Episode 215: Mind Over Matter

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Everyone remembers their first passion.

For many people, that might be sports or theater or whatever the pop culture obsession was at the time.

For me, growing up as a kid in the 80s, there were two similar things that I was absolutely fascinated with.

The first was a holdover from the Cold War, something that always seemed to have a Russia versus the CIA vibe to it.

I think my first glimpse of it was actually on an old episode of Unsolved Mysteries, grainy black and white video footage of people doing something extraordinary, moving objects with their minds.

It didn't take long for terms like ESP and telekinesis to embed themselves firmly in my young, impressionable brain, and I became one of what must have been a million grade school kids trying to guess what card my brother was holding in his hand.

Honestly, there was just something overwhelmingly attractive about that sort of power.

And then there was magic.

Right from my living room, I had a front-row seat to all of the David Copperfield television specials, and I was hooked.

I mean, come on, the guy made the Statue of Liberty disappear in 1983 for crying out loud.

He walked through the Great Wall of China and escaped from Alcatraz.

How could a kid not become obsessed with magic?

To me, the 1980s felt like the perfect mix of security from a safer, more modern world, but with these vestiges of old superstitions and beliefs still alive and active around me, that's probably a big reason for who I am today.

But what I know now, decades later, is that I was only seeing the tip of a very big, very old iceberg.

For a glimpse of the truly bizarre and unusual world at the intersection of the stage and the supernatural, we need to go deeper into the past.

So, if you're ready, I want to take you on a tour of the wild and fascinating world of celebrity mediums.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

Every generation has had a few stars.

I mentioned David Copperfield a moment ago, but perhaps he was a bit before your time.

Today there's people like Darren Brown, Penn and Teller, and Justin Willman.

Decades earlier there was Ricky J and Doug Henning.

And of course, if you go back far enough, you'll bump into the granddaddy of them all, Harry Houdini.

But while each of them brought their own style and bag of tricks to the stage, one thing united all of them.

Their audiences knew they were being tricked.

I mean, that's sort of the point when you see a man claim to make the Statue of Liberty disappear, right?

The fun is in the spectacle, not that it's actually happening.

But when it came to the mediums of the second half of the 19th century, things were very different.

Their careers were built on the idea that the audience was witnessing something real and supernatural.

And a great example of this was William John Warner, who toured and performed under the name Cairo.

Warner was born just outside of Dublin, Ireland in 1866 and was already deep into the occult by his teen years.

But when most students were preparing for university, Warner headed east to India, where he studied ancient texts on, of all things, palmistry.

And after two years of soaking it all in, he returned and set up shop as a palm reader.

And Warner was really into hands.

You can see it in his stage name, Cairo, taken from the technical term for palm reading, chiromancy.

He himself claimed to have studied thousands of hands, cast in plaster, impressions in clay, and even printed on paper with ink.

And the public loved him.

Now, you might not have heard of William Warner before, but you've certainly heard of a few of his clients.

Thomas Edison, Mark Twain, President Grover Cleveland, Oscar Wilde, and even the Prince of Wales.

All of them paid Warner a visit looking for the sort of guidance only he could glean from looking at their hands.

By the end of his life, he had set up shop in Hollywood, where he sold upwards of 20 palm readings a day for as much as a thousand bucks a pop.

And when he died, no one seemed to question his talent.

After all, this was a man who predicted in early 1912 that shipbuilder William Peary would be in for the fight of his life.

A short while later, one of Peary's ships sank in the North Atlantic, putting his career into a tailspin.

That ship?

The Titanic.

William Stanton Moses was another star of the stage in the world of mediums.

His talent wasn't palm-reading, though.

No, he was known across England for his talent with automatic writing.

Although, unlike William Warner, Moses would have a tougher path.

William Stanton Moses had actually started out his career as a priest in the Church of England, who was adamantly opposed to anything even remotely connected to the occult or the supernatural.

But two years after his ordination, he somehow attended a seance and seems to have become hooked.

Five months into that, he claimed he had experienced levitation and could see and feel the spirits around him.

Soon enough, he was holding his own seances, and his primary method for communicating with the dead was through automatic writing, where a pencil would write out messages from the other world without a hand to hold them or guide them.

For the most part, he kept those seances to friends and family, but he did branch out enough to capture a bit of fame, and with that renown came skepticism in the form of researchers hoping to debunk his work.

But despite being caught with a bottle of oil of phosphorus, something that tricksters would use to make their hands appear to glow in the dark, most people just assumed that he was too nice of a man to be a fraud.

And then there was Eusepia Palladino, an Italian woman born in 1854.

