit photography. Those are great. I think the spirit
photography just because they were taking advantage of this new technology.
People didn't even understand. It was like the deep fake

(37:18):
of the time, and they were probably like everybody, we
got maybe three years, Yeah, we better get prolific, and
then everyone's gonna be like, oh, that's just double exposure. Um.
And then people like I said earlier to a lot
of the new age stuff that's tied into spiritualism today,
like tarot readings or um oh, I don't know, astrology,

(37:42):
that kind of stuff that had nothing to do with
this because spiritualists, all of it grew out of Christianity,
so there was some Christian basis to all of the
spiritualist practices. And even though in a lot of ways
it was extraordinarily her ridical. There was no religious leader

(38:02):
in charge of anything. There was no scripture or doctrine
or anything like that. It was still very much tied
into and born out of Christianity, So stuff like occult
things would have would have been very much frowned upon
by spiritualists totally. Should we take another break, I think
we should. All right, We'll take another break and tell

(38:24):
you about what the Civil War had to do with
all of this right after this, all right, so, uh,

(38:56):
pre Civil War in the United States, spiritualism was popular
or it was booming, but it was more like the
kind of thing that you did in a theater and
you would go see it as a curiosity or you
might just maybe even knew it was fake and it
was just entertainment. There wasn't a lot going on back then.
Kind of penguins in a zoo today, like you know,
they're fake, but it's still fun to look at, right

(39:18):
and not. Why not go pay a nickel to see
madam whatever, do her little do her little erotic uh,
because we'll get into that he's got a little sexy
at times. Do your little ghost, Jimmy. This is part
of the part of the draw. The ghost Jimmy. But um,
we need to talk about a couple of things here.
That the Civil War for sure, but um, one of

(39:38):
the things that was going on. You know, we've been
talking about a lot about the northeastern United States, and
there's a very good reason it didn't take hold in
the South. It's because the way Christianity was and so
I might argue still is in the South didn't leave
a lot of room. Um, the hierarchy didn't leave a
lot of room for other schools of thought. And it

(39:59):
was based sically, even though it wasn't necessarily cult. It
was just shut down kind of from the beginning in
the South. They're like, we'll stick to our voodoo, thank
you very much, exactly, keep that spiritualism stuff out. Yeah,
So it was just not a big thing in the South. Um.
The mediums at the time would move off the stage

(40:22):
sometimes and have these these private sciences. Uh. Sometimes they
would get in touch with a family member, but oftentimes
it would just be kind of the same in the
state as the stage show. They would say, like, I'm
gonna get in touch with Sammy Davis Jr. Or whatever.
The popular dead figure at the time was Sure. Um,
but that was for like, pre Civil War, it was
an entertainment, it was an amusement. But when the Civil

(40:43):
War came and a lot of people died in the
Civil War, and that means that a lot of people
who survived the Civil War lost a loved one. And
this might have been people who you know, went off
to fight and just never came back, never heard from again,
no nothing, have no idea where they died, where they

(41:04):
were buried. And so that kind of grief, you know,
that transcends any kind of time or place, and it
created a lot of people, a large population of people
who were very interested in getting in touch with their
dead relative. And it just so happened that at the
time there was a movement afoot that said, oh, well,
this guy over here is actually really good at getting

(41:26):
in touch with the dead one. Don't you have a
seance with him? You just have to, you know, pay
him to to do this work, because it is a
lot of work, whether you are a believer and a skeptic,
it's a lot of work to have been a medium
during this time. Um. And so they would be paid
and they would make a living like this, and so
these seances, these performances, uh, were decreased in size, but

(41:51):
vastly increased in frequency. Yeah, a lot more spiritualists doing
smaller mediums for families or smaller seances for fami lens.
And the same thing happened after World War One as well.
So it's um, you know, it's kind of all fun
and games until it gets to this level. If it's
a big theater show, fine whatever, Uh, go pay your

(42:12):
money and get entertained for an hour. But when you
are taking people's money who have lost loved ones in battle,
then that's when it gets kind of really ugly if
you ask me, right, And that's where I think a
lot of the genuine skeptics who who beat this kind
of stuff to a pulp, that's the place that they're
coming from, you know, not not not necessarily that it's

(42:33):
like an a front of science or reason or common
sense or anything like that, but that there are a
lot of people who have parted um money from people
who were bereaved at the time, and you just you
don't take advantage of people who are undergoing grief. That's
a pretty shoddy thing to do. That's a life lesson
right there for everybody listening, especially Not only that, not

(42:57):
only taking their money. But I imagine in a lot
of cases people made real life decisions based on things
that would happen in these seances. You know, right's to
sell the family farm, like yeah, stuff like that. Oh God,
I hadn't thought about that. And not only sell the
family farms, sell it to me the medium. That's what
your dead for. What something's coming through there saying pennies

(43:19):
on the dollar, that's great. So yeah, that's terrible. So
by the end of the twentie century, things started to
decline a bit. Um. One was just pure greed. There
were too many of them out there. They were all
trying to outdo one another. They were trying to draw

(43:40):
bigger crowds and more money, and they were getting more
outrageous by doing so. And that meant, just like anything,
when you try and do that, the bigger you try
to force something to be Sometimes that can lead to
its kind of early death. I guess, yeah, go big
or go home, But eventually you're going to go home anyway.
That's the end of that saying. I love right, so um.

