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How Spiritualism Works · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You should know, a production of five
0:03
Speaker 1: Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
0:12
Speaker 1: I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Bryan over there
0:16
Speaker 1: somewhere in the heart of darkness. I'm in the office, dude.
0:22
Speaker 1: Where I hear your voice, Chuck, but I can't see you. Yeah.
0:27
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know why people need to know
0:29
Speaker 1: the behind the scenes things, but home recording provides some
0:32
Speaker 1: challenges and I was getting pretty frustrated. So I was like,
0:36
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm gonna go to the studio. Yeah,
0:39
Speaker 1: because I know it'll sound great in here, and I
0:42
Speaker 1: know there won't be dogs and children, and uh, everyone
0:46
Speaker 1: should feel good about it because I have not seen
0:49
Speaker 1: another human being. Yeah, in the building. Security didn't a
0:54
Speaker 1: security guard try to run you off the road when
0:56
Speaker 1: you were parking. He didn't try. He stopped me literally
0:59
Speaker 1: in the parking lot. Was like, what are you doing here?
1:00
Speaker 1: I was like, I'm going to my job, and he
1:02
Speaker 1: said okay, he said stay home, save lives. But before
1:08
Speaker 1: we left, I mean apparently since I left. Uh, they
1:12
Speaker 1: have these. Um, there's a bottle of microphone sanitizer. WHOA,
1:19
Speaker 1: there are headphone sanitized or not sanitized, but just disposable
1:24
Speaker 1: headphone covers. Sweet, and I feel more safe here than
1:29
Speaker 1: I do at my house. What microphone sanitizer that sounds
1:33
Speaker 1: really made up? Yeah, it's um. We'll go ahead and
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Speaker 1: buzz market. No I won't because it smells bad, and
1:40
Speaker 1: I didn't want to buzz market and then say it
1:42
Speaker 1: smells bad. It's apple flavor, which would make Emily just
1:46
Speaker 1: like turn over in her bed. It's a it's a
1:49
Speaker 1: good um jolly rancher flavor. Not the best scent, though.
1:53
Speaker 1: I hate it when they add sent to stuff that
1:55
Speaker 1: doesn't need scent. Try finding an unscented garbage back these days. Uh?
2:02
Speaker 1: Is it tough too? Yeah? Man, every single one of them.
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Speaker 1: I even got some that said unscented and it still
2:08
Speaker 1: smells like something you've missed it. In parentheses underneath it
2:12
Speaker 1: says mostly we can't help ourselves one percent. Rosemary Well,
2:20
Speaker 1: I don't have my over the ear headphones right now.
2:25
Speaker 1: I just look one of you mas long scarves wrapped
2:33
Speaker 1: around my head twice to keep from your audio bleeding
2:36
Speaker 1: onto the track through my microphone. You either look like
2:41
Speaker 1: Lawrence of Arabia or like you just wandered in with
2:45
Speaker 1: a headed tree. Yeah, I had to kept slipping off
2:48
Speaker 1: with the lawrence of Arabia. Look, so I had to
2:50
Speaker 1: do it the other way around. So now it looks
2:52
Speaker 1: like I have a nineteent century toothache. Oh, man, to
2:57
Speaker 1: me another picture. It's not it's not very comfortable. My
3:00
Speaker 1: Adam's apple is being pressed towards the back of my
3:02
Speaker 1: throat right now. Yeah, what was the deal with that
3:05
Speaker 1: whole toothache thing? Like? Was there ice in there something?
3:09
Speaker 1: Or was it just like I just die their gin
3:11
Speaker 1: shutting help? Knowing that era, there were probably some sort
3:16
Speaker 1: of like razor blade and heroin concoction that would just
3:20
Speaker 1: scrape the area where the tooth was and inject you
3:23
Speaker 1: with dope to keep you from complaining. Doctor Dr Payne's
3:29
Speaker 1: new chin wrap now with more leeches right from the
3:33
Speaker 1: makers of microphone sanitizer. All right, let's get into this.
3:39
Speaker 1: We've already been goofing around for too long. Let's just finish,
3:43
Speaker 1: just get this over with. Let's get serious and talk
3:46
Speaker 1: about spiritualism, shall we. This is a great, great job
3:50
Speaker 1: by grab Stir, great idea by you, and it'll be
3:53
Speaker 1: a great episode. Yeah, grab Stir, We we asked him
3:55
Speaker 1: to help us out with this, so we put together
3:57
Speaker 1: a world class article for us, and um, when we
4:00
Speaker 1: asked him, we said, hey, how about spiritualism because my
4:02
Speaker 1: brother wrote his dissertation on that should be simple and
4:06
Speaker 1: I mean just afforded us that it did. It didn't
4:11
Speaker 1: even like a racist brother's first name. He just did
4:13
Speaker 1: a strike through and wrote ed after easy Money. So, um,
4:19
Speaker 1: it is like a really really interesting phenomena and something
4:23
Speaker 1: I think we kind of take for granted because it
4:26
Speaker 1: pops up everywhere in our world in pop culture. I mean,
4:31
Speaker 1: it's just a part of everything from crystal balls to seances,
4:35
Speaker 1: to Weiji boards to tarot cards, all of this stuff. Movies. Yeah,
4:40
Speaker 1: as a matter of fact, I ran across so you know,
4:42
Speaker 1: dan Ackroyd's huge into UFOs, right, I didn't know that. Actually,
4:46
Speaker 1: he's also enormous into spirits and ghosts. It's actually one
4:50
Speaker 1: of the impetus is Yeah, I think so of him
4:54
Speaker 1: writing Ghostbusters. He's actually a fourth generation spiritualist with a
4:59
Speaker 1: capital at like the Church Spiritualism. He was raised that way.
5:04
Speaker 1: His his father, grandfather, and great grandfather were all spiritualists
5:08
Speaker 1: and that's how he was raised as well, um, so
5:12
Speaker 1: it does this kind of it's so permeated our our culture.
5:15
Speaker 1: It's weird to think of a time when it wasn't there.
5:18
Speaker 1: But there actually was this period starting and riot about
5:22
Speaker 1: in the middle of the nineteenth century going well into
5:25
Speaker 1: the twentieth century where there was a movement that basically said,
5:32
Speaker 1: the spirit world is there, it exists. When you die,
5:36
Speaker 1: your personality survives, and some people actually have a talent
5:40
Speaker 1: for communicating with the spirits and the spirit world, and
5:45
Speaker 1: we're going to start doing that. And that was spiritualism,
5:49
Speaker 1: the spiritualist movement. Yeah. Um, and ed uh pointed out,
5:54
Speaker 1: which we should as well, that ghosts and things like
5:57
Speaker 1: that and ghost stories they had been around people have
6:00
Speaker 1: been around everyone since the dawn of humankind has tried
6:04
Speaker 1: to figure out like what happens after you die too,
6:06
Speaker 1: people visit, do they take on, you know, other other
6:10
Speaker 1: forms or whatever. So that's different than what we're talking about.
6:14
Speaker 1: What we're talking about is spiritualism in that it became
6:20
Speaker 1: a a big scam in way to get money out
6:24
Speaker 1: of people who are in pain for my friends or
6:27
Speaker 1: loved one's death sadly, Yeah, yeah, for sure. Um, but
6:31
Speaker 1: there is like a through a thread through there where. Um.
6:36
Speaker 1: This same era, the same period, in this belief in
6:38
Speaker 1: communicating with the spirits and the idea that you could
6:41
Speaker 1: go to a seance and talk to your dead loved
6:43
Speaker 1: one or whatever. It produced this other group of people
6:49
Speaker 1: who said, yes, there are tons of fraudsters and hucksters
6:53
Speaker 1: out there who are taking advantage of this, but there's
6:56
Speaker 1: also this real, Um, there's a the real version of
7:01
Speaker 1: of it actually does exist, and we're gonna apply this
7:05
Speaker 1: new fangled thing called science to investigate it. And that
7:09
Speaker 1: produced that that era of people like Charles Fort or
7:14
Speaker 1: Harry Price who visited the Borerley Rectory the most haunted
7:19
Speaker 1: place in England. Um. Or uh, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Um,
7:25
Speaker 1: like those guys. I know I'm trying, not a new version. UM.
7:29
Speaker 1: Like these guys though they they were they they believed
7:33
Speaker 1: in this stuff and the possibility of it that they
7:36
Speaker 1: also believed in the possibly of applying science to it,
7:39
Speaker 1: and even if science couldn't explain it, it didn't mean
7:41
Speaker 1: that it didn't exist. And then there was another group
7:44
Speaker 1: who were what we would recognize today is like pure skeptics,
7:48
Speaker 1: like the James Randy's of the day who all followed
7:51
Speaker 1: in the footsteps of Harry who DENI is we'll see
7:54
Speaker 1: who kind of created this. So you had hucksters, believers
7:57
Speaker 1: who were skeptical and genuine pure skeptic dicks who believed
8:01
Speaker 1: none of it was correct. Yeah, and what I mentioned before,
8:04
Speaker 1: like all the previous attempts to do stuff like this,
8:08
Speaker 1: pre mid eighteen hundreds in largely the Northeast United States,
8:13
Speaker 1: it was more religious like prophets and shaman and stuff
8:16
Speaker 1: like that. Spiritualism was the birth of the Madame Cleo's
8:20
Speaker 1: of the world. Uh Ed refers to it as a democratization,
8:25
Speaker 1: and that's one way to look at it, but it was.