She came from a poor farming family and struggled for much of her life to be seen as anything other than a country bumpkin.

But apparently early on she showed promise in the world of spiritualism.

In 1886, a well-known local occultist heard about Eusepia and helped her kickstart her career as a traveling medium.

Soon, she was touring Europe and America, wowing audiences with her ability to levitate objects, to manifest ghosts, and to make handprints appear in soft clay without touching it.

Now, either she was a bit less convincing than others in her field, or folks were just more skeptical about the claims of women back then.

And honestly, it sounds like it was a bit of both.

But Eusepia spent most of the rest of her life fighting against claims of fraud.

It didn't help that these objects that she claimed to move across the table or levitate into the air were found to have long, almost invisible strands of her own hair tied to them.

Despite all this, though, she kept touring.

But as she got older and more tired, those performances became more and more sloppy, which of course led to more claims of fraud, claims that snowballed into a backlash so strong that she was ultimately forced to retire.

William Warner, William Stanton Moses, and Eusepia Palladino are all wonderful examples of how enterprising individuals turned common public belief in the supernatural into celebrity-level careers.

And to one degree or another, they also show us how prevalent deception was was in that world.

But they only give us a glimpse.

No, for a real look at the darker side of celebrity mediums, we need to take a look at the story of one more person.

Because much like his career, the way it all unraveled is more than a little spectacular.

We don't know a lot about Henry's early life, although that's not uncommon for the world of two centuries ago.

We're pretty sure that he was born in 1835, but possibly 1836, and came from the Niagara region of New York, which I think is important for at least one reason.

Just 50 miles east of his hometown of Johnson Creek is the city of Rochester.

And if you remember the early days of spiritualism and mediums, a lot of historians point to one particular household there in that city as the epicenter of the movement, the home of the Fox family.

It was there in 1847 when sisters Margaret and Catherine began a career that would turn them into international superstars.

And there's zero chance that a local 12-year-old boy in a poor farming family would have heard their story and not dreamed of a similar path for himself.

So it shouldn't surprise any of us that by the age of 18, he was demonstrating some of his own unique abilities.

It's said that he could stand half a dozen feet away from a table and knock it over with the wave of his hand.

He could even make heavier objects like a small piano levitate off the floor, which was certainly one way of getting attention.

And soon enough, people were talking about the amazing Henry Slade.

By the age of 20, Henry was traveling from city to city under the stage name Dr.

Henry Slade and the Great Slade.

And within a decade, he was also in high demand overseas in all the biggest cities in Europe.

He was so well loved that French Emperor Napoleon III gifted him with a diamond worth upwards of $100,000 today.

There was a waiting list for folks who wanted to sit in on one of Henry's legendary seances that was weeks long, and all of those people were paying good money for the experience.

By some estimates, Slade was worth over $15 million at the peak of his career.

So, what was he actually doing?

Well, Henry Slade was famous for one thing ⁇ slate writing.

Here's how it worked.

Everyone would sit down to the table with a medium, and that medium would offer up a small writing slate.

Think of it like a chalkboard the size of an iPad with a small wooden frame around it.

Sometimes there were two halves and they closed like a book, and sometimes it was just a single slate.

After demonstrating that the slate was blank, the medium would close it or turn it over and then slip it under the table where it would be out of reach from anyone's hands.

And then with both hands visible on the table, the seance would begin.

And honestly, that would all play out exactly as you might imagine.

Low light from a single candle or lamp, everyone holding hands, and the medium speaking out loud to the spirit world.

I think you get the idea.

And when they were done, the medium would then reach under the table, retrieve the slate, and wouldn't you know it, there would be writing on it.

A message from the other side.

Now, seances with the Great Slade included other feats of wonder, of course, things like levitating tables and other objects.

But as you might imagine, these slate writings were the big star, and Henry was good at them too.

In England at the time, there was a group by the name of the Society for Psychical Research, which was dedicated to the study of paranormal phenomenon.

And one of their members, a guy named Frank Podmore, wrote that, of all the physical phenomena of mediumship, the slate-writing performances of such men as Slade appear to have proved most baffling to the expert.

It was, in a nutshell, proof-positive that spiritualism was real.

Or at least that's what everyone believed.

But in 1872, something happened that changed all of that.

First, a man named John Truesdell attended one of Slade's seances in New York that year and noticed something odd.

It seems that he witnessed Slade using his foot to move those objects, and most importantly, he caught the medium writing on the slate himself.

And second, Slade went to London a year later to put on a series of performances, and those rumblings of fraud followed him, which caused the London police to see if they could get to the bottom of the issue.

