Selects: How Spiritualism Works

This is an iHeart Podcast, Guaranteed Human.

With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is

so passionate about banking with Capital One.

If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums.

He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist

with your banking needs.

Yep, even on weekends.

It's pretty much all he talks about, and in a good way.

What's in your wallet?

Terms apply.

Capital One dot com slash bank Capital One in a member FDIC.

Hey everybody, there's a new film called Project Hail Mary that you're going to want to see.

It follows a science teacher, Ryle and Grace, played by Ryan Gosling, who wakes up alone

on a spaceship light years from Earth with no memory of who he is or how he got there.

As his memory slowly returns, he realizes he's actually on a last-ditch mission to solve

the mystery of a substance that's causing the sun to die.

So no pressure, calling on his scientific knowledge and unorthodox ideas, Ryle and

us to figure out how to save Earth.

It's a smart, high-stakes story about science, survival, and most importantly, hope and

connection in the face of impossible odds.

So don't miss it on the big screen.

See Project Hail Mary, only in theaters and IMAX, March 20th.

Get your tickets now.

When you think about protecting what matters, it's usually your family, your future, or

the stability you've worked a lifetime to build, right?

That's why Protective is here.

Enter on a mission to help more people achieve the sense of protection and financial security

they deserve.

Trusted by 32 million people, Protective is by your side with life insurance, retirement,

employee benefit, and asset protection solutions.

If you're wondering what protecting your future could look like, check out Protective.com

to learn more.

For more information and important disclosures, please visit Protective.com.

Hey guys, it's me, your old pal Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our

2020 episode on spiritualism, which as you might be able to tell from the first couple

minutes was recorded during the height of the COVID pandemic.

That's not why I chose this one.

I chose it because it's been coming up a lot lately for some reason in episode after

episode, which I've taken as a sign to choose this as a select.

But it's also kind of made me think about all of the back and forth I've gone through

in my life.

Is there an afterlife?

Is there not an afterlife?

Who knows?

That's where I'm at right now.

Who knows?

So maybe listen to this episode about the spiritualism movement and see what you think about the whole

thing.

Enjoy.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hey and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over here somewhere in the heart of darkness.

I'm in the office, dude.

I hear your voice, Chuck, but I can't see you.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't know why people need to know the behind-the-scenes things, but home recording

provides some challenges and I was getting pretty frustrated.

So I was like, you know what, I'm going to go to the studio because I know it'll sound

great in here.

Yeah.

I know there won't be dogs or children and everyone should feel good about it because I have

not seen another human being in the building.

Didn't a security guard try to run you off the road when you were parking?

He didn't try.

He stopped me literally in the parking lot.

I was like, what are you doing here?

I was like, I'm going to my job and he said, okay.

He said, stay home, save lives.

Before we left, I mean, apparently since I left, they have these, there's a bottle of

microphone sanitizer.

Whoa.

There are headphone sanitized or not sanitized, but just disposable headphone covers.

Sweet.

And I feel more safe here than I do at my house.

What?

A microphone sanitizer that sounds really made up.

Yeah.

It's, I'll go ahead and buzz market.

No, I won't because it smells bad and I didn't want to buzz market and then say it smells

bad.

It's apple flavor, which would make Emily just like turn over in her bed.

It's a good jolly rancher flavor, not the best scent though.

I hate it when they add scent to stuff that doesn't need scent.

Yeah, I agree.

Try finding an unscented garbage bag these days.

Is it tough too?

Yeah, man, every single one of them, I even got some that said unscented and it still

smells like something.

You've missed it in parentheses underneath it says mostly.

Yeah, 99% unscented.

Right.

We can't help ourselves.

One percent rose Mary.

Well, I don't have my over the ear headphones right now.

I just have ear buds.

I saw that look.

One of you me's long scarves wrapped around my head twice to keep from your audio believing

on to the track through my microphone.

You either look like Lawrence of Arabia or like you just wandered in with a head injury.

Yeah, I had to, it kept slipping off with the Lawrence of Arabia look so I had to do it

the other way around.

So now it looks like I have a 19th century toothache.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

To me another picture.

It's not, it's not very comfortable.

My Adam Zappel is being pressed toward the back of my throat right now.

Yeah.

What was the deal with that whole toothache thing like was there ice in there or something

or was it just like I just tied their chin shut and it'll help knowing that era there

were probably some sort of like razor blade and heroin concoction that would just scrape

the area where the tooth was and inject you with dope to keep you from complaining.

Dr.

Payne's new chin wrap now with more leeches right from the makers of microphone sanitizing.

All right.

Let's get into this.

We've already been goofing around for too long, let's just finish, let's get this over

with.

Let's get serious and talk about spiritualism.

Shall we?

This is a great, great job by Grabster, great idea by you and it'll be a great episode.

Yeah.

We asked him to help us out with this so we put together a world-class article for us

and when we asked him we said, hey, how about spiritualism, he goes, my brother wrote

his dissertation on that, should be simple.

Right.

And I mean, he just forwarded us that.

Right.

It didn't even like a racist brother's first name, it just did a strike through and wrote

Ed after it.

Easy money.

So it is like a really, really interesting phenomena and something I think we kind of

take for granted because it pops up everywhere in our world and in pop culture.

I mean, it's just a part of everything from crystal balls to sands, to weegee boards,

to tarot cards, all of this stuff, movies, yeah.

As a matter of fact, I ran across so, you know, Dan Ackroyd's huge into UFOs, right?

Yeah, I did know that actually.

He's also enormous into spirits and ghosts.

It's actually one of the impetus is, yeah, I think so.

Of him writing Ghostbusters, he's actually a fourth generation spiritualist with a capital

S like the church spiritualism.

He was raised that way, his father, grandfather and great grandfather were all spiritualists

and that's how he was raised as well.

So it does just kind of, it's so permeated our culture, it's weird to think of a time

when it wasn't there, but there actually was this period starting and right about in

the middle of the 19th century, going well into the 20th century, where there was a movement

that basically said, the spirit world is there.

It exists when you die, your personality survives and some people actually have a talent for

communicating with the spirits in the spirit world and we're going to start doing that.

And that was spiritualism, the spiritualist movement.

Yeah, and Ed pointed out, which we should as well, that ghosts and things like that and

ghost stories, they had been around since people had been around.