8:27
Speaker 1: It was the idea that hey, if you are chosen
8:31
Speaker 1: and you are special, um, you could you know, it's
8:33
Speaker 1: not like you have to be some religious leader. You
8:35
Speaker 1: can just be a regular person with the gift exactly. Yeah,
8:39
Speaker 1: which was a huge sea change. And um, there are
8:43
Speaker 1: basically a few things that kind of came together for
8:46
Speaker 1: this mentality this um this fertile kind of imagination of
8:52
Speaker 1: this pocket of America and western New York where all
8:55
Speaker 1: of this began to kind of take shape. And one
8:58
Speaker 1: of those things was the frontier, this frontier mentality um.
9:02
Speaker 1: The historian Frederick Jackson Turner called it the significance of
9:06
Speaker 1: the frontier in American history, and he basically said, man,
9:11
Speaker 1: the people who are living out there on the frontier,
9:13
Speaker 1: they're living on the edge of civilization, the the leading
9:16
Speaker 1: edge right right beyond that what they're coming up against.
9:20
Speaker 1: And and this is highly debatable because part of what
9:22
Speaker 1: they were coming up against was Native America. It just
9:27
Speaker 1: wasn't a civilization in the forum that any European had
9:30
Speaker 1: ever encountered before. But the idea was that the people
9:33
Speaker 1: who are living on the frontier and expanding westward were
9:38
Speaker 1: basically being forced just by virtue of having to survive
9:43
Speaker 1: under these weird conditions outside of culture and civilization in
9:47
Speaker 1: the European sense, that that they were having to abandon
9:51
Speaker 1: that culture and basically make it up as they went
9:53
Speaker 1: along and recreate a new culture from the frontier, and
9:58
Speaker 1: that that just kind of through the rules out the window. Yeah,
10:02
Speaker 1: this is one of my favorite things when we do topics,
10:05
Speaker 1: that when you can look back at a movement and
10:10
Speaker 1: point to factors that at any other time in history,
10:13
Speaker 1: if just one of these might not have taken you know,
10:16
Speaker 1: might not have influenced it, that it might not have
10:18
Speaker 1: happened at all. There's something about that that I've always
10:21
Speaker 1: really loved. And uh, this is a perfect example. The
10:23
Speaker 1: frontier life is one. Religious fervor is another. Uh. And
10:28
Speaker 1: specifically in New York in the eighteen hundreds, people were
10:32
Speaker 1: really caught up on this religious fervor and it kind
10:34
Speaker 1: of went from town to town and there was no uh,
10:39
Speaker 1: there was no big religious authorities in the area. They
10:41
Speaker 1: were out on the frontier. They had no structured hierarchy
10:44
Speaker 1: of religion, and so again they could just make up stuff. Uh.
10:49
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying that's not tied to this next sidence,
10:53
Speaker 1: because I don't want to turn anyone off, but a
10:55
Speaker 1: lot of religion sprang out from this region during that time,
10:58
Speaker 1: like Millerism and Mormon is um and uh, Quakers and
11:02
Speaker 1: Shakers kind of had a a resurgence, basically a shot
11:07
Speaker 1: in the arm, just because of this fervor going on
11:10
Speaker 1: at the time. And I couldn't quite put where um Millerism,
11:13
Speaker 1: why it seems so familiar, And then I remember that
11:16
Speaker 1: that was the woman who gave birth eventually to the
11:19
Speaker 1: Seventh day Adventists and that popped up in the Kellogg episode.
11:23
Speaker 1: Remember yeah, yeah, Millerism was where it all started. But
11:26
Speaker 1: that was and that really kind of indicates And I
11:29
Speaker 1: love it when things just things we talked about before,
11:31
Speaker 1: like have even more context from something else. But that
11:35
Speaker 1: that just kind of goes to show you, like, this
11:37
Speaker 1: is the kind of place where somebody could be like
11:39
Speaker 1: I'm in contact with the spirits or Jesus came and
11:42
Speaker 1: hung out with me or whatever, and this is what
11:45
Speaker 1: I what I know and what I've been told. So, um,
11:48
Speaker 1: let's start a religion based on it, and not even
11:51
Speaker 1: necessarily just religions too, but also like social movements, like
11:55
Speaker 1: utopian societies where into your food twenty times, so you'll
11:59
Speaker 1: poopies here exactly, um. Or you know, women have equal
12:03
Speaker 1: equal rights as men, which is just completely radical. Or um,
12:08
Speaker 1: how about fifty of us lived together and just by
12:11
Speaker 1: the fact that we all lived together were married according
12:14
Speaker 1: to this utopian society, just just whatever you wanted to
12:19
Speaker 1: to do, you kind of could because the frontier through
12:23
Speaker 1: the rules out the window, or at the very least
12:25
Speaker 1: cultural traditions that most people are raised into. When that's
12:29
Speaker 1: not there, people make up their own. Yeah, for sure. Uh.
12:35
Speaker 1: And the third big factor that UM that you mentioned
12:37
Speaker 1: was we haven't talked about yet with science. And you
12:40
Speaker 1: talked a little bit about science at the beginning, but
12:42
Speaker 1: the idea that in the middle of the Industrial Revolution,
12:46
Speaker 1: when we're really learning a lot more than we ever
12:48
Speaker 1: have about science and things like electro electromagnetism and things
12:53
Speaker 1: that you can't see, but science is saying, oh, it's there.
12:56
Speaker 1: This kind of fed the spiritualist movement because you know,
13:00
Speaker 1: that's something else that you can't see that other people
13:03
Speaker 1: are saying is there. So they're like, well, hey, if
13:05
Speaker 1: science is saying there are things out there we can't
13:08
Speaker 1: quite explain, but trust me it's real, then why shouldn't
13:11
Speaker 1: I believe this stuff too? Yeah? Or well this electric
13:14
Speaker 1: like electro magnetism, maybe that actually explains how spirit survive
13:18
Speaker 1: after death. It was a really wide open time as
13:24
Speaker 1: far as you know, um acceptance of possibilities rather than
13:30
Speaker 1: no science has said this is not possible, or it
13:34
Speaker 1: can't explain this, or you can't see it with your
13:36
Speaker 1: own eyes, so it won't It doesn't it doesn't jibe like.
13:39
Speaker 1: There was a lot more willingness among people who were
13:42
Speaker 1: scientifically minded to say, well, maybe this is a good
13:46
Speaker 1: explanation of that. Let's investigate. Yeah, the birth of science
13:50
Speaker 1: and medicine was a really crazy time. It really was.
13:54
Speaker 1: It really was. So should we take a break? Yes,
13:59
Speaker 1: come on, man, Yes, I think you're you're beard holsters
14:04
Speaker 1: on too tight. I haven't been able to feel my
14:08
Speaker 1: nose for about fifteen minutes. All right, we'll go, uh
14:12
Speaker 1: rub your nose and bring some feeling back, and we'll
14:13
Speaker 1: talk about some of the furty ritualists. Okay, I'm gonna
14:43
Speaker 1: say it's spiritualists. Nice um. And there there was actually
14:48
Speaker 1: so there was a bunch of factors that led to
14:52
Speaker 1: the beginning of all of this, including there was one that,
14:55
Speaker 1: um that I also came across that we need to mention,
14:57
Speaker 1: a guy named Andrew Jackson Davis who combined ideas of
15:00
Speaker 1: the German hypnotist Franz Mesmer with the Swedish philosopher of
15:05
Speaker 1: the soul, Emmanuel swedenborg Um. They were both eighteenth century.
15:11
Speaker 1: He kind of brought them together, and he was a
15:13
Speaker 1: bit of a nobody, but he emerged very very soon
15:16
Speaker 1: after the Fox sisters became celebrities as a founder of
15:20
Speaker 1: the spiritualist movement. Almost like he was doing it off
15:23
Speaker 1: in isolation at the same time that all of us began. Yeah,
15:27
Speaker 1: so the Fox sisters figure into this really quite largely. Uh.
15:31
Speaker 1: And you can even pinpoint a date to what you
15:33
Speaker 1: might consider the birth of the modern American spiritualist movement
15:38
Speaker 1: is March thirty one, eighty eight in Hydesville, New York,
15:42
Speaker 1: near Rochester, at a farm. This Fox family lived there,
15:46
Speaker 1: real people, not a family of cute little red for
15:50
Speaker 1: fuzzy creatures voiced by George Clooney exactly. Uh. Mr and
15:55
Speaker 1: Mrs Fox had three daughters. Actually one was much older.
