Monster Hunters by Tea Krulos

Author:Tea Krulos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2015-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

Rosabelle, Believe!

If any of this conflict sounds familiar, it should: it’s been going on for about a hundred years now. Ehrich Weiss, better known by his stage name, Harry Houdini (d. 1926), devoted considerable time and money during the latter stage of his career to debunking psychic claims. Early in his career Houdini did mediumship as part of his stage act, but he said he soon found he couldn’t bear the guilt of shamming his audience.

“I was brought to a realization of the seriousness of trifling with the hallowed reverence which the average human being bestows on the departed,” Houdini later wrote. “I was chagrined that I should ever have been guilty of such frivolity and for the first time realized it bordered on crime.”

The death of Houdini’s mother left him heartbroken—he actually collapsed when he received a cable that she had died. He approached Spiritualism with an open mind, hoping there was a genuine case of someone able to communicate with the dead. What he found was a long road filled with charlatans associated with the Spiritualist movement.

One of the strange friendships-turned-rivalries of history was between Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (d. 1930), Spiritualist and author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Doyle became heavily involved in Spiritualism after losing his son Kingsley, his brother, and other family members during World War I.

Although he was responsible for creating the highly deductive Holmes, Doyle’s own detective skills were at times clouded by his desire to believe. He was a proponent of the Cottingley Fairies, a hoax propagated by two young girls who carefully copied illustrations of fairies from a children’s book* and posed with them near a brook by their house.

Looking at the photos now, it’s hard to see how anyone could fall for such a stunt, but for many years people thought they were real. Doyle wrote magazine articles arguing that the photos proved there was a doorway to another world.

Doyle’s wife, Lady Jean Doyle, also a Spiritualist, was an acclaimed medium. The Doyles held séances almost nightly, and would communicate with a spirit named Phineas, who often warned the Doyles that the world was facing impending doom and that the end times were near. After Doyle met Houdini, he was convinced that the magician had actual unearthly powers and hoped to recruit him to the Spiritualist movement.

When Houdini came to visit the Doyles, they staged a séance for him, as recalled in the book The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero by William Kalush and Larry Sloman. Houdini accepted, but as the séance began he quickly became disappointed. Lady Doyle claimed that she had channeled Houdini’s beloved mother.

Houdini had not told the Doyles a simple but important fact about his mother—although she could speak four or five languages, English was not one of them, and yet now Lady Doyle was delivering a message in the Queen’s English. Other subtle mistakes convinced Houdini that Lady Doyle was a failure as a medium. Doyle and

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