Everyone, since the dawn of humankind, has tried to figure out what happens after you

die to people visit, do they take on other forms or whatever.

So that's different than what we're talking about.

What we're talking about is spiritualism and that it became a big scam and way to get

money out of people who are in pain from a friend's or loved one's death.

Sadly, yeah, yeah, for sure.

But there is like a thread through there where this same era, this same period and this

belief in communicating with the spirits and the idea that you could go to a say-ons

and talk to your dead loved one or whatever.

It produced this other group of people who said, yes, there are tons of fraudsters and

hucksters out there who are taking advantage of this.

But there's also this real version of it actually does exist.

And we're going to apply this newfangled thing called science to investigate it.

And that produced that era of people like Charles Fort or Harry Price who visited the

Boroughly Rectory, the most haunted place in England, or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, like

these guys.

I know.

I'm trying not a new version.

These guys, though, they believed in this stuff and the possibility of it.

They also believed in the possibility of applying science to it.

And even if science couldn't explain it, it didn't mean that it didn't exist.

And then there was another group who were what we would recognize today as like pure

skeptics, like the James Randy's of the day, who all followed in the footsteps of Harry

Houdini, as we'll see, who kind of created this.

So you had hucksters, believers who were skeptical and genuine pure skeptics who believed none

of it was correct.

Yeah.

And what I mentioned before, like all the previous attempts to do stuff like this, pre-mid-1800s

and largely the Northeast United States, it was more religious like prophets and shaman

and stuff like that.

Spiritualism was the birth of the Madame Clios of the world, Ed refers to it as a democratization.

And that's one way to look at it.

But it was the idea that, hey, if you are chosen and you are special, it's not like you

have to be some religious leader, you can just be a regular person with the gift.

Exactly.

Yeah, which was a huge sea change.

And there are basically a few things that kind of came together for this mentality, this

fertile kind of imagination of this pocket of America and Western New York where all of

this began to kind of take shape.

And one of those things was the frontier, this frontier mentality, the historian Frederick

Jackson Turner called it the significance of the frontier in American history.

And he basically said, man, the people who are living out there on the frontier, they're

living on the edge of civilization, the leading edge, right?

Right beyond that, what they're coming up against, and this is highly debatable because

part of what they were coming up against was Native America.

It just wasn't a civilization in the form that any European had ever encountered before.

But the idea was that the people who were living on the frontier and expanding westward

were basically being forced just by virtue of having to survive under these weird conditions

outside of culture and civilization in the European sense, that they were having to

abandon that culture and basically make it up as they went along and recreate a new

culture from the frontier, and that that just kind of threw the rules out the window.

Yeah, this is one of my favorite things when we do topics that when you can look back

at a movement and point to factors that at any other time in history, if just one of these

might not have taken, you know, might not have influenced it, that it might not have

happened at all.

There's something about that that I've always really loved, and this is a perfect example.

The frontier life is one.

Religious fervor is another, and specifically in New York, in the 1800s, people were really

caught up on this religious fervor, and it kind of went from town to town.

And there was no big religious authorities in the area, they were out on the frontier.

They had no structured hierarchy of religion.

And so again, they could just make up stuff, and I'm not saying that's not tied to this

next sentence, because I don't want to turn anyone off, but a lot of religions sprang

out from this region during that time, like Millerism and Mormonism, and Quakers and

Shakers kind of had a resurgence, basically, a shot in the arm, just because of this fervor

going on at the time.

And I couldn't quite put where Millerism, why it seemed so familiar, and then I remember

that that was the woman who gave birth eventually to the seventh day Adventists, and that popped

up in the Kellogg episode, remember?

Yeah, yeah.

Millerism was where it all started, but that was, and that really kind of indicates, and

I love it when things just, things we've talked about before, like having the more context

from something else, but that just kind of goes to show you, like this is the kind of

place where somebody could be like, I'm in contact with the spirits, or Jesus came and

hung out with me, or whatever.

And this is what I know and what I've been told, so let's start a religion based on it,

and not even necessarily just religions, too, but also, like, social movements, like utopian

societies, where, and chew your food 20 times, so you'll poopy here.

Exactly, or, you know, women have equal rights as men, which is just completely radical,

or how about 50 of us live together, and just by the fact that we all live together, we're

married according to this utopian society, just whatever you wanted to do, you kind of

could, because the frontier through the rules out the window, or at the very least cultural

traditions that most people are raised into, when that's not there, people make up their

own.

Yeah, for sure, and the third big factor that you mentioned was, or we haven't talked

about yet, was science, and you talked a little bit about science at the beginning, but

the idea that in the middle of the industrial revolution, when we're really learning a lot

more than we ever have about science, and things like electro-magnetism, and things that

you can't see, but science is saying, oh, it's there.

This kind of fed the spiritualist movement, because, you know, that's something else that

you can't see that other people are saying is there, so they're like, well, hey, if science

is saying there are things out there, we can't quite explain, but trust me, it's real,

and why shouldn't I believe this stuff, too?

Yeah, or, well, this electro-magnetism, maybe that actually explains how spirit survive

after death.

It was a really wide open time, as far as, you know, acceptance of possibilities, rather

than, no, science has said, this is not possible, or it can't explain this, or you can't see

it with your own eyes, so it doesn't jive.

I think there was a lot more willingness among people who were scientifically minded to

say, well, maybe this is a good explanation of that, let's investigate.

Yeah, the birth of science in medicine was a really crazy time.

It really was.

So, should we take a break?

Yes.

Come on, man.

Yes.

I think your beard holster is on too tight.

It is.

I haven't been able to feel my nose for about 15 minutes.

All right, we'll go rub your nose and bring some feeling back, and we'll talk about some

of the firti-irtualists.

Support for the show comes from public.

If you look at your investing app, what do you see?

An interface stuck in 1997?

Or something that looks modern, but feels more like a casino than a place to build wealth?

Public is different.

It's the investing platform for those who take it seriously.

On public, you can build your portfolio for the long haul, stocks, options, bonds, crypto.

It's all there.

But what really makes public different is the technology behind it.

Imagine starting your day with an AI summarized market briefing, getting clear summaries of

earnings calls the moment they end, or turning any idea into an investible index just by typing

a prompt.