(44:01):
Part of it was that they they were making more
and more audacious claims, but also there were more and
more scientists like those that that UM open minded scientific
approach had become a lot more hardened towards UM spiritualism
and mediums because so many had been investigated and found

(44:23):
it just be total frauds. Most of the time, the
outcome was the the medium couldn't reproduce this ectoplasm or
get in touch with the spirit when they were under
controlled conditions, or they they went for it and they
were found to be a fraud, like the the the
knuckle of their toe was found to be rapping on

(44:45):
a stool or something like that. UM. And so as
these reports kept coming out, more and more these scientific
investigators were like, I don't think any of this is real,
and they would be interviewed in newspapers and the papers
would run these articles, and so over time the just
the general public kind of turned away from spiritualism. Is

(45:05):
is hocom and bunk. But the thing is is not
everyone did and even still today. Go asked Dan a Kroid,
there is a group of people who would here to
spiritualism as a as a religion, No for sure, UM.
And one of the big reasons that it didn't completely
go away was UH, spiritualists were very smart and that

(45:26):
they would use influencers of the day in their act.
They would seek out these well known people. Um. They
would tour the world, sometimes tour Europe and do um
seances with like royal families of various countries, the newspapers
right about this. Um, they would get a quote or
maybe demand a quote from someone like well known and

(45:50):
they would say, all right, I'll come to a science,
but you gotta give me a quote that I can
use my my flyer or whatever. What's that called pull quote? No? No, no,
the that that fallacy, the logical fallacy, appeal to authority,
I think, oh yeah, yeah, the appeal to authority, yeah,
which you know makes a lot of sense if people see, oh,

(46:10):
well they did a stance for the Prince of Monaco
or or Sammy Davis Jr. Then it's got to be
good enough for me. It's not pseudoscience at all, because
why would Sammy Davis Jr. Believe in pseudoscience? Right, He's
just a Satanist. He doesn't care about pseudoscience, that's right. So, Um.
One of the other authorities that they would appeal to,

(46:32):
Chuck was, um, what this one. There's an expose written
in seven and by God if I can't, I can't
find it anywhere in my tabs. But it was basically
uh oh, Revelations of a Spirit Medium is what it
was called. And it was written anonymously by a medium,
a huckster of fraud, and I'm pretty sure it was published.

(46:56):
And it is like four pages exposing all the tip
and all that stuff, all the tricks. But one of
there's a glossary of like nineteenth century slang words among hoaxters.
It's amazing. But one of them was the top heavy,
and that was a scientist who was over credentialed. They
had all these PhDs and everything like that, so they
were booksmarked, but they were super gullible. And if you

(47:18):
could get a top heavy to basically say, like, I
can't explain it, Science can't explain it, that would go
a very long way to bolstering your career. You know. Yeah,
Even if you talked to a hundred scientists and one
of them was a top heavy who had said something
valuable to you, that's the only one You're You're the
tenth dentist of that I'm out of ten dentists, right,

(47:40):
exactly exactly, And that's all you need, especially if the
other nine dentists just keep their traps shut because they
have better things to do. But there were a bunch
of people who would not keep their traps shut. Um,
I guess actually one of a legendary top heavy even
though he wasn't a scientist, credential or otherwise was um

(48:01):
so Arthur Conan Doyle. I don't know what's wrong with me? Um,
I'm sorry, sir Arthur Coning. Do wheal by the way
before I forget if if there's not a band called
the tenth Dentist out there, then I don't know what
to think anymore. It's a good one. Remember those tried
in commercials? I think it was four out of five dentists.

(48:21):
One of them was a four out of five. He
was bit on the testicles by a squirrel before he
could pronounce how, before he could recommend dentin or trident
or something like that. Maybe it should be the fifth.
It is four out of five, it's not nine out
of ten. Do you remember that though it was great?
What was the what was the cult? Was it? We
make holes in teeth? Remember that the cartoon that was crest? Okay,

(48:46):
do you want to hear you want to hear the
pinnacle of eighties marketing. Two kids, my third grade maybe
fourth grade class put on a play about out yes
and cavities sponsored by Crest. Yeah. They had a big
pushback then for taking over the minds of American children.