15:58
Speaker 1: Her name was Leiah. She was nine seen in twenty
16:00
Speaker 1: three years older. Whow was that funny? Because I saw
16:04
Speaker 1: a picture of her, and she's like the spitting image
16:06
Speaker 1: of Jeffrey Ross. You gotta look her up, Jeff That's
16:13
Speaker 1: that's what Lea Fox looked like. I didn't see. I
16:15
Speaker 1: saw the picture of the three of him, and I
16:17
Speaker 1: didn't get a good close up. That's an unfortunate look
16:19
Speaker 1: for him and her. Yeah, anybody really? Uh? And I
16:23
Speaker 1: think he would admit that too. Oh yeah, but he's
16:26
Speaker 1: doing all right there. What if he had really thin skin?
16:29
Speaker 1: Ros Master he couldn't take a joke against him something.
16:33
Speaker 1: Have you seen that Bumping Mike show. It's pretty good.
16:36
Speaker 1: Uh No, is that the roast competition thing? Yeah? He
16:39
Speaker 1: and Davidtel just sit there and roast people. It's really good. Man.
16:43
Speaker 1: I used to love Davidtel back in the day. He
16:46
Speaker 1: has just turned into like the weird like comedy genius
16:49
Speaker 1: friend that that Jeffrey Ross has, and it shines through
16:53
Speaker 1: in this awesome I'll check it out. So the Fox family,
16:58
Speaker 1: older daughter Lea was nice teen and twenty three years
17:01
Speaker 1: older than younger Kate and Maggie or I guess Maggie
17:05
Speaker 1: and Kate if you're going in that order. And on
17:08
Speaker 1: that night in March eight, they heard these rapping, knocking
17:13
Speaker 1: sounds and they didn't know where it was coming from,
17:16
Speaker 1: and that kind of kick started this whole thing. In
17:19
Speaker 1: a weird way, this led and we'll talk about the
17:23
Speaker 1: more specifics, but in a weird way, this led to
17:25
Speaker 1: them eventually saying, wait a minute, we can make some
17:28
Speaker 1: money if we convince people that young Kate and Maggie
17:32
Speaker 1: are a conduit to the other side. Yeah. The the
17:35
Speaker 1: thing is is like when it went from you know, like, oh,
17:38
Speaker 1: there's a ghost rapping or knocking like a Poulter guyst
17:41
Speaker 1: kind of thing too. This ghost will respond to questions
17:46
Speaker 1: from the sisters through rapping and knocking, like how old
17:50
Speaker 1: is Maggie? And it would wrap like fifteen times or
17:52
Speaker 1: something like that. And that that really caught a lot
17:55
Speaker 1: of people's attention. And Maggie and Kate moved in with Leah.
18:00
Speaker 1: And apparently, from what I read, it was Leah whose
18:03
Speaker 1: idea it was to take the show on the road
18:05
Speaker 1: try to scam people out of money. It was not
18:08
Speaker 1: a super great person from from what I read. Yeah,
18:13
Speaker 1: I just sorry. I was thinking of a rapping ghost
18:16
Speaker 1: and right got sidetracked. George Washington And I'm here to
18:22
Speaker 1: say I love fruity pebbles in a mate a way.
18:25
Speaker 1: You know what's funny is I was going to do
18:27
Speaker 1: that exact same thing, but for the Fox family. That's
18:29
Speaker 1: like the go to rap for guys like us. Oh,
18:32
Speaker 1: it totally is guys who can't wrap. Yeah, I'm here
18:36
Speaker 1: to say something, something something in a something way. The
18:41
Speaker 1: Zach Morris method, I think, is what that is. I
18:43
Speaker 1: wonder if that's based on an actual rap. I guess
18:46
Speaker 1: there was one at some point that really did that, right, Yeah,
18:48
Speaker 1: I think Blondie was the popular. Um my name is Blondie.
18:56
Speaker 1: I'm here to say I'm gonna try wrap because it's
18:59
Speaker 1: popular today. Exactly. So, uh, where what were you saying?
19:05
Speaker 1: I was laughing. I didn't even notice. I'm sorry, Oh,
19:08
Speaker 1: just that it was basically I was laying at Leah's
19:11
Speaker 1: feet for corrupting the younger sisters. Yeah, she kind of.
19:16
Speaker 1: She ended up managing them as a unit, I think
19:18
Speaker 1: later on, if I'm not mistaken, But there aren't great
19:22
Speaker 1: records of everything going on at the time. But um,
19:25
Speaker 1: the idea was that Kate and Maggie were the ones.
19:28
Speaker 1: It wasn't really her parents, but they're the ones who
19:30
Speaker 1: could actually communicate with this barn spirit. And so they said,
19:35
Speaker 1: you know what, they not only can talk to this spirit.
19:38
Speaker 1: Media starts, you know, getting ahold of these stories, and
19:42
Speaker 1: obviously back then that it was a very big deal
19:44
Speaker 1: with something like this coming out in the media with
19:46
Speaker 1: not a lot else going on. But they moved and
19:50
Speaker 1: would go away to other places and said, wherever they go,
19:54
Speaker 1: ghosts are talking to them. So you guys, my daughters
19:57
Speaker 1: are talented and gifted. They're not just talking to the
20:02
Speaker 1: what we think is a murder victim from our previous house,
20:05
Speaker 1: right right, which which just changed everything. And also rather suspiciously,
20:11
Speaker 1: Leah suddenly realized that she was able to communicate with
20:14
Speaker 1: spirits too, So all three of the sisters were able
20:16
Speaker 1: to But yeah, not just that one murder victim in
20:19
Speaker 1: their house that had been the original ghost, but just
20:22
Speaker 1: about any ghost. And this was the beginning of the
20:26
Speaker 1: spiritualist movement. Basically a trank by a couple of teenage
20:31
Speaker 1: girls that got way out of hand really fast. Yeah,
20:34
Speaker 1: and so what do they do. They start having these
20:37
Speaker 1: uh private sessions where people would pay money, and they
20:41
Speaker 1: would wear these big long dresses that were in fashion
20:43
Speaker 1: at the time, and they would no one's exactly sure
20:46
Speaker 1: the exact mechanism, but they would do some sort of
20:49
Speaker 1: toe knocking or something where they couldn't be seen. And
20:52
Speaker 1: that was the Morse code that they said was the
20:54
Speaker 1: ghost speaking to them. So it was it's really um.
20:58
Speaker 1: They they had like a little wooden stool under the
21:01
Speaker 1: table with them and they would take off their shoes surreptitiously,
21:05
Speaker 1: and from what I can gather, they could pop their
21:11
Speaker 1: knuckle of their toe up and down with enough force
21:17
Speaker 1: that it would make a thud on that wooden stool.
21:22
Speaker 1: It was. Yeah, they should have just been like, forget
21:25
Speaker 1: all this spirits stuff, but this weird thing, um. But
21:29
Speaker 1: that that was that was the phantom knocking. And we
21:32
Speaker 1: know that because Maggie later on confessed to the New
21:37
Speaker 1: York Tribune maybe or the Post one of them, um
21:41
Speaker 1: and and said like, this is how, this is how
21:43
Speaker 1: we did it actually in an effort to take her
21:46
Speaker 1: sister Lea down. UM. But it ended up taking the
21:50
Speaker 1: spiritualist movement down in large part. But that was it,
21:55
Speaker 1: like thumping your knuckle on a wooden stool. They did
21:59
Speaker 1: this for forty forty years. They made a living around
22:04
Speaker 1: the world doing that and created a new religion from it. Yeah,
22:10
Speaker 1: and the UM. By the time the spiritualism fad sort
22:13
Speaker 1: of died away, the two younger sisters were and she
22:17
Speaker 1: recanted that confession, by the way, but everyone's like, yeah,
22:19
Speaker 1: you already said it could try, um. But the two
22:23
Speaker 1: younger sisters uh and Maggie especially were in pretty bad
22:27
Speaker 1: shape with alcoholism. And they died sort of in a
22:30
Speaker 1: call your brother's sq way, very quietly and uh, fairly
22:34
Speaker 1: destitute in New York City in the eighteen nineties, trapped
22:37
Speaker 1: under newspapers maybe, but now they they had very interesting
22:43
Speaker 1: but also very sad lives like Um, I think Maggie
22:48
Speaker 1: married a skeptic and he not not a good move,
22:52
Speaker 1: right he died. He talked her out of doing spiritualism,
22:56
Speaker 1: but she went back after he died. Kate married another
22:59
Speaker 1: spiritual since she had a huge career um touring the
23:03
Speaker 1: world as a spiritualist, made a lot of money, um,
23:06
Speaker 1: but but apparently lost it all. And Leah again was
23:11
Speaker 1: just kind of I guess, a bit of a villain
23:12
Speaker 1: in this story. Where's that movie? Man? I was wondering
23:16
Speaker 1: the exact same thing. It's crazy it hasn't been made
23:19
Speaker 1: fifty times already, you know, Yeah, that would be that
23:22
Speaker 1: would be pretty cool. I couldn't even find a good
23:24
Speaker 1: documentary on it. Oh yeah, on them at least. I'm
23:28
Speaker 1: sure there are plenty on that they're featured in. But
23:31
Speaker 1: and no matter how you look at it too, whether
23:36
Speaker 1: you look at it from the aspect of a believer
23:39
Speaker 1: who thinks like this is where it all started, these
23:42
Speaker 1: two sisters, and there's plenty of reasons to believe if
23:46
Speaker 1: you're a credulous person or um confiding, as Mark Twain
23:50
Speaker 1: would put it, that, you know, like the the Andrew
23:54
Speaker 1: Jackson Davis guy who who kind of started this thing
23:57
Speaker 1: on his own, supposedly wrote on March thirty one, eighty eight,
24:02
Speaker 1: that spirit came to him and said, the work has begun. Um,
24:06
Speaker 1: we just started something over here, and then later found
24:09
Speaker 1: out about the Fox sisters. Like, there's all sorts of
24:11
Speaker 1: stuff you can believe, and so it's interesting from that respect.
