Proof of Life-After-Death : True tales of the Afterlife by Young Steph

Author:Young, Steph [Young, Steph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Houdini

F

amous magician and escapologist Harry Houdini was a vociferous and very outspoken critic of clairvoyants in his day, and he even wrote a book about his investigations into a number of mediums who were active when he was alive. He came to the conclusion that the mediums he looked into were all frauds and he was incredibly angry about it because he believed they were preying on and exploiting extremely vulnerable people who were grieving for their lost loved ones. In 1919 alone, Houdini attended at least 100 seances, and rather impressively, he claimed to have accumulated one of the largest libraries in the world on all aspects of spiritualism, including hauntings, witchcraft and demons, with some of the texts going back as far as the year 1489. As for the claims of these mediums’ abilities to speak to the dead, Houdini wrote, ‘I have not found one incident that savoured of the genuine.’ Everything, he said, ‘has been the result of deluded brains or those which were too actively and intensely willing to believe.’ As a result, he called spiritualism, ‘monstrous fiction,’ and he failed to understand how people could still support some of the mediums he uncovered as frauds when they had been caught cheating time and time again. He illustrates some of the fraud by describing the confession of one of the Fox sisters, Catherine and Margaretta, the first ‘celebrity mediums’ who toured America in the 1850’s giving demonstrations to packed audiences and making a princely sum of about $150 a night, which in those days was a huge amount of money. However, many years after their time in the spotlight, one of the sisters came out and confessed that the rapping sounds which would be heard at their seances had simply been the result of ‘a perfect control of the muscles of the leg below the knee, which governs the tendons of the foot and allow action of the toe and ankles bones that is not commonly known.’ The sisters were only young when they were giving their demonstrations, and Margaret Fox points out that if it is started when a person is young, they can train their muscles to work in this way, and she gave a demonstration of this trickery, by giving incorrect raps to questions, to prove her raps were fraudulent movements of her own body rather than direct communication from spirits. Physicians also proved, by examining her in the act, that the raps were being produced by the joint in her toe, and not be spirits! Houdini also ripped apart the famous Davenport Brothers, corresponding with one of them in later life and receiving a written confession of their trickery too. The brother explained that the spirit manifestations at his shows were produced by physical dexterity and clever rope tricks; not by spirits. The brothers would cunningly slip out of their rope bindings in order move around the room in the dark to produce the sound of ringing bells and using other props, at their public demonstrations.

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