This is what investing looks like when the tools finally catch up.

Go to public.com and earn a 1% uncapped match when you transfer your portfolio.

Public.

Investing for those who take it seriously.

Add paid for by public holdings, brokerage services by public investing, member FINRA

SIPC, advisory services by public advisors, SEC registered advisor, crypto services by

zero hash, all investing involves risk of loss, see complete disclosures at public.com

slash disclosures.

Hey, everybody, get this linked in has grown to a network of over one billion professionals

and 130 million decision makers.

And that's where it stands apart from other ad buys.

Yeah, for sure.

You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company, role, seniority, skills, even

company revenue.

So you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.

Yep, that's why LinkedIn ads generates the highest B2B row as of all online ad networks.

Seriously, all of them.

And get this.

If you spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads, you get a free $250 credit

for the next one.

Hey, everyone, we want to talk to you a little bit about Wayfair because no matter what

you're aesthetic, whether it's mid-century modern farmhouse, contemporary, eclectic,

it doesn't matter because Wayfair is going to have something for you.

Yeah, Wayfair.

They've got just what you need and it's convenient, too, because they have a ton of different

stuff to choose from, a huge selection of home decor items, and it's easy to find exactly

what's right for you with their amazing search engine.

That's right.

Whether you're starting a home project, you need like furniture upgrades or accent pieces

or functional decor or put us doing a spring refresh and you need some outdoor furniture,

patio decor, maybe lighter bedding, Wayfair has got it all.

Yep, and thousands of five star reviews help you shop with confidence.

So find furniture, decor, and essentials that fit your unique style and budget.

Head to Wayfair.com right now and shop all things home that's w-a-y-f-a-i-r.com.

Wayfair.

Every style, every home.

Okay, I'm going to say it's spiritualists, nice.

And there was actually, so there was a bunch of factors that led to the beginning of all

of this, including there was one that I also came across that we need to mention.

The guy named Andrew Jackson Davis, who combined the ideas of the German hypnotist Franz

Mesmer with the Swedish philosopher of the Seoul Emanuel Swedenborg.

They were both 18th century.

He kind of brought them together and he was a bit of a nobody, but he emerged very soon

after the fox sisters became celebrities as a founder of the spiritualist movement, almost

like he was doing it off in isolation at the same time that all of us began.

Yeah, so the fox sisters figure into this really quite largely, and you can even pinpoint

a date to what you might consider the birth of the modern American spiritualist movement

is March 31, 1848 in Heidsville, New York near Rochester.

At a farm, this fox family lived there.

Real people, not a family of cute little red fuzzy creatures.

Voice by George Clooney.

Exactly.

Mr. and Mrs. Fox had three daughters, actually.

One was much older.

Her name was Leia.

She was 19 and 23 years older.

Why was that funny?

Because I saw a picture of her and she's like the spitting image of Jeffrey Ross.

You got to look her up.

Jeffrey Ross was throwing up on it, but it's what Leia Fox looked like.

I didn't see it.

I saw the picture of the three of them and I didn't get a good close up.

That's an unfortunate look for him and her.

Yeah, anybody really.

And I think he would admit that too.

Oh, yeah.

He's doing all right though.

What if he had really thin skin, the rock master?

He like couldn't take a joke against him, so have you seen that bump in Mike's show?

It's pretty good.

No, is that the roast competition thing?

Yeah, he and David tell just sit there and roast people.

It's really good.

Man, I used to love David Tell back in the day.

He has just turned into the weird comedy genius friend that Jeffrey Ross has and it shines

through in this.

Awesome.

I'll check it out.

So the Fox family, older daughter Leia was 19 and 23 years older than younger Kate and

Maggie, or I guess Maggie and Kate, if you're going in that order.

And on that night, on March 31st, 1848, they heard these wrapping knocking sounds and they

didn't know where it was coming from.

And that kind of kick started this whole thing.

In a weird way, this led, and we'll talk about the more specifics, but in a weird way,

this led to them eventually saying, wait a minute, we can make some money if we convince

people that young Kate and Maggie are a conduit to the other side.

Yeah, the thing is, is like when it went from, you know, like, oh, there's a ghost wrapping

or knocking, like a poltergeist kind of thing to this ghost will respond to questions

from the sisters through wrapping and knocking, like how old is Maggie?

And it would wrap like 15 times or something like that.

And that really caught a lot of people's attention.

And Maggie and Kate moved in with Leia.

And apparently from what I read, it was Leia whose idea it was to take the show on the

road, try to scam people out of money.

It was not a super great person from, from what I read.

Yeah, I just, sorry, I was thinking of a wrapping ghost and, right, got sidetracked.

I'm the ghost of George Washington, and I'm here to say, I love fruity pebbles and

to make you a way.

You know what's funny is I was going to do that exact same thing, but for the Fox family,

that's like the go to rapper guys like us.

Oh, it totally is.

Guys, you can't wrap.

Yeah, I'm here to say something, something, something, and it's something way.

The Zach Morris method, I think is what that is.

I wonder if that's based on an actual rap.

I guess there was one at some point that really did that, right?

Yeah, I think Blondie was the one who popularized that.

My name is Blondie.

I'm here to say I'm going to try rap because it's popular today.

Exactly.

So, what were you saying?

I was laughing.

I didn't even notice.

I'm sorry.

Oh, just that it was basically, I was laying at Leah's feet for corrupting the younger

sisters.

Yeah, she kind of, she ended up managing them as a unit, I think later on, if I'm not

mistaken, but there aren't great records of everything going on at the time.

But the idea was that Kate and Maggie were the ones, it wasn't really her parents, but

they're the ones who could actually communicate with this barn spirit.

And so they said, you know what?

They not only can talk to this spirit, media starts getting a hold of these stories.

And obviously, back then, it was a very big deal with something like this coming out

in the media with not a lot else going on.

But they moved and would go away to other places and said, wherever they go, ghosts are

talking to them.

Yeah.

My daughters are talented and gifted.

They're not just talking to the, what we think is a murder victim from our previous house.

Right.

Which just changed everything.

And also, rather suspiciously, Leah suddenly realized that she was able to communicate

with spirits too.

So all three of the sisters were able to.

But yeah, not just that one murder victim in their house that had been the original ghost,

but just about any ghost.