(49:09):
Well it worked. What's funny is is I now use
um aquafresh the orange tube? Oh? Man, if there is
a favorite toothpaste that any boy in America has ever had,
that is it in its mind that was from the eighties. No,
it is now. But I'm saying the Crest takeover of
my mind doesn't work? Got you? And I'm an aquafresh

(49:29):
point now? Is that the one with a tricolor? Yeah,
which is another very appealing part of it. Man, you'd
buy it all, don't you. I do? Yeah? I am
a little gullible. You're like an Arthur Conan Doyle. So
he if you recognize his name, he was the author
of Sherlock Holmes. Of course, he was super into this.
He joined the Society for Psychical Research, which is an

(49:52):
early skeptical slash believer society. Um, and he always he
bought into this. He was just convinced. Um. But on
the other side of the equation, we're skeptics who were
not convinced, who basically didn't keep their mouth shut. They
were the other four who would say, like, no, everybody, actually,
this guy's wrong. My esteemed colleague has has been taken um.

(50:16):
But then the head of those guys was Harry Houdini.
Amazingly enough, Yeah, Houdini um. Which makes it super ironic
that at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles they have
have long had Harry Houdini seance nights where you can
go into the Harry Houdini Room and do a seance,
which is, you know, it's all for fun. But it

(50:38):
is kind of funny that he was very much against
this stuff, although it supposedly if you go the Magic Castle,
they'll tell you that he did, and he may have
really done this. Is told his wife before he died that, hey, listen,
if I was wrong, I'll come back and I'll contact
you and let you know you're right. And and he

(50:58):
came back and he said, I've got good news and
I've got bad news. The good news is there is
a heaven. The bad news is your scheduled to pitch
there tonight. Do you remember that Scary Stories to Tell
in the Dark book? Yeah, where was that what that
was from there was like two friends who played baseball together.
He had a pact like Harry Houdini and his wife. Apparently.

(51:20):
I think that's a There's different versions of that joke though. Man,
the illustrations in that book were just barrened on. Yeah,
that was great stuff. And by the way, we should
give a big rest in peace to Mr Morton Drucker,
who passed away a couple of weeks ago in real time.
But that was that was a big one. We talked
about Mad Magazine a lot, and mort Drucker was my

(51:42):
number one with a bullet favorite artist and he passed
on and he was one of the greats. He definitely
shaped my childhood in a very large way with his drawings. Yeah, Um,
we'll hear from you soon, right, He's like you was
her pitching tonight? Oh no, both of us so so

(52:04):
Harry Houdini. He's like, yeah, Josh is gonna flub it
and Chuck's gonna have to be brought in for the safe.
So Harry Hudin Harry Judini created this longstanding tradition of
stage magicians, um exposing the fraud of spiritual is m Basically, yeah,
because they were, They're like, they're stealing our tricks. Yeah,

(52:26):
and it's pretty cool. Like he would incorporate into his
stage shows a lot of these things that spiritualists were
doing to show how they did it, and he was
relentless at it. Yeah, he was very relentless, but it
was very cool. And the fact that it's still going
on today. Um Richard Wiseman, who's come up a few times.
He was in the Shell Drake episode. He was in

(52:48):
the Ghosts episode, and I think we somehow misconstrued as
research in the ghost episode to suggest that he had
proven ghosts exists. I don't remember exactly the details of it,
but what we got that one wrong. But in this case,
he has recreated seances from the nineteenth century and has
shown how willing people are to totally misreport the events

(53:11):
that went on in the seance to say that yes,
you know, the table did levitate, or um all the
stuff that he's studying under these controlled conditions, and it's
basically shown not just that the the the medium himself
or more often herself as we'll see UM, was engaging
in fraud, but also that the audience was Um had

(53:33):
a willing suspension of disbelief and we're part of this too.
By saying like I felt the phantom arm tapped me
on the shoulder. The medium didn't have anything to do
with that. That was just something that kind of came
out of the environment that was produced in the seance.
You know. Yeah, pretty interesting, It is pretty interesting. So
we'll finish up here with this. UM. I thought this

(53:54):
was very interesting actually, the social implications of this. UM.
Most of the not all, but a lot of these
spiritualists were women in the nineteenth century. Um, for some
practical reasons, I could wear these long dresses that could
hide uh talented toe knuckles. Um, they were not because
of the time, they wouldn't get like searched too closely, obviously,

(54:18):
because you wouldn't do that if you were a scientist
trying to examine whether or not a spiritualist was real
or not. And that led to there were men, for sure,
But that led to this kind of interesting side note. UM.
One is that women could make their own money, and
so it's easy to poop poo something like this. But
I'm sure those Fox sisters made a lot more dough