24:15
Speaker 1: But also if you're just a pure gied in the
24:17
Speaker 1: Wold skeptic who do not believe in any kind of
24:20
Speaker 1: afterlife or soul or anything like that, it's equally interesting
24:24
Speaker 1: in a totally different way that this whole like almost
24:29
Speaker 1: century long movement started from that. You know, Yeah, I
24:34
Speaker 1: just love it. I love this whole story. So it's
24:37
Speaker 1: sweeping the nation at this point by the eighteen fifties,
24:40
Speaker 1: and uh, we're gonna go over some of the different
24:43
Speaker 1: things that they would do, some of the methods that
24:45
Speaker 1: they would use to communicate with the other side, to
24:48
Speaker 1: fake communicate with the other side. Uh. The first one
24:52
Speaker 1: is channeling um and these would be trance mediums. So
24:56
Speaker 1: this is like when you've seen in a movie when
24:58
Speaker 1: someone is just talking like I am in my regular
25:02
Speaker 1: voice and I'm entering the trance and I'm doing a
25:04
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of showy things, uh, to kind
25:08
Speaker 1: of get people, you know, pretty pumped up. I feel
25:10
Speaker 1: like they're spending their money. Well, you giving me pumped up,
25:13
Speaker 1: I'll tell you that. And all of a sudden, you know,
25:15
Speaker 1: I go into this other voice and I'm like a
25:18
Speaker 1: small child. Uh, maybe the parents lost a child, or
25:22
Speaker 1: I'm a woman, or I'm Davis Jr. Hey, Brad, I
25:28
Speaker 1: just came back to say that, don't worry about me.
25:31
Speaker 1: This cat is doing just fine. I came back to
25:34
Speaker 1: say I love pretty pebbles in a major way. Invented rap.
25:39
Speaker 1: That's right. So, uh, if you were a good talented medium,
25:44
Speaker 1: that that meant that you were probably a pretty good actor.
25:47
Speaker 1: You could probably do good voices. Um. Sometimes in the
25:50
Speaker 1: case of course Scott, who I know, we've talked about
25:52
Speaker 1: her before, her name, can't remember what, I have no
25:56
Speaker 1: recollection or talking about her. Yeah, it sounds super familiar.
25:59
Speaker 1: But she was one of the top mediums trans mediums
26:03
Speaker 1: because she was this very sort of demure, attractive young
26:08
Speaker 1: lady and her whole demeanor was about that. And then
26:11
Speaker 1: she was apparently a great actor because she would go
26:13
Speaker 1: into this these big, heavy, gruff voices, and the gulf
26:17
Speaker 1: between who she was and who she was imitating was
26:20
Speaker 1: so great that everyone was just like, fantastic, Corra Scott,
26:23
Speaker 1: you're a genius. Well also, yeah, she was like a
26:26
Speaker 1: little twelve year old girl when she started, and supposedly
26:29
Speaker 1: she would take the stage and confidently discuss like physics
26:33
Speaker 1: and philosophy and all that stuff because there was some
26:37
Speaker 1: authoritative spirit who had basically taken possession of her. Yeah,
26:42
Speaker 1: and uh, I looked up her picture and Kate Winslet
26:46
Speaker 1: I think is from my casting couches, who I would
26:49
Speaker 1: throw in that movie. Okay, not not as the twelve
26:52
Speaker 1: year old that would be weird unless they do some
26:54
Speaker 1: sort of bad irishman d aging. But she looked enough
26:57
Speaker 1: like her, and she's a she's a great actor. So
27:00
Speaker 1: um So that's so. So. Channeling is what you kind
27:03
Speaker 1: of think of, where somebody becomes possessed, the medium becomes possessed. Right. Yeah.
27:09
Speaker 1: There's also ones where like they're they're just saying like,
27:12
Speaker 1: oh I can hear what they're saying, but you can't
27:14
Speaker 1: because they're speaking to me through telepathy, right, Okay, that
27:19
Speaker 1: that reminds me of John Edwards. Remember him crossing over
27:22
Speaker 1: with John Edwards? Yeah, I can't picture him. I think
27:26
Speaker 1: if I saw a picture I would totally remember, though
27:29
Speaker 1: you would he would. What a weird time the nineties
27:32
Speaker 1: were as far as stuff like that goes, although I
27:33
Speaker 1: think his show ran from two thousand to two thousand four. Yeah,
27:37
Speaker 1: but that can sort of coincided with the uh Reverend
27:40
Speaker 1: Bob Dobbs and the televangelism and all that good stuff.
27:44
Speaker 1: Um time. So then there's automatic writing was another big
27:48
Speaker 1: one too, And all of this should sound familiar again
27:50
Speaker 1: because the stuff just is so permeated in a pop
27:53
Speaker 1: culture it's crazy. But automatic writing is instead of the
27:57
Speaker 1: medium's voice being taken over, the medium being possessed in
28:02
Speaker 1: and speaking as the spirit, um, the spirit took over
28:07
Speaker 1: their hand and they would start writing and so in
28:10
Speaker 1: just the same way Corus Scott would um have a
28:13
Speaker 1: completely different personality or a different voice or different accent
28:16
Speaker 1: or something like that. This, like the handwriting or the
28:19
Speaker 1: word usage or anything like that would be different than
28:24
Speaker 1: the medium's normal handwriting. This is automatic writing and there
28:28
Speaker 1: was I'm trying to decide if I could do that. Well,
28:31
Speaker 1: sometimes they would use their non dominant hands, So if
28:33
Speaker 1: you want to change your handwriting, just do that to start.
28:38
Speaker 1: And then uh. There was a woman named Pearl Curran
28:42
Speaker 1: who wrote at least five thousand poems, novels and plays
28:48
Speaker 1: through automatic writing, all channeling the spirit of a seventeenth
28:52
Speaker 1: century woman from England named patients Worth. That's prolific. That's
28:59
Speaker 1: a lot of words. And then what about direct voice? Yeah,
29:03
Speaker 1: direct voices When you are a medium, you contact a
29:06
Speaker 1: spirit and the spirit is so powerful that they just
29:11
Speaker 1: speak to you directly, like the medium is just sitting
29:14
Speaker 1: there with their mouth clothes. Uh. And this happened usually
29:17
Speaker 1: in a dark room where they would have a business
29:20
Speaker 1: partner just behind the curtain obviously use talking, or maybe
29:25
Speaker 1: they were just doing a bad ventriloquist kind of deal
29:28
Speaker 1: where they're it's dark enough where you can't really see
29:30
Speaker 1: their lips moving throwing their voice. There was a woman
29:34
Speaker 1: named Leslie Flint is a medium. Oh really he looked
29:39
Speaker 1: like the old man from up. Oh did it make
29:44
Speaker 1: you cry when you looked at him? My daughter watch that?
29:50
Speaker 1: Here have these balloons? So yeah, Leslie. I actually love
29:55
Speaker 1: that name for a man, so and I don't know
29:57
Speaker 1: why I assumed, but he would recreate famous people like
30:01
Speaker 1: Sammy Davis Jr. But was it very good at it apparently,
30:07
Speaker 1: which is kind of funny. That makes us a little
30:09
Speaker 1: bit more ridiculous and fun Well, I was reading um
30:12
Speaker 1: obituary about him that was written by somebody who attended
30:15
Speaker 1: one of his or a couple I think of his seances,
30:18
Speaker 1: and they said things like, you know a lot of
30:20
Speaker 1: times you could tell it like what the trickery was
30:23
Speaker 1: or whatever, but there are other times where he would
30:25
Speaker 1: like be speaking over the voice, which is tough to
30:29
Speaker 1: do with ventriloquism. Or one time he was tested, he
30:33
Speaker 1: was made to hold colored water in his mouth while
30:36
Speaker 1: the spirit voice was speaking, and you're like, wow, you
30:39
Speaker 1: know that's pretty interesting. And then you just think, well,
30:41
Speaker 1: there's there's always an explanation for it, um, And you know,
30:46
Speaker 1: maybe there's another person who who was a Confederate in
30:48
Speaker 1: the room who knows, but um, it just goes to
30:51
Speaker 1: show that even still even today, and this guy's obituary
30:54
Speaker 1: that was written in the nineties the nines um that
30:58
Speaker 1: they were like, yeah, you know, he was largely considered
31:01
Speaker 1: a trickster fraud. But they'll still hedge and say, you know,
31:06
Speaker 1: but there were a couple of things and at the
31:07
Speaker 1: very least it's unexplained, which is pretty interesting and neat,
31:10
Speaker 1: but that doesn't necessarily mean that, Oh no, there really
31:13
Speaker 1: was a spirit that was talking in the room thanks
31:16
Speaker 1: to him. Amazing. So we had table turning. Uh, this
31:21
Speaker 1: is at a you know, this isn't like a theatrical performance.