And this was the beginning of the spiritualist movement, basically a prank by a couple

of teenage girls that got way out of hand really fast.

Yeah.

And so what do they do?

They start having these private sessions where people would pay money.

And they would wear these big long dresses that were in fashion at the time.

And they would, no one's exactly sure the exact mechanism, but they would do some sort

of toe knocking or something where they couldn't be seen.

And that was the Morse code that they said was the ghost speaking to them.

So it's really, they had like a little wooden stool under the table with them.

And they would take off their shoes surreptitiously.

And from what I can gather, they could pop their knuckle of their toe up and down with

enough force that it would make a thud on that wooden stool.

That's creepy.

And in and of itself.

It was.

Yeah.

They should have just been like, forget all this spirit, so much this weird thing.

But that was the phantom knocking.

And we know that because Maggie later on confessed to the New York Tribune, maybe, or the post

one of them, and said like, this is how we did it, actually in an effort to take her

sister Leah down.

But it ended up taking the spiritualist movement down in large part.

But that was it, like thumping your knuckle on a wooden stool.

They did this for 40, 40 years.

They made a living around the world doing that and created a new religion from it.

Yeah.

And the, by the time the spiritualism fads sort of died away, the two younger sisters

were.

And she recanted that confession, by the way, but everyone's like, yeah, you already

said it.

You could try.

Right.

But the two younger sisters and Maggie, especially, were in pretty bad shape with alcoholism.

And they died sort of in a call your brother's Eskway, very quietly and fairly destitute in

New York City in the 1890s.

And trapped under newspapers, maybe.

No, they had very interesting, but also very sad lives like I think Maggie married a skeptic.

And he died.

Not a good move.

Right.

He died.

He talked her out of doing spiritualism, but she went back after he died.

Kate married another spiritualist, and she had a huge career touring the world as a

spiritualist.

She made a lot of money, but apparently lost it all.

And Leah, again, was just kind of, I guess, a bit of a villain in this story.

Where's that movie, man?

I was wondering the exact same thing.

It's crazy.

It hasn't been made 50 times already, you know?

Yeah.

That would be, that would be pretty cool.

I couldn't even find a good documentary on it.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

On them, at least.

I'm sure they're plenty on, that they're featured in, but it didn't give me those

fox sisters.

No matter how you look at it too, whether you look at it from the aspect of a believer who

thinks like, this is where it all started, these two sisters.

And there's plenty of reasons to believe if you're a credulous person, or confiding as

Mark Twain would put it, that, you know, like the Andrew Jackson Davis guy who kind of

started this thing on his own, supposedly wrote on March 31st, 1848, that a spirit came

to him and said, the work has begun.

We just started something over here.

And then later found out about the fox sisters, like, there's all sorts of stuff you can believe.

And so it's interesting from that respect.

But also if you're just a pure dyed in the wool skeptic who do not believe in any kind

of afterlife or soul or anything like that, it's equally interesting in a totally different

way that this whole, like almost century long movement started from that, you know, it's

crazy.

I love this whole story.

So it's sweeping the nation at this point by the 1850s and we're going to go over some

of the different things that they would do, some of the methods that they would use to

communicate with the other side to fake communicate with the other side.

The first one is channeling.

And these would be trans mediums.

So this is like when you've seen in a movie, when someone is just talking like I am in

my regular voice and I'm entering the trance and I'm doing a lot of, a lot of showy things

to kind of get people, you know, pretty pumped up, feel like they're spending their money

well.

You're giving me pumped up.

I'll tell you that.

And all of a sudden, you know, I go into this other voice and I'm like a small child.

Maybe the parents lost a child or I'm a woman or I'm.

Sammy Davis Jr.

Hey, Brad, I just came back to say that don't worry about me.

This cat is doing just fine.

I came back to say I love pretty pebbles in a major way.

Invented wrap, that's right.

So if you were a good, talented medium that meant that you were probably a pretty good

actor, you could probably do good voices.

Sometimes in the case of Cora Scott, who I know we've talked about her before.

Her name sounds familiar, but I have no recollection of talking about her.

Yeah, it sounds super familiar, but she was one of the top mediums, trance mediums because

she was this very sort of demure attractive young lady and her whole demeanor was about

that.

And then she was apparently a great actor because she would go into these big heavy gruff

voices and the gulf between who she was and who she was imitating was so great that

everyone was just like, fantastic, Cora Scott, you're a genius.

Well, also, yeah, she was like a little 12-year-old girl when she started and supposedly

she would take this stage and confidently discuss like physics and philosophy and all

that stuff because there was some authoritative spirit who had basically taken possession

of her.

Yeah, and I looked up her picture and Kate Winslet, I think, is from my casting couches

who I would throw in that movie.

Okay.

Not as the 12-year-old.

That would be weird unless they do some sort of bad Irishman de-aging, but she looked

enough like her and she's a great actor.

So that's, so channeling is what you kind of think of where somebody becomes possessed.

The medium becomes possessed, right?

Yeah.

And also ones where, like, they're just saying like, oh, I can hear what they're saying,

but you can't because they're speaking to me through telepathy.

Right.

Okay.

That, that reminds me of John Edwards, remember him crossing over with John Edwards?

Yeah.

I can't picture him.

I think if I saw a picture, I would totally remember though.

You would.

What a weird time the 90s were as far as stuff like that goes.

Although I think his show ran from 2000 to 2004.

Yeah, but that could sort of coincide with Reverend Bob Dobs and the Televangelism and all

that good stuff.

Yeah.

It was a crazy time.

So then there's automatic writing was another big one too, and all of this is familiar.

Again, because the stuff just is so permeated in the pop culture, it's crazy.

But automatic writing is instead of the medium's voice being taken over, the medium being

possessed and speaking as the spirit, the spirit took over their hand and they would start

writing.

And so in just the same way, Korra Scott would have a completely different personality

or a different voice or different accent or something like that, this, like the handwriting

or the word usage or anything like that would be different than the medium's normal handwriting.

This is automatic writing.

And there was a trend to decide if I could do that.

Well, sometimes they would use their non-dominant hand.

So if you want to change your handwriting, just do that to start.

I can't.

That's the way.

And then there was a woman named Pearl Curran who wrote at least 5,000 poems, novels and plays

through automatic writing, all channeling the spirit of a 17th century woman from England

named Patience Worth.