(54:40):
than they ever could have as uh, you know, doing
anything else offered an available to them at the time.
So that's a good thing that gave him some agency.
But these uh, it was no coincidence that sometimes the
voice from the other side would champion sort of progressive views,
because this turned out to be a chance to sort

(55:02):
of reshape policy in a way. If you were a
woman and you were a spiritualist, it would be very
easy to say, you know, they're saying that that women
should have more rights and if not, they will come
back and haunt you, all right, And that kind of
ended up happening in some ways. Yeah, there was a
huge connection between spiritualism and spiritualist movement and abolitionism, the

(55:25):
women's suffrage movement, the women's temper or the temperance movement,
a lot of these progressive movements with workers rights and that.
You know, if you were an abolitionist and you didn't
believe in this kind of thing, you might be like,
I'm not really happy about that. But at the same
time it kind of whipped up this fervor and that
some people would like their spirits that that that was

(55:46):
that were being channeled by the medium. We're saying things
like you guys better get on the train of abolitionism,
you better get rid of slavery, and it actually did,
especially in these theatrical settings, have a widespread in fluence
on getting the message out there, um through the spirit communication.

(56:06):
Weirdly enough, yeah, it's almost like one could say anything
at all. It's something like, oh, I don't know a
campaign rally, and people would believe it if they were
an ardent enough believer in the speaker exactly, especially if
they detached their ego to you and your success. Very strange.
So um, I just want to give two shouts out,

(56:28):
one to the probably the greatest ghost movie that involves
seances ever ghost No WHOOPI Goldberg all right? The others, Yeah,
that was good, so good, and then spoil it. The
greatest short story involving seances in the spiritualist movement, written

(56:52):
by arguably the greatest American writer of all time, Joyce
Carol Oates. It's called Ninth Side. It's a short story.
It's the same time. Idol is a collection of her
short stories from the seventies. I think nine seven, Um, Nightside,
look it up and thank me later. It's seriously just
bone chilling how good it is. I wonder if we

(57:13):
could uh get in touch with her and read that
for our Halloween episodes. I tweeted to her once kind
of crassley, um, and never heard anything back. Even though
you're like Twitter, I know she saw that tweet. Hey
at Joyce Carol Oates, you think you're so cool? Right? Um?
I would love to read that one. There's another one too,
there's a she's probably not just the greatest American writer,

(57:36):
but the greatest American horror writer too. She's so wonderful.
I would read any of her stories. So if you
out there no Joyce Carol Oates were in contact with
her or her publisher, please, we would love to read
in our ad free episode one of her short stories
for Halloween. That's right, so I think she I like

(58:00):
that aspect. Okay, Oh one last thing, chuck. Uh. There's
a place called lily Dale in New York, appropriately enough,
which is basically a spiritualist community where you can go
basically be among spiritualists as a religion. Today wonderful, since
I said today it's time for listening to man, I'm

(58:23):
gonna call this. Uh. We haven't gotten emails in two
weeks from people because something's wrong with our email server.
So it's on the Days again, You're gonna get a
couple on bad days. I think, hey, guys, listening to
your recent episode on the Day's reminded me of a
funny story I thought you might like. Two thousand four
of my family bought a new house in the suburbs

(58:45):
of Detroit. Was designed and built by an exceptionally pragmatic, efficient,
yet lacking an aesthetic appreciation engineer. To our surprise my
husband's delight, as he is from Spain, the master bathroom
included a separate biday unit. I remember where this is
two thousand four, and people were not as familiar in
this country. Most people that visited our home had no

(59:05):
idea what it was, and we also made the decision
to not give advanced notice when they went to the bathroom. Invariably,
people would emerge from the bathroom trip either a little
wet or with an embarrassed look on their face as
they confessed having explored the contraption and released a stream
of water onto themselves and into our bathroom. Was always
good for a laugh. I sure appreciate you, guys. When

(59:27):
we moved from Michigan to the South to the South Carolina,
what she was? She once missed South Carolina because that
would explain that last bit. Now, I thought it was
she met the South, and I didn't see on the
next line it said Carolina. So that was just me.
Your voices accompanied us as we made many twelve hour

(59:47):
trips back and forth. We enjoyed the knowledge and the tangents,
even the tangents. Uh. And now you continue to suthe
and educate me as I go on my four to
five mile recreational walks during the pandemic quarantine and temporary
hopefully furlough. And that is from Michelle sal Sado. Nice.

(01:00:08):
Thanks a lot, Michelle. We're glad to know that you're
doing okay. They're hanging out waiting for things to get
back to normal in the South Carolina. That's right, chuck,
um and uh as it will eventually go back to normal. Um.
And in the meantime, if you want to get in
touch with us, like Michelle did to let us know
some silly story about it a day or what have you,

(01:00:29):
you can get in touch with us. Send us an
email to stuff podcast how Stuff Works dot com. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios. How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.