31:24
Speaker 1: This is in a small room. Everyone and this kind
31:27
Speaker 1: of think wegia board with this. It's the same sort
31:29
Speaker 1: of thing, except the wigia board would be the actual
31:31
Speaker 1: table that you're sitting at. You and everyone would put
31:34
Speaker 1: their hands on the table and then the table would
31:36
Speaker 1: move or tilt or something when you're asking questions. So
31:40
Speaker 1: it's inhabiting the furniture. Of course, what's going on here
31:43
Speaker 1: is either like knee movements or sometime they had uh
31:47
Speaker 1: these rings on the medium's finger that were slotted and
31:51
Speaker 1: could move the table around without anyone noticing. Just another
31:55
Speaker 1: little parlor trick basically, yeah, or you know the idea
31:58
Speaker 1: that in your moving the table yourself like AUGI board. Um,
32:04
Speaker 1: I can't remember what it's called, but basically your your
32:06
Speaker 1: body is is moving without your brain being aware of it.
32:11
Speaker 1: And then there's also just the straight up power of suggestion,
32:13
Speaker 1: and this applies to table turning in a lot of
32:15
Speaker 1: other stuff. But if you're saying, like if you're the
32:20
Speaker 1: medium at a seance and you said the table is rising,
32:22
Speaker 1: it's rising people who are willing to believe, a lot
32:26
Speaker 1: of people who went to seance is wanted to believe.
32:29
Speaker 1: We're already believed in this stuff. Just the power of
32:31
Speaker 1: suggestion could be like, oh, it is raising a little bit,
32:34
Speaker 1: I can feel it. I can tell kind of thing. Yeah.
32:37
Speaker 1: My favorite, and uh, I bet your favorite too is
32:42
Speaker 1: ectoplasmic manifestations. Yeah, it's pretty good. This is when you
32:47
Speaker 1: would actually, as a spiritualist, produce something physical, something would
32:52
Speaker 1: manifest itself, uh, an actual substance. And it was they
32:56
Speaker 1: called it ectoplasm, and they could pull it from their
32:59
Speaker 1: boy and it was just basically something that they would
33:03
Speaker 1: make beforehand, um out of whatever. I mean, they would
33:08
Speaker 1: make out out of all kinds of things. It was
33:10
Speaker 1: one story about someone who was actually gluing cut out
33:13
Speaker 1: faces from a magazine onto dolls and those were ectoplasm spirits.
33:18
Speaker 1: But they would hide these things sometimes like up their
33:20
Speaker 1: butt or in their other body cavities, and they would
33:25
Speaker 1: pull these things out. And some of the pictures that
33:27
Speaker 1: you see online if you look up ectoplasma eighteen hundreds
33:31
Speaker 1: seance is just the pictures themselves are hysterical and frightening
33:36
Speaker 1: all at the same time. Yeah, and especially now when
33:39
Speaker 1: you look back and see them, you're like, how did
33:41
Speaker 1: anybody fall for that? And it's really important to keep
33:44
Speaker 1: in mind one they wanted to believe, but two, these
33:47
Speaker 1: seances would be carried out in dark rooms to where
33:51
Speaker 1: you couldn't see much at all. Um, you just suddenly
33:55
Speaker 1: see some luminous you know, cloth or something that you
33:59
Speaker 1: were led to believe was ectoplasm kind of what looked
34:02
Speaker 1: like floating in the middle of the table or something
34:05
Speaker 1: like that. It's stuff that's that's really easy to explain.
34:08
Speaker 1: But in a darkened room that you've been sitting in
34:10
Speaker 1: for three hours communicating with spirits, you might be a
34:14
Speaker 1: lot more prone to to buy into it than under
34:17
Speaker 1: normal circumstances. Yeah, for sure. Uh, maybe you're a little drunk,
34:23
Speaker 1: right tipsy. Levitation was another big one, nice little uh
34:28
Speaker 1: party trick. Um. I actually could sort of do this
34:31
Speaker 1: for a little while. The David Blaine method. I don't
34:33
Speaker 1: know if you ever saw his when he made himself levitate.
34:36
Speaker 1: It's just kind of hopping up and down and air right. No,
34:39
Speaker 1: it's it's you're thinking of trampolines. Oh, that's not the
34:47
Speaker 1: same thing. People, people can see those. Uh No, it's
34:50
Speaker 1: all about the angle with the David Blaine method um
34:53
Speaker 1: of getting them to see you from the right angle
34:56
Speaker 1: to where what you're really doing is you're rising your
34:59
Speaker 1: body up with just one, like just your first three
35:04
Speaker 1: toes on your right foot, and you're and you're hiding
35:07
Speaker 1: that with your other foot, so it looks like you're
35:10
Speaker 1: just a sort of levitating a few inches off the ground,
35:13
Speaker 1: and then you act like you're unsteady, and then you
35:15
Speaker 1: land back down and go, oh boy, that was a
35:17
Speaker 1: good one. That was pretty powerful. So wait a minute,
35:20
Speaker 1: David Blaine can raise his entire body weight with three toes, well,
35:26
Speaker 1: I mean he's on his toes. I just I mean
35:29
Speaker 1: I could do it at the time too. This is
35:30
Speaker 1: in the nineties. Man, that's impressive. I don't think I've
35:33
Speaker 1: ever had the kind of toe strength there that is
35:36
Speaker 1: required to do that. You can raise yourself up with
35:39
Speaker 1: one foot in a seated position. No, no, no, you're standing.
35:44
Speaker 1: Oh oh yeah. So what you're doing is you're standing
35:48
Speaker 1: there and then you raise yourself off the ground with
35:51
Speaker 1: just the toes on your right foot, let's say, and
35:54
Speaker 1: you're keeping your left foot is shielding that so you
35:56
Speaker 1: can't quite see it, and it just creates if you
35:59
Speaker 1: got someone at the right angle. And I got pretty
36:01
Speaker 1: good at it. My roommate Justin was like, you're getting
36:03
Speaker 1: bet a mate, right, Oh, I'm getting drunk. Well, both
36:08
Speaker 1: of those things were happening. I thought you were talking about, like,
36:11
Speaker 1: you know, like a fake here or something like that
36:13
Speaker 1: where they're sitting cross legged in their avocating I was like,
36:18
Speaker 1: to do that with just three toes, That in and
36:21
Speaker 1: of itself is pretty impressive, but it's all right, What
36:26
Speaker 1: are the other There's another couple of things they did too,
36:28
Speaker 1: What are the photography? Pretty pretty straightforward stuff where you know,
36:33
Speaker 1: this is the very beginnings of photography. So people didn't
36:36
Speaker 1: understand double exposures unless you're a photographer. But if you were,
36:40
Speaker 1: you could do all sorts of neat stuff like double
36:42
Speaker 1: exposed something to put a ghostly face in the background
36:45
Speaker 1: over someone's shoulder. U. I saw one. I saw a
36:49
Speaker 1: spirit photograph where it was a ghostly arm. It also
36:55
Speaker 1: could have been a genie coming out of a bottle.
36:57
Speaker 1: One of the two. It looked exactly the same, but
37:00
Speaker 1: it was like that it was on a table, so
37:02
Speaker 1: they were like, this is a spirit arm levitating the table.
37:05
Speaker 1: So they're like tying three things together. Table turning, levitating
37:09
Speaker 1: and spirit photography. Those are great. I think the spirit
37:12
Speaker 1: photography just because they were taking advantage of this new technology.
37:15
Speaker 1: People didn't even understand. It was like the deep fake
37:18
Speaker 1: of the time, and they were probably like everybody, we
37:22
Speaker 1: got maybe three years, Yeah, we better get prolific, and
37:26
Speaker 1: then everyone's gonna be like, oh, that's just double exposure. Um.
37:30
Speaker 1: And then people like I said earlier to a lot
37:33
Speaker 1: of the new age stuff that's tied into spiritualism today,
37:36
Speaker 1: like tarot readings or um oh, I don't know, astrology,
37:42
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff that had nothing to do with
37:45
Speaker 1: this because spiritualists, all of it grew out of Christianity,
37:50
Speaker 1: so there was some Christian basis to all of the
37:54
Speaker 1: spiritualist practices. And even though in a lot of ways
37:58
Speaker 1: it was extraordinarily her ridical. There was no religious leader
38:02
Speaker 1: in charge of anything. There was no scripture or doctrine
38:05
Speaker 1: or anything like that. It was still very much tied
38:08
Speaker 1: into and born out of Christianity, So stuff like occult
38:14
Speaker 1: things would have would have been very much frowned upon
38:17
Speaker 1: by spiritualists totally. Should we take another break, I think
38:21
Speaker 1: we should. All right, We'll take another break and tell
38:24
Speaker 1: you about what the Civil War had to do with
38:26
Speaker 1: all of this right after this, all right, so, uh,
38:56
Speaker 1: pre Civil War in the United States, spiritualism was popular
39:00
Speaker 1: or it was booming, but it was more like the
39:02
Speaker 1: kind of thing that you did in a theater and
39:04
Speaker 1: you would go see it as a curiosity or you
39:07
Speaker 1: might just maybe even knew it was fake and it
39:09
Speaker 1: was just entertainment. There wasn't a lot going on back then.