Nice.

That's prolific.

That's a lot of words.

And then what about direct voice?

Yeah, direct voice is when you are a medium.

You contact a spirit and the spirit is so powerful that they just speak to you directly.

Like the medium is just sitting there with their mouth closed.

Yeah.

And this happened usually in a dark room where they would have a business partner just

behind the curtain, obviously, use talking or maybe they were just doing a bad ventriloquist

kind of deal where it's dark enough where you can't really see their lips moving, throwing

their voice.

There was a woman named Leslie Flint, who's a medium.

Oh, really?

He looked like the old man from up.

Oh.

Did it make you cry when he looked at it?

It did.

My daughter dislikes that.

There's so much.

Here have these balloons.

So yeah, Leslie.

I actually love that name for a man.

Yeah.

I don't know why I assumed, but he would recreate famous people like Sammy Davis, Jr.

But let's hit very good at it, apparently, which is kind of funny.

That makes us all a little bit more ridiculous and fun.

Well, I was reading an obituary about him that was written by somebody who attended one

of his or a couple of I think of his sayances.

And they said things like, you know, a lot of times you could tell like what the trickery

was or whatever.

There were other times where he would like be speaking over the voice, which is tough

to do with ventriloquism, or one time he was tested, he was made the whole colored water

in his mouth while the spirit voice was speaking and you're like, wow, you know, that's pretty

interesting.

And then you just think, well, there's always an explanation for it.

Yeah.

And you know, maybe there's another person who was a confederate in the room.

Who knows?

But it just goes to show that even still, even today, in this guy's obituary that was

written in the 90s, the 1990s, that they were like, yeah, you know, he was largely considered

a trickster of fraud, but they'll still hedge and say, you know, but there were a couple

of things.

And at the very least, it's unexplained, which is pretty interesting and neat, but that

doesn't necessarily mean that, oh, no, there really was a spirit that was talking in the

room, thanks to him.

Amazing.

So we had table turning.

This is at a, you know, this isn't like a theatrical performance.

This is in a small room, everyone, and this kind of think Ouija board with this.

It's the same sort of thing, except the Ouija board would be the actual table that you're

sitting at.

You would, everyone would put their hands on the table and then the table would move

or tilt or something when you're asking questions.

So it's inhabiting the furniture.

Of course, what's going on here is either like knee movements or sometimes they had these

rings on the mediums finger that were slotted and could move the table around without anyone

noticing just another little parlor trick, basically.

Yeah, or, you know, the idea that you're moving the table yourself like a Ouija board.

I can't remember what it's called, but basically your, your body is moving without your brain

being aware of it.

And then there's also just the straight up power of suggestion, and this applies to table

turning in a lot of other stuff.

But if you're saying like, if you're the medium at a seance and you said the table is rising,

it's rising, people who are willing to believe, a lot of people who went to seance is wanted

to believe, we're already believed in this stuff.

Just the power of suggestion could be like, oh, it is raising a little bit, I can feel

it, I can tell kind of thing.

Yeah, my favorite, and I bet your favorite too, is ectoplasmic manifestations.

That's a good one.

Yeah, it's pretty good.

This is when you would actually, as a spiritualist, produce something physical, something would

manifest itself in actual substance, and it was, they called it ectoplasm, and they could

pull it from their body, and it was just basically something that they would make beforehand

out of whatever, I mean, they would make it out of all kinds of things.

It was one story about someone who was actually gluing cut out faces from a magazine onto

dolls, and those were ectoplasm spirits, but they would hide these things, sometimes

like up their butt or in their other body cavities, and they would pull these things out, and

some of the pictures that you see online, if you look up ectoplasm, 1800s seance, is just

the pictures themselves are hysterical and frightening all at the same time.

Yeah, and especially now when you look back and see them, you're like, how did anybody

fall for that?

And it's really important to keep in mind, one, they wanted to believe, but two, these

seances would be carried out in dark rooms to where you couldn't see much at all.

You just suddenly see some luminous cloth or something that you were led to believe

was ectoplasm, kind of what looked like floating in the middle of the table or something

like that.

It's tough, that's really easy to explain, but in a darkened room that you've been sitting

in for three hours communicating with spirits, you might be a lot more prone to buy into

it than under normal circumstances.

Yeah, for sure.

Maybe you're a little drunk, right, tipsy on shnapps.

Levitation was another big one, nice little party trick.

I actually could sort of do this for a little while.

The David Blaine method, I don't know if you ever saw his, when he made himself levitate.

It's just kind of hopping up and down in there, right?

No, it's, you're thinking of trampolines.

That's not the same thing, people can see those.

Okay.

No, it's all about the angle with the David Blaine method of getting them to see you

from the right angle to where what you're really doing is you're rising your body up with

just one, just your first three toes on your right foot and you're hiding that with

your other foot.

It looks like you're just sort of levitating a few inches off the ground and then you

act like you're in steady and then you land back down and go, oh boy, that was a good one.

That was pretty powerful.

So wait a minute, David Blaine can raise his entire body weight with three toes.

Well, I mean, he's on his toes.

I just, I mean, I could do it at the time too.

This is in the 90s.

Man, that's impressive.

I don't think I've ever had the kind of toes strength that is required to do that.

You can raise yourself up with one foot in a seated position.

No, no, no, you're standing.

Oh, oh, oh, I got you.

Yeah, yeah.

So what you're doing is you're standing there and then you raise yourself off the ground

with just the toes on your right foot, let's say, and you're keeping your left foot

is shielding that so you can't quite see it.

Yeah, no, I've got it.

And it just creates, if you got someone at the right angle and I got pretty good at it.

My roommate, Justin was like, you're getting better, mate.

Right.

Well, I'm getting drunker.

Well, both of those things were happening.

I thought you were talking about like, you know, like a fake ear or something like that where

they're sitting cross-legged and they're in levitating.

I was like, to do that with just three toes, that in and of itself is pretty impressive,

but it's pretty good.

It does that.

All right.

What are the other, there's another couple of things they did, too.

What are the?

Pure photography.

Pretty straightforward stuff where, you know, this is the very beginnings of photography.

So people didn't understand double exposures unless you were a photographer.

Right.

But if you were, you could do all sorts of neat stuff like double expose something and

put a ghostly face in the background over someone's shoulder.