And what they uncovered would shock the world.

Every investigation needs a leader.

To spearhead theirs, the police brought in Ray Lancaster, a professor of zoology at the University of London.

He was a protégé of Thomas H.

Huxley and a friend of Charles Darwin, among many other luminaries in the world of biology and anthropology.

I guess my point is that Ray Lancaster was no slouch.

On September 11th of 1876, he showed up at one of Henry Slade's London shows and paid the ticket price to attend.

Inside, he witnessed exactly what I described a few moments before, an audience around a table, Slade seated among them, and the blank slate being shown off before moved out of reach.

But Lancaster noticed something else.

Between showing off the blank slate and returning his hands to the table, there was a brief span of time that Slade filled with a coughing fit.

The famous medium claimed that he had a bad cold, apologized, and then got on with the performance.

But Lancaster made a mental note of it.

Less than a week later, he returned with a friend named Brian Donkin, who was a well-respected criminologist and physician.

And during this second performance, Lancaster reached out and grabbed the slate just before Slade placed it beneath the table.

When he pulled the slate away, he found something extraordinary.

There was already writing on it.

And that's when Slade tried to drop something.

Lancaster and Duncan made a grab for it and discovered that it was a sort of thimble painted to match Slade's skin color, upon which was embedded a tiny chunk of the same type of pencil used to write on the slate.

Basically, they had caught the medium red-handed.

Henry Slade was a fraud.

It turns out this would get him in a lot of trouble.

You see, England had a law on the books known as the Vagrancy Act, which prohibited taking money under false pretenses.

And since each each of the people attending those seances had paid Slade money, believing that he was the real deal, they were able to bring charges against him.

The trial began a few weeks later on October 1st, 1876, and according to everything I've read about it, it was quite the spectacle.

The prosecuting attorney called Slade's deception clumsy and stupid and said the medium's talent was nothing more than the power of an ordinary conjurer.

And certainly an ordinary conjurer performs far more cleverly than Mr.

Slade does.

Yeah, that had to sting, and it got worse too.

That same prosecuting attorney even performed the slate trick for the jury to enjoy.

And when asked if there were really spirits in the room, he replied, yes, but the spirits of wine.

Apparently, the trial was one long string of laughter from just about everyone in the room.

It was entertainment, but the man at the center of it all, an entertainer himself, probably didn't appreciate a bit of that.

In the end, Slade was found guilty, sentenced to three months in prison, and then immediately appealed the case.

A short while later, the case was thrown out on a technicality, but the damage had already been done.

Slade went to France after that, hoping to pick back up where he left off with his touring, but the news had already crossed the channel.

And around the same time, more and more experts were debunking other spiritualist mediums, sometimes even going so far as to declare them as mentally unfit or suffering from lesions on the brain.

In In 1884, Slade bravely sat for a committee at the University of Pennsylvania that aimed to debunk his work, which they promptly did.

Defeated and depressed, he started to exit the public spotlight and slowly went broke in his final years.

He did a few shows here and there and still managed to find people willing to pay a small fee to see his slate writing in action, but his reputation would never be the same.

In 1901, Henry Slade vanished from public life entirely.

Four years later, his death was reported in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he'd been receiving treatment at a sanitarium.

He spent his final years as a penniless, friendless recluse and was buried in a pauper's grave.

A year later, a group of spiritualists learned of their hero's tragic ending and raised the funds to give him a proper burial.

His remains were exhumed and moved to Riverside Cemetery in Albion, Michigan, and a new headstone was placed over the grave, along with an epitaph worthy of his former glory.

Henry Slade, renowned throughout the world as the first spiritualist medium for the independent slate writing, retired to spirit life September 8, 1905 after an earthly visit of 69 years, 5 months, and 22 days.

With toil now finished, with soul set free, he now enters eternity.

And Ray Lancaster and Brian Duncan, well, they fared much better than the fraud they managed to expose.

Both men were knighted by by the king.

Mind over matter.

When I think back to those days in the early 1980s as I sat in front of the television and watched people bend spoons without touching them, that's the phrase that always comes back to me.

Three simple words that hide a mountain of complexity.

But when we look at the lives of people like Henry Slade, mind over matter takes on a whole new meaning.

For people in the late 1800s, it was up to them to overlook the obvious and outrageous, their mind over what truly mattered.

And in that battle between logic and superstition, there were winners and there were losers.

But it's a battle that never seems to have ended.

Even today, we all struggle to punch through the noise and deception to find the truth that lies behind so much of what we're told.

