The Magician and the Spirits by Deborah Noyes

Author:Deborah Noyes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

Houdini speaks of mediums hiring “a quiet couple for the express purpose of attending funerals, mixing with the mourners, and gathering information.” The culprits would “dress some little woman demurely and place her in the reception room where she greets the visitors, telling them her troubles and naturally receiving confidences in return.” He even recounts the tale of “an old-time circus grafter who, having been cleaned out in Wall Street . . . invested what little capital he had and all he could borrow in a beauty parlor.” The grafter took what he learned there and set himself up as a medium, “the venture yielding handsomely the first year.”

The fact was, people told things about themselves without being remotely aware they were doing it. “Under the excitement of the moment their subconscious mind speaks,” as Houdini put it, “while their conscious mind forgets. This does not escape the medium.”

Outrageous though some of these methods sound, when there was money to be made, Houdini believed, fake mediums (he called them “human wolves,” “human leeches,” and “human vultures”) would stop at nothing. Those “resourceful in obtaining information have made millions of dollars,” he asserted, “blood money made at the cost of torture to the souls of their victims.”

A program advertising Houdini's open challenge to mediums, circa 1924.

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