That's great.

I saw one, I saw a spirit photograph where it was a ghostly arm.

It also could have been a genie coming out of a bottle, one of the two.

It looked exactly the same, but it was like, it was on a table.

So they were like, this is a spirit arm levitating table.

So they're like tying three things together, table turning, levitating, and spirit photography.

Those are great.

I think the spirit photography, just because they were taking advantage of this new technology

people didn't even understand.

Right.

It was a deep fake at the time.

And they were probably like, everybody we got maybe three years.

Yeah.

We better get prolific.

And then everyone's going to be like, oh, that's just double exposure.

Right.

And then people, like I said earlier, too, a lot of the new age stuff that's tied in

the spiritualism today, like tarot readings or, oh, I don't know, a straw with cheese.

That kind of stuff.

I had nothing to do with this because spiritualists all of it grew out of Christianity.

So there was some Christian basis to all of the spiritualist practices.

And even though in a lot of ways it was extraordinarily heretical, there was no religious leader

in charge of anything.

There was no scripture doctrine or anything like that.

It was still very much tied into and born out of Christianity.

So stuff like occult things would have, would have been very much found upon by spiritualists.

Totally.

Should we take another break?

I think we should.

All right.

We'll take another break and tell you about what the Civil War had to do with all of this.

Right after this.

Support for the show comes from public.

Huh.

I wonder if this can beat the market.

Everyone's talking about the NASDAQ 100, but let's get more specific.

Software.

Actually, too broad.

How about software that's already profitable?

Companies that beat the last five quarters.

Oh, and I want founders who are marathon runners.

That's discipline.

Yeah.

Let's see what that looks like.

With generated assets on public, you can turn any idea into an investable index, just

enter a prompt and watch the AI screen thousands of stocks in seconds.

You can then back test your index against the S&P 500, make adjustments, refine your criteria,

and when you're ready, invest in what you've built.

Go to public.com and build your own index with generated assets, plus earn a 1% uncapped

match when you transfer your portfolio, public, investing for those who take it seriously.

Add paid for by public holdings, brokerage services by public investing, member Finra

SIPC, advisory services by public advisors, SEC registered advisor, sample prompts are

for illustrative purposes only, not investment advice, all investing involves risk of loss,

be complete disclosures at public.com slash disclosures.

Hey, everybody, get this.

LinkedIn has grown to a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision

makers.

And that's where it stands apart from other ad buys.

Yeah, for sure.

You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company, role, seniority, skills, even

company revenue.

So you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.

Yep.

LinkedIn ads generates the highest B2B row as of all online ad networks, seriously, all

of them.

And get this.

If you spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads, you get a free $250 credit

for the next one.

Just go to LinkedIn.com slash sysk.

That's LinkedIn.com slash sysk, terms and conditions apply.

This episode is brought to you by Audi.

We all know that feeling, a change of plans, an unexpected curve, a new opportunity.

Instead of overthinking, what if you just said yes?

Yeah, with the all new Audi Q3, the answer is easy.

The Q3 is made for the yes life, with the power and room to handle whatever pops up.

Yes to adventure, yes to escape, yes to right now.

Because saying yes without hesitation, that's real luxury.

The all new Audi Q3 made for the yes life.

Learn more at AudiUSA.com Alright, so pre civil war in the United States, spiritualism

was popular.

It was booming.

But it was more like the kind of thing that you did in a theater and you would go see

it as a curiosity, or you might just maybe even knew it was fake and it was just entertainment.

There wasn't a lot going on back then.

Kind of like looking at penguins in a zoo today, like you know they're fake, but it's

still fun to look at.

Right.

Why not go pay a nickel to see Madame, whatever, do her little erotic, because we'll get

into that.

These got a little sexy at times too.

Her little ghost, Jimmy.

This is part of the part of the draw, the ghost, I mean.

But we need to talk about a couple of things here, the civil war for sure.

But one of the things that was going on, we've been talking about a lot about the northeastern

United States.

And there's a very good reason it didn't take hold in the South.

It's because the way Christianity was and some might argue still is in the South, didn't

leave a lot of room.

The hierarchy didn't leave a lot of room for other schools of thought, and it was basically,

even though it wasn't necessarily called, it was just shut down kind of from the beginning

in the South.

They're like, we'll stick to our voodoo, thank you very much.

Exactly.

Keep that spiritualism stuff out.

Yeah, so it was just not a big thing in the South.

The mediums at the time would move off the stage sometimes and have these private

sayances.

Oh, yeah.

Sometimes they would get in touch with a family member, but oftentimes it would just be kind

of the same in the state.

As a state show, they would say, like, I'm going to get in touch with Sammy Davis, Jr.,

or whatever the popular dead figure at the time was.

Sure.

But that was for pre-civil war.

It was an entertainment, it was an amusement, but when the civil war came, a lot of people

died in the civil war.

And that means that a lot of people who survived the civil war lost a loved one.

And these might have been people who went off to fight and just never came back, never

heard from again, no, nothing, have no idea where they died, where they were buried.

And so that kind of grief, that transcends any kind of time or place.

And it created a lot of people, a large population of people who were very interested in getting

in touch with their dead relative.

And it just so happened that at the time, there was a movement, a foot that said, oh, well,

this guy over here is actually really getting in touch with the dead one, and you have a

say-ons with him.

You just have to pay him to do this work because there's a lot of work, whether you are

a believer and a skeptic, it's a lot of work to have been a medium during this time.

And so they would be paid and they would make a living like this.

And so these say-ons, these performances were decreased in size, but vastly increased

in frequency.

Yeah, a lot more spiritualists doing smaller mediums for families or smaller say-onses

for families.

And this same thing happened after World War I as well.

So it's kind of all fun and games until it gets to this level.

If it's a big theater show, find whatever, go pay your money and get entertained for

an hour.

When you are taking people's money who have lost loved ones in battle, then that's when

it gets kind of really ugly if you ask me.

Right.

And that's where I think a lot of the genuine skeptics who beat this kind of stuff to a pulp,

that's the place that they're coming from.

You know, not necessarily that it's like in a front to science or reason or common sense

or anything like that, but that there are a lot of people who have parted money from

people who were bereaved at the time, and you just, you don't take advantage of people

who are undergoing grief.