39:11
Speaker 1: Kind of penguins in a zoo today, like you know,
39:15
Speaker 1: they're fake, but it's still fun to look at, right
39:18
Speaker 1: and not. Why not go pay a nickel to see
39:20
Speaker 1: madam whatever, do her little do her little erotic uh,
39:24
Speaker 1: because we'll get into that he's got a little sexy
39:26
Speaker 1: at times. Do your little ghost, Jimmy. This is part
39:29
Speaker 1: of the part of the draw. The ghost Jimmy. But um,
39:33
Speaker 1: we need to talk about a couple of things here.
39:35
Speaker 1: That the Civil War for sure, but um, one of
39:38
Speaker 1: the things that was going on. You know, we've been
39:40
Speaker 1: talking about a lot about the northeastern United States, and
39:43
Speaker 1: there's a very good reason it didn't take hold in
39:45
Speaker 1: the South. It's because the way Christianity was and so
39:51
Speaker 1: I might argue still is in the South didn't leave
39:53
Speaker 1: a lot of room. Um, the hierarchy didn't leave a
39:57
Speaker 1: lot of room for other schools of thought. And it
39:59
Speaker 1: was based sically, even though it wasn't necessarily cult. It
40:02
Speaker 1: was just shut down kind of from the beginning in
40:05
Speaker 1: the South. They're like, we'll stick to our voodoo, thank
40:08
Speaker 1: you very much, exactly, keep that spiritualism stuff out. Yeah,
40:14
Speaker 1: So it was just not a big thing in the South. Um.
40:18
Speaker 1: The mediums at the time would move off the stage
40:22
Speaker 1: sometimes and have these these private sciences. Uh. Sometimes they
40:25
Speaker 1: would get in touch with a family member, but oftentimes
40:28
Speaker 1: it would just be kind of the same in the
40:30
Speaker 1: state as the stage show. They would say, like, I'm
40:32
Speaker 1: gonna get in touch with Sammy Davis Jr. Or whatever.
40:35
Speaker 1: The popular dead figure at the time was Sure. Um,
40:38
Speaker 1: but that was for like, pre Civil War, it was
40:41
Speaker 1: an entertainment, it was an amusement. But when the Civil
40:43
Speaker 1: War came and a lot of people died in the
40:47
Speaker 1: Civil War, and that means that a lot of people
40:50
Speaker 1: who survived the Civil War lost a loved one. And
40:54
Speaker 1: this might have been people who you know, went off
40:57
Speaker 1: to fight and just never came back, never heard from again,
41:01
Speaker 1: no nothing, have no idea where they died, where they
41:04
Speaker 1: were buried. And so that kind of grief, you know,
41:08
Speaker 1: that transcends any kind of time or place, and it
41:12
Speaker 1: created a lot of people, a large population of people
41:15
Speaker 1: who were very interested in getting in touch with their
41:18
Speaker 1: dead relative. And it just so happened that at the
41:20
Speaker 1: time there was a movement afoot that said, oh, well,
41:24
Speaker 1: this guy over here is actually really good at getting
41:26
Speaker 1: in touch with the dead one. Don't you have a
41:27
Speaker 1: seance with him? You just have to, you know, pay
41:31
Speaker 1: him to to do this work, because it is a
41:34
Speaker 1: lot of work, whether you are a believer and a skeptic,
41:38
Speaker 1: it's a lot of work to have been a medium
41:40
Speaker 1: during this time. Um. And so they would be paid
41:43
Speaker 1: and they would make a living like this, and so
41:46
Speaker 1: these seances, these performances, uh, were decreased in size, but
41:51
Speaker 1: vastly increased in frequency. Yeah, a lot more spiritualists doing
41:56
Speaker 1: smaller mediums for families or smaller seances for fami lens.
42:00
Speaker 1: And the same thing happened after World War One as well.
42:03
Speaker 1: So it's um, you know, it's kind of all fun
42:06
Speaker 1: and games until it gets to this level. If it's
42:08
Speaker 1: a big theater show, fine whatever, Uh, go pay your
42:12
Speaker 1: money and get entertained for an hour. But when you
42:15
Speaker 1: are taking people's money who have lost loved ones in battle,
42:18
Speaker 1: then that's when it gets kind of really ugly if
42:20
Speaker 1: you ask me, right, And that's where I think a
42:22
Speaker 1: lot of the genuine skeptics who who beat this kind
42:27
Speaker 1: of stuff to a pulp, that's the place that they're
42:30
Speaker 1: coming from, you know, not not not necessarily that it's
42:33
Speaker 1: like an a front of science or reason or common
42:35
Speaker 1: sense or anything like that, but that there are a
42:38
Speaker 1: lot of people who have parted um money from people
42:43
Speaker 1: who were bereaved at the time, and you just you
42:46
Speaker 1: don't take advantage of people who are undergoing grief. That's
42:49
Speaker 1: a pretty shoddy thing to do. That's a life lesson
42:52
Speaker 1: right there for everybody listening, especially Not only that, not
42:57
Speaker 1: only taking their money. But I imagine in a lot
42:59
Speaker 1: of cases people made real life decisions based on things
43:03
Speaker 1: that would happen in these seances. You know, right's to
43:06
Speaker 1: sell the family farm, like yeah, stuff like that. Oh God,
43:09
Speaker 1: I hadn't thought about that. And not only sell the
43:12
Speaker 1: family farms, sell it to me the medium. That's what
43:15
Speaker 1: your dead for. What something's coming through there saying pennies
43:19
Speaker 1: on the dollar, that's great. So yeah, that's terrible. So
43:27
Speaker 1: by the end of the twentie century, things started to
43:30
Speaker 1: decline a bit. Um. One was just pure greed. There
43:35
Speaker 1: were too many of them out there. They were all
43:37
Speaker 1: trying to outdo one another. They were trying to draw
43:40
Speaker 1: bigger crowds and more money, and they were getting more
43:42
Speaker 1: outrageous by doing so. And that meant, just like anything,
43:46
Speaker 1: when you try and do that, the bigger you try
43:48
Speaker 1: to force something to be Sometimes that can lead to
43:51
Speaker 1: its kind of early death. I guess, yeah, go big
43:53
Speaker 1: or go home, But eventually you're going to go home anyway.
43:57
Speaker 1: That's the end of that saying. I love right, so um.
44:01
Speaker 1: Part of it was that they they were making more
44:04
Speaker 1: and more audacious claims, but also there were more and
44:07
Speaker 1: more scientists like those that that UM open minded scientific
44:13
Speaker 1: approach had become a lot more hardened towards UM spiritualism
44:19
Speaker 1: and mediums because so many had been investigated and found
44:23
Speaker 1: it just be total frauds. Most of the time, the
44:27
Speaker 1: outcome was the the medium couldn't reproduce this ectoplasm or
44:32
Speaker 1: get in touch with the spirit when they were under
44:35
Speaker 1: controlled conditions, or they they went for it and they
44:39
Speaker 1: were found to be a fraud, like the the the
44:42
Speaker 1: knuckle of their toe was found to be rapping on
44:45
Speaker 1: a stool or something like that. UM. And so as
44:48
Speaker 1: these reports kept coming out, more and more these scientific
44:52
Speaker 1: investigators were like, I don't think any of this is real,
44:55
Speaker 1: and they would be interviewed in newspapers and the papers
44:58
Speaker 1: would run these articles, and so over time the just
45:01
Speaker 1: the general public kind of turned away from spiritualism. Is
45:05
Speaker 1: is hocom and bunk. But the thing is is not
45:08
Speaker 1: everyone did and even still today. Go asked Dan a Kroid,
45:12
Speaker 1: there is a group of people who would here to
45:15
Speaker 1: spiritualism as a as a religion, No for sure, UM.
45:20
Speaker 1: And one of the big reasons that it didn't completely
45:22
Speaker 1: go away was UH, spiritualists were very smart and that
45:26
Speaker 1: they would use influencers of the day in their act.
45:29
Speaker 1: They would seek out these well known people. Um. They
45:32
Speaker 1: would tour the world, sometimes tour Europe and do um
45:37
Speaker 1: seances with like royal families of various countries, the newspapers
45:41
Speaker 1: right about this. Um, they would get a quote or
45:45
Speaker 1: maybe demand a quote from someone like well known and
45:50
Speaker 1: they would say, all right, I'll come to a science,
45:51
Speaker 1: but you gotta give me a quote that I can
45:53
Speaker 1: use my my flyer or whatever. What's that called pull quote? No? No, no,
45:59
Speaker 1: the that that fallacy, the logical fallacy, appeal to authority,
46:03
Speaker 1: I think, oh yeah, yeah, the appeal to authority, yeah,
46:08
Speaker 1: which you know makes a lot of sense if people see, oh,
46:10
Speaker 1: well they did a stance for the Prince of Monaco
46:13
Speaker 1: or or Sammy Davis Jr. Then it's got to be
46:17
Speaker 1: good enough for me. It's not pseudoscience at all, because
46:19
Speaker 1: why would Sammy Davis Jr. Believe in pseudoscience? Right, He's
46:23
Speaker 1: just a Satanist. He doesn't care about pseudoscience, that's right. So, Um.