And in the end, maybe that will always be a part of life for us, however exhausting that might sound.

Now, remember that University of Pennsylvania committee that examined Slade's abilities and declared him to be a fraud?

There was another medium at that examination, one who testified against him.

And his name was Remigius Weiss, who went by the stage name Remigius Elbus, for that added wizardly flavor, I'm sure.

Weiss was a former medium who had, in a sense, gone straight years before, and in that time he had befriended Slade and learned everything he could from the man.

His goal was to obtain definitive proof of the man's fraud, and he finally got it.

After sitting Slade down and performing all of the medium's tricks back for him, he announced that he was ready to unveil his friend as a fraud.

But Slade panicked and offered to sign a written confession so long as Weiss kept the secret under his hat.

Feeling sorry for the desperate medium, Weiss agreed.

But there was one other man out there who didn't care about Slade's feelings, especially after the medium had passed away.

This man was well-versed in just how rife with frauds the world of spiritualism had become, and he'd been working for years to unmask as many of them as possible, the living and the dead.

And somehow, this man managed to get Weiss to send him not only a description of how Slade performed his slate-writing trick, but also Slade's written confession itself, which he then published in full, along with the rest of his evidence, in a book in 1924.

The book's name, A Magician Among the Spirits by Harry Houdini.

The history of trickster mediums in the spiritualist movement is one full of drama and disappointment.

Tens of thousands of people across the globe were taken in by these criminals, only to have their hearts broken when the magic was revealed to be a fraud.

But we're not done with our journey just yet.

Then I have one more story for you about the power of belief.

Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.

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It's easy to walk away from a discussion about spiritualist mediums and be skeptical.

Certainly, stories about frauds like Henry Slade make a good case for ignoring everything you might hear from a celebrity medium.

But if you're a student of history, you know there's always an exception to the rule.

David was born into a Quaker family in Philadelphia back in 1857.

He studied hard, went to college, and finally joined the world of the working working class in the 1870s.

For him, that meant joining his uncles in the family wool business, and after getting married a short time later, it seemed his life was on the typical, expected path.

But like most of us, David had a hobby.

You know, a place to let off steam after a busy day at the 9-to-5.

For you, it might be video games, reading mystery novels, or painting miniatures for your weekly RPG nights.

But for David, it was singing.

He sang in the clubs.

He sang in the choir.

Basically, if there was an opportunity to sing, David was there.

And apparently, he was good at it.

In 1885, at the age of 28, David made the bold decision to quit his career and traveled to Europe to formally train in music.

Soon enough, he was in Florence, Italy, learning at the proverbial feats of instructors like Luigi Vanuccini and Francesco Lemperti.

And after growing in his ability and experience, he finally landed his first professional role in an opera, La Bazouche.

Later on, with enough experience under his belt to make him hungry for whatever the future might hold, he took a moment during a trip to London to step into the shop of a local medium.

He had decisions to make.

Should he pursue opera or concert music?

And the pop culture currents of the late 1800s gently guided him toward the supernatural for an answer.

Now, this medium in particular used a planchette as their method of communicating with the dead.

That's the little heart-shaped wooden object that you might find included with the Ouija board.

Back then, planchettes often had a hole in them near the pointed end, where a pencil could be placed, allowing the spirits to write or draw their messages through the medium.

And this medium's message was clear.

Opera was the way to go.

But not only that, the spirits offered specific advice.

He was instructed to focus on four major operas, Tannhauser, Tristan and Nizold, Ida, and Meistersinger, and even given the names of specific roles in each that he should prepare for ahead of time.

But predictions by mediums, as we've already explored today, are often a game of chance.

With most mediums for hire, any answer was better than no answer, so a lot of grains of salt were needed to take along with their predictions.

But David took it all to heart and filed it away for later.

In 1892 though, all of that seemed to become relevant.

The Royal Opera at Covent Garden hired David to be part of a performance.

Its title, Die Meistersinger.

But wait, it gets even better because one of the show's lead cast members got sick during rehearsals, forcing the producers to cancel, which made David available for another role, one that his medium had recommended he train for just in case, in a production of Tristan and Isolde.

It turned out to be the performance that unlocked his entire career, setting him on a path to be wildly successful and loved by all.

And yes, David Skull Bispum clearly paved his own road through hard work and determination, but it's also impossible to ignore the amazing coincidence found in his medium's advice.

Proof that spiritualism offered a glimpse into a future already written for us, or just one more piece of evidence of just how susceptible some people are to the power of suggestion.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Jenna Rose Nethercotts and music by Chad Lawson.

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