That's a pretty shot thing to do.

That's a life lesson right there for everybody listening, especially young masters.

Not only that, not only taking their money, but I imagine in a lot of cases, people made

real life decisions based on things that would happen in these say-onses, you know.

Right.

It's true.

Like sell the family farm, like stuff like that.

Oh, God.

I hadn't thought about that.

And not only sell the family farm, sell it to me, the medium.

That's what your dead brother wanted you to do.

For what?

Something's coming through.

They're saying, pinnys on the dollar.

That's great.

Oh, he's feeling it.

Yeah, that's terrible.

So by the end of the 20th century, things started to decline a bit.

One was just pure greed.

There were too many of them out there.

They were all trying to outdo one another.

They were trying to draw bigger crowds and more money and they were getting more outrageous

by doing so.

And that meant just like anything when you try and do that, the bigger you try to force

something to be sometimes that can lead to its kind of early death, I guess.

Yeah.

Go big or go home, but eventually you're going to go home anyway.

That's the end of that saying.

I love it.

Right.

So part of it was that they were making more and more audacious claims, but also there

were more and more scientists like those that open-minded scientific approach had become

a lot more hardened toward spiritualism and mediums because so many had been investigated

and found it just be total frauds.

Most of the time the outcome was the medium couldn't reproduce this ectoplasm or get

in touch with the spirit when they were under control conditions or they went for it

and they were found to be a fraud.

Like the knuckle of their toe was found to be wrapping on a stool or something like that.

And so as these reports keep coming out more and more, these scientific investigators

were like, I don't think any of this is real.

And they would be interviewed in newspapers and the papers would run these articles.

And so over time, just the general public kind of turned away from spiritualism as hocom

and bunk.

But the thing is, is not everyone did.

And even still today, go ask Dan Acroid.

There is a group of people who adhere to spiritualism as a religion.

No.

For sure.

And one of the big reasons that it didn't completely go away was spiritualists were very

smart and that they would use influencers of the day in their act.

They would seek out these well-known people.

They would tour the world sometimes, tour Europe and do seances with like royal families

of various countries.

The newspapers write about this.

They would get a quote or maybe demand a quote from someone like well-known and they

would say, all right, I'll come do a seance, but you got to give me a quote that I can

use on my flyer or whatever.

What's it called?

Pull quote?

No, no.

No.

That fallacy, the logical fallacy, appeal to authority, I think.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

The appeal to authority.

Sure.

Okay.

Yeah, which makes a lot of sense that people see, oh, well, they did a sense for the Prince

of Monaco.

Right.

Or Sammy Davis, Jr., then it's got to be good enough for me.

It's not pseudoscience at all because why would Sammy Davis, Jr. believe in pseudoscience?

Right.

He's just a satanist.

He doesn't care about pseudoscience.

That's right.

So, one of the other authorities that they would appeal to Chuck was what this one, there's

an exposé written in 1897 and by God, if I can't find it anywhere in my tabs, but it

was basically, oh, revelations of a spirit medium is what it was called and it was written

anonymously by a medium, a huckster, a fraud.

And I'm pretty sure it was published in 1897.

And it is like 400 pages exposing all the tips and all that stuff, all the tricks.

But one of, there's a glossary of like 19th century slang words among hoaxters.

It's amazing.

But one of them was the top heavy.

And that was a scientist who was over credentialed.

They had all these PhDs and everything like that.

So they were book smart, but they were super goalable.

And if you could get a top heavy to basically say like, I can't explain it, science can't

explain it.

That would go a very long way to bolstering your career, you know?

Yeah, even if you talk to 100 scientists and one of them was a top heavy who had said

something valuable to you, that's the only one.

You're the 10th dentist of the nine out of 10 dentists.

Exactly.

And that's all you need, especially if the other nine dentists just keep their trap shut

because they have better things to do.

But there were a bunch of people who would not keep their trap shut.

I guess actually one of a legendary top heavy, even though he was an scientist credential

or otherwise, was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

I don't know what's wrong with me.

I'm sorry.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

By the way, before I forget, if there's not a band called the 10th dentist out there,

then I don't know what to think anymore.

That's a good one.

Also those trident commercials, I think it was four out of five dentists.

One of them was...

That was a four out of five.

He was bit on the testicles by a squirrel before he could pronounce how, before he could

recommend dentine or trident or something like that.

Maybe it should be the fifth.

It is four out of five.

It's not nine out of 10.

Do you remember that though?

No.

It was a great...

Was that great?

What was the...

What was the cult?

Was it...

We make holes in teeth.

Oh yeah.

Remember that?

The cartoon?

That was crest.

You want to hear the pinnacle of 80s marketing to kids.

Sure.

My third grade, maybe fourth grade class, put on a play about...

Toothpaste?

Yes, and cavities sponsored by crest.

Yeah, they had a big push back then for taking over the minds of American children.

Well, it worked.

What's funny is, is I now use aquafresh, the orange tube.

Oh, man.

If there is a favorite toothpaste that any boy in America has ever had, that is it

in its mind.

That was from the 80s?

No, it is now.

But I'm saying the crest take over of my mind didn't work.

Gotcha.

I'm an aquafish boy now.

Is that the one with the tricolor?

Yeah.

Which is another very appealing part of it.

Man, you'd buy it all, don't you?

I do.

So gullible.

Yeah, I am a little gullible.

You're like an Arthur Conan Doyle.

And so he, if you recognize his name, he was the author of Sherlock Holmes, of course.

He was super into this.

He joined the Society for Psychical Research, which was an early skeptical slash believer

society.

And he always, he bought into this.

He was just convinced.

But on the other side of the equation were skeptics who were not convinced, who basically

didn't keep their mouth shut.

They were the other four who would say like, no, everybody actually, this guy is wrong.

My esteemed colleague has been taken.

But then the head of those guys was Harry Houdini, amazingly enough.

Yeah.

Houdini, which makes it super ironic that at the magic castle in Los Angeles, they have,

have long had Harry Houdini say Aunt's Knights, where you can go into the Harry Houdini room

and do a say Aunt's, which is, you know, it's all for fun, but it is kind of funny that

he was very much against this stuff.

