Selects: How Spiritualism Works

6:47Josh Clark:This is a great, great job by Grabster. Great idea by you. Yeah. And it'll be a great episode.

6:53Chuck Bryant:Yeah, Grabster, we asked him to help us out with this. So he 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. It should be simple.

7:05Josh Clark:Right, so he just forwarded us that. Yeah, right.

7:10Chuck Bryant:He didn't even erase his brother's first name. He just did a strike-through and wrote Ed after it. Easy money. So it is like a really, really interesting phenomenon. and something I think we kind of take for granted because it pops up everywhere in our world, in pop culture. I mean, it's just a part of everything from crystal balls to seances to Ouija boards to tarot cards. All of this stuff. Movies, yeah. As a matter of fact, I ran across, so you know Dan Aykroyd's huge into UFOs, right?

7:44Josh Clark:I did know that, actually.

7:46Chuck Bryant:He's also enormous into spirits and ghosts. It's actually one of the impetuses. was 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 his father grandfather and great-grandfather were all spiritualists and that's how he was raised as well um so it does just kind of it's so permeated our our culture it's weird to think of a time when it wasn't there But there actually was this period starting in 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.

8:34Chuck Bryant: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 have been around.

9:00Josh Clark:Everyone since the dawn of humankind has tried to figure out, like, what happens after you die? Do people visit? Do they take on, you know, other forms or whatever? So that's different than what we're talking about. What we're talking about is spiritualism in 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.

9:27Chuck Bryant: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 seance 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, there's the 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 Borley Rectory, the most haunted place in England, or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

10:24Chuck Bryant:Conan? I know. I'm trying not a new version. I like it. 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 Randys 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.

11:02Josh Clark:Yeah, and what I mentioned before, like all the previous attempts to do stuff like this, pre-mid-1800s in largely the Northeast United States, it was more religious, like prophets and shaman and stuff like that. Spiritualism was the birth of the Madame Cleos 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.

11:37Chuck Bryant: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 in 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.

12:26Chuck Bryant: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.

13:01Josh Clark: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.

13:40Josh Clark: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 religion 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.

14:09Chuck Bryant:And I couldn't quite put where Millerism, why it seems 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, I love it when things we've talked about before, like have even 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.

14:47Chuck Bryant: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—

14:57Josh Clark:And chew your food 20 times so you'll poopies here.

14:59Chuck Bryant: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 threw 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.

15:32Josh Clark: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 electromagnetism 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, then why shouldn't I believe this stuff too?

16:11Chuck Bryant:Yeah, or, well, this, like, electromagnetism, maybe that actually explains how spirits 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 won't, it doesn't jive. Like 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.

16:49Josh Clark:The birth of science and medicine was a really crazy time.

16:52Chuck Bryant:It really was. It really was.

16:54Josh Clark:So should we take a break? Yes. Come on, man. Yes. I think your beard holster is on too tight.

17:05Chuck Bryant:It is. I haven't been able to feel my nose for about 15 minutes. All right.

17:10Josh Clark:Well, go rub your nose and bring some feeling back, and we'll talk about some of the spiritualists.

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20:14Chuck Bryant:Okay, I'm going to say it. Spiritualists.

20:17Josh Clark:Nice.

20:19Chuck Bryant:And there was actually, so there's 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, a guy named Andrew Jackson Davis, who combined the ideas of the German hypnotist Franz Mesmer with the Swedish philosopher of the soul, 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 this began.

20:58Josh Clark: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. It is March 31, 1848 in Hydesville, New York, near Rochester. At a farm, this Fox family lived there. Real people, not a family of cute little red fuzzy creatures.

21:22Chuck Bryant:Voiced by George Clooney.

21:24Josh Clark:Yeah, exactly. Mr. and Mrs. Fox had three daughters, actually. One was much older. Her name was Leah. She was 19 and 23 years older. Why was that funny?

21:35Chuck Bryant: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 wearing a bonnet. That's what Leah Fox looked like.

21:46Josh Clark:I didn't see, 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.

21:51Chuck Bryant:Yeah, anybody really.

21:55Josh Clark:And I think he would admit that too.

21:56Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah.

21:57Josh Clark:He's doing all right though.

21:58Chuck Bryant:What if he had really thin skin, the roast master? He like couldn't take a joke against himself. Have you seen that Bumpin' Mike show? It's pretty good.

22:08Josh Clark:No. Is that the roast competition thing?

22:11Chuck Bryant:Yeah, he and Dave Vittell just sit there and roast people. It's really good.

22:14Josh Clark:Man, I used to love Dave Vittell back in the day.

22:16Chuck Bryant:He has just turned into like the weird like comedy genius friend that Jeffrey Ross has. And it shines through in this. Awesome. I'll check it out.

22:27Josh Clark:So the Fox family, older daughter Leah 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 rapping 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.

23:06Chuck Bryant:Yeah, the thing is, is like when it went from, you know, like, oh, there's a ghost rapping or knocking, like a poltergeist kind of thing, to this ghost will respond to questions from the sisters through rapping and knocking, like, how old is Maggie? And it would rap like 15 times or something like that. And that really caught a lot of people's attention. And Maggie and Kate moved in with Leah. And apparently, from what I read, it was Leah 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 what I read.

23:44Josh Clark:Yeah, I just, sorry. I was thinking of a rapping ghost and got sidetracked on my own brain.

23:51Chuck Bryant:I'm the ghost of George Washington, and I'm here to say I love Fruity Pebbles in a major way.

23:57Josh Clark:You know what's funny? I was going to do that exact same thing, but for the Fox family. That's like the go-to rap for guys like us.