46:29
Speaker 1: One of the other authorities that they would appeal to,
46:32
Speaker 1: Chuck was, um, what this one. There's an expose written
46:37
Speaker 1: in seven and by God if I can't, I can't
46:40
Speaker 1: find it anywhere in my tabs. But it was basically
46:44
Speaker 1: uh oh, Revelations of a Spirit Medium is what it
46:48
Speaker 1: was called. And it was written anonymously by a medium,
46:52
Speaker 1: a huckster of fraud, and I'm pretty sure it was published.
46:56
Speaker 1: And it is like four pages exposing all the tip
47:00
Speaker 1: and all that stuff, all the tricks. But one of
47:03
Speaker 1: there's a glossary of like nineteenth century slang words among hoaxters.
47:08
Speaker 1: It's amazing. But one of them was the top heavy,
47:11
Speaker 1: and that was a scientist who was over credentialed. They
47:14
Speaker 1: had all these PhDs and everything like that, so they
47:16
Speaker 1: were booksmarked, but they were super gullible. And if you
47:18
Speaker 1: could get a top heavy to basically say, like, I
47:22
Speaker 1: can't explain it, Science can't explain it, that would go
47:25
Speaker 1: a very long way to bolstering your career. You know. Yeah,
47:29
Speaker 1: Even if you talked to a hundred scientists and one
47:32
Speaker 1: of them was a top heavy who had said something
47:34
Speaker 1: valuable to you, that's the only one You're You're the
47:37
Speaker 1: tenth dentist of that I'm out of ten dentists, right,
47:40
Speaker 1: exactly exactly, And that's all you need, especially if the
47:44
Speaker 1: other nine dentists just keep their traps shut because they
47:49
Speaker 1: have better things to do. But there were a bunch
47:51
Speaker 1: of people who would not keep their traps shut. Um,
47:54
Speaker 1: I guess actually one of a legendary top heavy even
47:57
Speaker 1: though he wasn't a scientist, credential or otherwise was um
48:01
Speaker 1: so Arthur Conan Doyle. I don't know what's wrong with me? Um,
48:05
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, sir Arthur Coning. Do wheal by the way
48:12
Speaker 1: before I forget if if there's not a band called
48:14
Speaker 1: the tenth Dentist out there, then I don't know what
48:16
Speaker 1: to think anymore. It's a good one. Remember those tried
48:18
Speaker 1: in commercials? I think it was four out of five dentists.
48:21
Speaker 1: One of them was a four out of five. He
48:23
Speaker 1: was bit on the testicles by a squirrel before he
48:25
Speaker 1: could pronounce how, before he could recommend dentin or trident
48:29
Speaker 1: or something like that. Maybe it should be the fifth.
48:31
Speaker 1: It is four out of five, it's not nine out
48:33
Speaker 1: of ten. Do you remember that though it was great?
48:38
Speaker 1: What was the what was the cult? Was it? We
48:41
Speaker 1: make holes in teeth? Remember that the cartoon that was crest? Okay,
48:46
Speaker 1: do you want to hear you want to hear the
48:48
Speaker 1: pinnacle of eighties marketing. Two kids, my third grade maybe
48:55
Speaker 1: fourth grade class put on a play about out yes
49:01
Speaker 1: and cavities sponsored by Crest. Yeah. They had a big
49:05
Speaker 1: pushback then for taking over the minds of American children.
49:09
Speaker 1: Well it worked. What's funny is is I now use
49:11
Speaker 1: um aquafresh the orange tube? Oh? Man, if there is
49:17
Speaker 1: a favorite toothpaste that any boy in America has ever had,
49:20
Speaker 1: that is it in its mind that was from the eighties. No,
49:23
Speaker 1: it is now. But I'm saying the Crest takeover of
49:26
Speaker 1: my mind doesn't work? Got you? And I'm an aquafresh
49:29
Speaker 1: point now? Is that the one with a tricolor? Yeah,
49:33
Speaker 1: which is another very appealing part of it. Man, you'd
49:36
Speaker 1: buy it all, don't you. I do? Yeah? I am
49:40
Speaker 1: a little gullible. You're like an Arthur Conan Doyle. So
49:44
Speaker 1: he if you recognize his name, he was the author
49:46
Speaker 1: of Sherlock Holmes. Of course, he was super into this.
49:49
Speaker 1: He joined the Society for Psychical Research, which is an
49:52
Speaker 1: early skeptical slash believer society. Um, and he always he
49:58
Speaker 1: bought into this. He was just convinced. Um. But on
50:01
Speaker 1: the other side of the equation, we're skeptics who were
50:04
Speaker 1: not convinced, who basically didn't keep their mouth shut. They
50:07
Speaker 1: were the other four who would say, like, no, everybody, actually,
50:11
Speaker 1: this guy's wrong. My esteemed colleague has has been taken um.
50:16
Speaker 1: But then the head of those guys was Harry Houdini.
50:19
Speaker 1: Amazingly enough, Yeah, Houdini um. Which makes it super ironic
50:24
Speaker 1: that at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles they have
50:27
Speaker 1: have long had Harry Houdini seance nights where you can
50:31
Speaker 1: go into the Harry Houdini Room and do a seance,
50:34
Speaker 1: which is, you know, it's all for fun. But it
50:38
Speaker 1: is kind of funny that he was very much against
50:41
Speaker 1: this stuff, although it supposedly if you go the Magic Castle,
50:44
Speaker 1: they'll tell you that he did, and he may have
50:45
Speaker 1: really done this. Is told his wife before he died that, hey, listen,
50:52
Speaker 1: if I was wrong, I'll come back and I'll contact
50:54
Speaker 1: you and let you know you're right. And and he
50:58
Speaker 1: came back and he said, I've got good news and
51:01
Speaker 1: I've got bad news. The good news is there is
51:04
Speaker 1: a heaven. The bad news is your scheduled to pitch
51:07
Speaker 1: there tonight. Do you remember that Scary Stories to Tell
51:11
Speaker 1: in the Dark book? Yeah, where was that what that
51:14
Speaker 1: was from there was like two friends who played baseball together.
51:17
Speaker 1: He had a pact like Harry Houdini and his wife. Apparently.
51:20
Speaker 1: I think that's a There's different versions of that joke though. Man,
51:23
Speaker 1: the illustrations in that book were just barrened on. Yeah,
51:27
Speaker 1: that was great stuff. And by the way, we should
51:30
Speaker 1: give a big rest in peace to Mr Morton Drucker,
51:34
Speaker 1: who passed away a couple of weeks ago in real time.
51:37
Speaker 1: But that was that was a big one. We talked
51:39
Speaker 1: about Mad Magazine a lot, and mort Drucker was my
51:42
Speaker 1: number one with a bullet favorite artist and he passed
51:46
Speaker 1: on and he was one of the greats. He definitely
51:48
Speaker 1: shaped my childhood in a very large way with his drawings. Yeah, Um,
51:57
Speaker 1: we'll hear from you soon, right, He's like you was
52:00
Speaker 1: her pitching tonight? Oh no, both of us so so
52:04
Speaker 1: Harry Houdini. He's like, yeah, Josh is gonna flub it
52:07
Speaker 1: and Chuck's gonna have to be brought in for the safe.
52:11
Speaker 1: So Harry Hudin Harry Judini created this longstanding tradition of
52:17
Speaker 1: stage magicians, um exposing the fraud of spiritual is m Basically, yeah,
52:23
Speaker 1: because they were, They're like, they're stealing our tricks. Yeah,
52:26
Speaker 1: and it's pretty cool. Like he would incorporate into his
52:29
Speaker 1: stage shows a lot of these things that spiritualists were
52:32
Speaker 1: doing to show how they did it, and he was
52:35
Speaker 1: relentless at it. Yeah, he was very relentless, but it
52:39
Speaker 1: was very cool. And the fact that it's still going
52:41
Speaker 1: on today. Um Richard Wiseman, who's come up a few times.
52:46
Speaker 1: He was in the Shell Drake episode. He was in
52:48
Speaker 1: the Ghosts episode, and I think we somehow misconstrued as
52:52
Speaker 1: research in the ghost episode to suggest that he had
52:54
Speaker 1: proven ghosts exists. I don't remember exactly the details of it,
52:58
Speaker 1: but what we got that one wrong. But in this case,
53:01
Speaker 1: he has recreated seances from the nineteenth century and has
53:06
Speaker 1: shown how willing people are to totally misreport the events
53:11
Speaker 1: that went on in the seance to say that yes,
53:14
Speaker 1: you know, the table did levitate, or um all the
53:17
Speaker 1: stuff that he's studying under these controlled conditions, and it's
53:20
Speaker 1: basically shown not just that the the the medium himself
53:26
Speaker 1: or more often herself as we'll see UM, was engaging
53:30
Speaker 1: in fraud, but also that the audience was Um had
53:33
Speaker 1: a willing suspension of disbelief and we're part of this too.