Although supposedly, if you go to the magic castle, they'll tell you that he did, and he

may have really done this, is told his wife before he died that, hey, listen, if I was

wrong, I'll come back and I'll contact you and let you know.

You're right.

And he came back and he said, I've got good news and I've got bad news.

The good news is there is a heaven.

The bad news is your schedule to pitch there tonight.

Do you remember that scary story to tell in the dark book?

Yeah.

Where was that?

It was like two friends who played baseball together.

Yeah.

We had a pack to like Harry Houdini and his wife, apparently.

I think that's a, there's different versions of that joke, though.

Me and the illustrations in that book were just bar none.

Yeah.

That was great stuff.

And by the way, we should give a big rest in peace to Mr. Mort Drucker, who passed away

a couple of weeks ago in real time, but that was, that was a big one.

We talk about Mad Magazine a lot and Mort Drucker was my number one with a bullet favorite

artist.

He agreed.

He passed on and he was one of the greats.

He definitely shaped my childhood in a very large way.

Yeah.

Big time with his drawings.

Nevermind.

All right, peace, sir.

Yeah.

Nice.

We'll hear from you soon.

Right.

He's like, you guys are pitching tonight.

Oh, no.

Both of us.

So Harry Houdini is like, yeah, Josh is going to flow a bit and Chuck's going to have to

be brought in for the save.

So Harry Houdini created this longstanding tradition of staged magicians exposing the

fraud of spiritualism, basically.

Yeah.

Because they were, they're like, they're stealing our tricks.

Yeah.

And it's pretty cool.

Like, he would incorporate into his stage shows.

A lot of these things that spiritualists were doing to show how they did it.

And he was relentless at it.

Yeah.

He was very relentless.

But it was very cool.

And the fact that it's still going on today, Richard Wiseman, who's come up a few times,

he was in the shell Drake episode, he was in the Ghosts episode, and I think we somehow

misconstrued his research in the Ghosts episode to suggest that he had proven Ghosts exists.

I don't remember exactly the details of it, but we got that one wrong.

In this case, he has recreated seances from the 19th century and has shown how willing

people are to totally misreport the events that went on in the seance to say that, yes,

you know, the table did levitate or all the stuff that he's studying under these controlled

conditions.

And it's basically shown not just that the the the medium himself or more often herself,

as we'll see, was engaging and fraud, but also that the audience had a willing suspension

of disbelief, and we're part of this too, by saying, like, I felt the fandom arm tapped

me on the shoulder.

The medium didn't have anything to do with that.

That was just something that kind of came out of the environment that was produced in

the seance, you know, yeah, pretty interesting.

It is pretty interesting.

So we'll finish up here with this.

I thought this is very interesting, actually, the social implications of this.

Most of the not all, but a lot of the spiritualists were women in the 19th century for some

practical reasons.

They could wear these long dresses that could hide talented tonuckles.

They would not, because of the time, they wouldn't get, like, searched too closely obviously

because you wouldn't do that.

If you were a scientist trying to examine whether or not a spiritualist was real or not,

and that led to, there were men for sure, but that led to this kind of interesting side

note.

One is that women could make their own money, and so it's easy to poo poo something like

this, but I'm sure those fox sisters made a lot more dough than they ever could have as,

you know, doing anything else offered and available to them at the time.

Sure.

That's a good thing.

They gave them some agency, but these, it was no coincidence that sometimes the voice

from the other side would champion sort of progressive views, because this turned out

to be a chance to sort of reshape policy in a way.

If you were a woman and you were a spiritualist, it would be very easy to say, you know, they're

saying that women should have more rights.

And if not, they will come back and haunt you all, right?

And that kind of ended up happening in some ways.

Yeah, there was a huge connection between spiritualism and spiritualist movement and abolitionism,

the women's suffrage movement, the women's temper, or the temperance movement.

Yeah.

A lot of these progressive women's workers' rights, and that, you know, if you were an abolitionist

and you didn't believe in this kind of thing, you might be like, I'm not really happy

about that, but at the same time, it kind of whipped up this fervor in that some people

would, like, their spirits that were being channeled by the medium were saying things

like, you guys better get on the train of abolitionism, you better get rid of slavery.

And it actually did, especially in these theatrical settings, have a widespread influence

on getting the message out there through the spirit communication weirdly enough.

Yeah, it's almost like one could say anything at all, it's something like, oh, I don't

know, a campaign rally, and people would believe it if they were an ardent enough believer

in the speaker.

Exactly, especially if they'd attached their ego to you in your success.

Very strange.

So I just wanted to give two shouts out, one, two, the probably the greatest ghost movie

that involved sayances ever.

Ghost?

No.

Whoopi Goldberg?

No.

All right.

And then the greatest short story involving sayances in the spiritualist movement written

by arguably the greatest American writer of all time, Joyce Carol Oates, it's called

Nightside, it's a short story, it's the same title as a collection of her short stories

from the 70s, I think, 1977, Nightside, look it up and thank me later, it's seriously just

bone-chilling.

How good it is.

I wonder if we could get in touch with her and read that for our Halloween episode here.

I tweeted to her once kind of crassly and never heard anything back, even though she

were like, Twitter, I know she saw that tweet.

Hey, at Joyce Carol Oates, you think you're so cool.

Right.

I would love to read that one.

There's another one too.

There's a, she's probably not just the greatest American writer, but the greatest American

horror writer too.

She's great.

She's so wonderful.

I would read any of her stories.

So if you out there know Joyce Carol Oates or in contact with her or her publisher, please

would love to read in our ad-free episode one of her short stories for Halloween.

That's right.

So I think she might like that aspect.

Okay.

Oh, one last thing, Chuck, there's a place called Lillie Dale in New York appropriately

enough, which is basically a spiritualist community where you can go basically be among

spiritualists as a religion today.

Wonderful.

Since I said today, it's time for listening to mail.

I'm going to call this.

We haven't gotten emails in two weeks from people because something's wrong with our

email server.

So it's on bidets again.

You're going to get a couple on bidets, I think.

Hey guys, listening to your recent episode on bidets reminded me of a funny story I thought

Selects: How Spiritualism Works

About this Episode

Hosts & Guests

More from Stuff You Should Know

Selects: The Skinny on Lyme Disease

The Colorado River Compact

Short Stuff: Simple Spelling Movement

The Middle Class: Canary in the Gold Mine