53:37
Speaker 1: By saying like I felt the phantom arm tapped me
53:39
Speaker 1: on the shoulder. The medium didn't have anything to do
53:42
Speaker 1: with that. That was just something that kind of came
53:44
Speaker 1: out of the environment that was produced in the seance.
53:47
Speaker 1: You know. Yeah, pretty interesting, It is pretty interesting. So
53:52
Speaker 1: we'll finish up here with this. UM. I thought this
53:54
Speaker 1: was very interesting actually, the social implications of this. UM.
54:00
Speaker 1: Most of the not all, but a lot of these
54:02
Speaker 1: spiritualists were women in the nineteenth century. Um, for some
54:06
Speaker 1: practical reasons, I could wear these long dresses that could
54:09
Speaker 1: hide uh talented toe knuckles. Um, they were not because
54:14
Speaker 1: of the time, they wouldn't get like searched too closely, obviously,
54:18
Speaker 1: because you wouldn't do that if you were a scientist
54:20
Speaker 1: trying to examine whether or not a spiritualist was real
54:24
Speaker 1: or not. And that led to there were men, for sure,
54:27
Speaker 1: But that led to this kind of interesting side note. UM.
54:31
Speaker 1: One is that women could make their own money, and
54:35
Speaker 1: so it's easy to poop poo something like this. But
54:38
Speaker 1: I'm sure those Fox sisters made a lot more dough
54:40
Speaker 1: than they ever could have as uh, you know, doing
54:45
Speaker 1: anything else offered an available to them at the time.
54:49
Speaker 1: So that's a good thing that gave him some agency.
54:51
Speaker 1: But these uh, it was no coincidence that sometimes the
54:54
Speaker 1: voice from the other side would champion sort of progressive views,
54:59
Speaker 1: because this turned out to be a chance to sort
55:02
Speaker 1: of reshape policy in a way. If you were a
55:05
Speaker 1: woman and you were a spiritualist, it would be very
55:08
Speaker 1: easy to say, you know, they're saying that that women
55:11
Speaker 1: should have more rights and if not, they will come
55:14
Speaker 1: back and haunt you, all right, And that kind of
55:17
Speaker 1: ended up happening in some ways. Yeah, there was a
55:19
Speaker 1: huge connection between spiritualism and spiritualist movement and abolitionism, the
55:25
Speaker 1: women's suffrage movement, the women's temper or the temperance movement,
55:29
Speaker 1: a lot of these progressive movements with workers rights and that.
55:33
Speaker 1: You know, if you were an abolitionist and you didn't
55:35
Speaker 1: believe in this kind of thing, you might be like,
55:37
Speaker 1: I'm not really happy about that. But at the same
55:39
Speaker 1: time it kind of whipped up this fervor and that
55:42
Speaker 1: some people would like their spirits that that that was
55:46
Speaker 1: that were being channeled by the medium. We're saying things
55:49
Speaker 1: like you guys better get on the train of abolitionism,
55:52
Speaker 1: you better get rid of slavery, and it actually did,
55:55
Speaker 1: especially in these theatrical settings, have a widespread in fluence
56:00
Speaker 1: on getting the message out there, um through the spirit communication.
56:06
Speaker 1: Weirdly enough, yeah, it's almost like one could say anything
56:10
Speaker 1: at all. It's something like, oh, I don't know a
56:12
Speaker 1: campaign rally, and people would believe it if they were
56:15
Speaker 1: an ardent enough believer in the speaker exactly, especially if
56:20
Speaker 1: they detached their ego to you and your success. Very strange.
56:25
Speaker 1: So um, I just want to give two shouts out,
56:28
Speaker 1: one to the probably the greatest ghost movie that involves
56:34
Speaker 1: seances ever ghost No WHOOPI Goldberg all right? The others, Yeah,
56:44
Speaker 1: that was good, so good, and then spoil it. The
56:48
Speaker 1: greatest short story involving seances in the spiritualist movement, written
56:52
Speaker 1: by arguably the greatest American writer of all time, Joyce
56:55
Speaker 1: Carol Oates. It's called Ninth Side. It's a short story.
56:59
Speaker 1: It's the same time. Idol is a collection of her
57:01
Speaker 1: short stories from the seventies. I think nine seven, Um, Nightside,
57:06
Speaker 1: look it up and thank me later. It's seriously just
57:10
Speaker 1: bone chilling how good it is. I wonder if we
57:13
Speaker 1: could uh get in touch with her and read that
57:16
Speaker 1: for our Halloween episodes. I tweeted to her once kind
57:18
Speaker 1: of crassley, um, and never heard anything back. Even though
57:22
Speaker 1: you're like Twitter, I know she saw that tweet. Hey
57:24
Speaker 1: at Joyce Carol Oates, you think you're so cool? Right? Um?
57:28
Speaker 1: I would love to read that one. There's another one too,
57:32
Speaker 1: there's a she's probably not just the greatest American writer,
57:36
Speaker 1: but the greatest American horror writer too. She's so wonderful.
57:41
Speaker 1: I would read any of her stories. So if you
57:44
Speaker 1: out there no Joyce Carol Oates were in contact with
57:47
Speaker 1: her or her publisher, please, we would love to read
57:53
Speaker 1: in our ad free episode one of her short stories
57:56
Speaker 1: for Halloween. That's right, so I think she I like
58:00
Speaker 1: that aspect. Okay, Oh one last thing, chuck. Uh. There's
58:04
Speaker 1: a place called lily Dale in New York, appropriately enough,
58:07
Speaker 1: which is basically a spiritualist community where you can go
58:11
Speaker 1: basically be among spiritualists as a religion. Today wonderful, since
58:18
Speaker 1: I said today it's time for listening to man, I'm
58:23
Speaker 1: gonna call this. Uh. We haven't gotten emails in two
58:28
Speaker 1: weeks from people because something's wrong with our email server.
58:32
Speaker 1: So it's on the Days again, You're gonna get a
58:35
Speaker 1: couple on bad days. I think, hey, guys, listening to
58:38
Speaker 1: your recent episode on the Day's reminded me of a
58:40
Speaker 1: funny story I thought you might like. Two thousand four
58:43
Speaker 1: of my family bought a new house in the suburbs
58:45
Speaker 1: of Detroit. Was designed and built by an exceptionally pragmatic, efficient,
58:49
Speaker 1: yet lacking an aesthetic appreciation engineer. To our surprise my
58:53
Speaker 1: husband's delight, as he is from Spain, the master bathroom
58:57
Speaker 1: included a separate biday unit. I remember where this is
59:00
Speaker 1: two thousand four, and people were not as familiar in
59:02
Speaker 1: this country. Most people that visited our home had no
59:05
Speaker 1: idea what it was, and we also made the decision
59:08
Speaker 1: to not give advanced notice when they went to the bathroom. Invariably,
59:12
Speaker 1: people would emerge from the bathroom trip either a little
59:14
Speaker 1: wet or with an embarrassed look on their face as
59:16
Speaker 1: they confessed having explored the contraption and released a stream
59:19
Speaker 1: of water onto themselves and into our bathroom. Was always
59:23
Speaker 1: good for a laugh. I sure appreciate you, guys. When
59:27
Speaker 1: we moved from Michigan to the South to the South Carolina,
59:31
Speaker 1: what she was? She once missed South Carolina because that
59:36
Speaker 1: would explain that last bit. Now, I thought it was
59:39
Speaker 1: she met the South, and I didn't see on the
59:41
Speaker 1: next line it said Carolina. So that was just me.
59:45
Speaker 1: Your voices accompanied us as we made many twelve hour
59:47
Speaker 1: trips back and forth. We enjoyed the knowledge and the tangents,
59:51
Speaker 1: even the tangents. Uh. And now you continue to suthe
59:54
Speaker 1: and educate me as I go on my four to
59:56
Speaker 1: five mile recreational walks during the pandemic quarantine and temporary
1:00:01
Speaker 1: hopefully furlough. And that is from Michelle sal Sado. Nice.
1:00:08
Speaker 1: Thanks a lot, Michelle. We're glad to know that you're
1:00:10
Speaker 1: doing okay. They're hanging out waiting for things to get
1:00:12
Speaker 1: back to normal in the South Carolina. That's right, chuck,
1:00:16
Speaker 1: um and uh as it will eventually go back to normal. Um.
1:00:22
Speaker 1: And in the meantime, if you want to get in
1:00:23
Speaker 1: touch with us, like Michelle did to let us know
1:00:26
Speaker 1: some silly story about it a day or what have you,
1:00:29
Speaker 1: you can get in touch with us. Send us an
1:00:31
Speaker 1: email to stuff podcast how Stuff Works dot com. Stuff
1:00:38
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