24:03Chuck Bryant:Oh, it totally is. Guys who can't rap.

24:06Josh Clark:Yeah, I'm here to say something, something, something in a something way.

24:10Chuck Bryant:Mm-hmm. The Zach Morris method, I think, is what that is.

24:15Josh Clark:I wonder if that's based on an actual rap. I guess there was one at some point that really did that, right?

24:19Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I think Blondie was the one who popularized that.

24:26Josh Clark:My name is Blondie. I'm here to say I'm going to try rap because it's popular today.

24:32Chuck Bryant:Exactly.

24:35Josh Clark:So what were you saying? I was laughing. I didn't even notice. I'm sorry.

24:39Chuck Bryant:Oh, oh, just that. It was basically, I was laying at Leah's feet for corrupting the younger sisters.

24:46Josh Clark: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, you know, 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.

25:27Josh Clark:So you guys, my daughters are talented and gifted. They're not just talking to the, what we think is a murder victim from our previous house.

25:37Chuck Bryant:Right, 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.

26:05Josh Clark: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.

26:27Chuck Bryant: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 in and of itself. It was. Yeah, they should have just been like, forget all this spirit stuff. Watch 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.

27:19Chuck Bryant: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 years. They made a living around the world doing that and created a new religion from it.

27:41Josh Clark:Yeah, and by the time the spiritualism fad 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. Good try. But the two younger sisters, and Maggie especially, were in pretty bad shape with alcoholism. And they died sort of in a Call Your Brothers-esque way, very quietly and fairly destitute in New York City in the 1890s.

28:08Chuck Bryant:And trapped under newspapers. Maybe. But 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, 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.

28:45Josh Clark:Where's that movie, man?

28:47Chuck Bryant:I was wondering the exact same thing. It's crazy it hasn't been made 50 times already, you know?

28:53Josh Clark:Yeah, that would be pretty cool. I couldn't even find a good documentary on it.

28:57Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah.

28:58Josh Clark:On them, at least. I'm sure there are plenty that they're featured in, but give me those Fox sisters.

29:04Chuck Bryant: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 foxes, there's like, there's all sorts of stuff you can believe. And so it's interesting from that respect.

29:46Chuck Bryant: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?

30:04Josh Clark:Yeah. It's crazy.

30:06Chuck Bryant:I just love it. I love this whole story.

30:08Josh Clark: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 trance 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 showy things to kind of get people pretty pumped up. I feel like they're spending their money well.

30:43Chuck Bryant:You're getting me pumped up, I'll tell you that.

30:45Josh Clark:And all of a sudden, 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.

30:59Josh Clark:Hey, Brad, I just came back to say that don't worry about me. this cat is doing just fine.

31:04Chuck Bryant:I came back to say I love pretty pebbles in a major way. He invented rap. That's right.

31:12Josh Clark: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

31:27Chuck Bryant:but I have no recollection of talking about her.

31:29Josh Clark:Yeah, she sounds super familiar But she was one of the top mediums, trans 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.

31:56Chuck Bryant:Well, also, yeah, she was like a little 12-year-old girl when she started. And supposedly she would take the 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.

32:14Josh Clark:And I looked up her picture and Kate Winslet, I think, is from my casting couch is who I would throw in that movie. OK.

32:22Chuck Bryant:OK.

32:22Josh Clark: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.

32:33Chuck Bryant:So channeling is what you kind of think of where somebody becomes possessed. The medium becomes possessed, right? Yeah. There's also ones where 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.

32:49Josh Clark:Right.

32:50Chuck Bryant:Okay. That reminds me of John Edwards. Remember him crossing over with John Edwards?

32:55Josh Clark:Yeah. I can't picture him. I think if I saw a picture, I would totally remember, though.

33:00Chuck Bryant:You would. 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.

33:08Josh Clark:Yeah, but that sort of coincided with Reverend Bob Dobbs and the televangelism and all that good stuff.

33:15Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

33:16Josh Clark:It was a crazy time.

33:17Chuck Bryant:So then there's automatic writing was another big one, too. and all of this should sound familiar, again, because the stuff just is so permeated into 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 Cora Scott would have a completely different personality or a different voice or different accent or something like that, And this, like the handwriting or the word usage or anything like that would be different than the medium's normal handwriting.

33:57Chuck Bryant:This is automatic writing. And there was actually—

34:00Josh Clark:Yeah, I'm trying to decide if I could do that.

34:02Chuck Bryant:Well, sometimes they would use their non-dominant hand. So if you want to change your handwriting, just do that to start. Yeah, I can't. There's no 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?

34:34Josh Clark: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.

34:47Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

34:47Josh Clark:And this happened usually in a dark room where they would have a business partner just behind the curtain, obviously, 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. That's a man. Who's a medium. Oh, really?

35:09Chuck Bryant:Mm-hmm. He looked like the old man from Up.

35:13Josh Clark:Oh. Did it make you cry when you looked at him?

35:17Chuck Bryant:It did.

35:18Josh Clark:My daughter just watched that. It's like, you've been through so much. Here, have these balloons. So, yeah, Leslie Finn. I actually love that name for a man, so. Yeah. And I don't know why I assumed. But he would recreate famous people like Sammy Davis Jr., but wasn't very good at it, apparently, which is kind of funny. That makes us all a little bit more ridiculous and fun.

35:42Chuck Bryant:Well, I was reading an obituary about him that was written by somebody who attended one of his, or a couple, I think, of his seances. And they said things like, you know, a lot of times you could tell like what the trickery was or whatever, but 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 to hold 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.

36:16Chuck Bryant:And, you know, maybe there was 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 or a 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. But no, there really was a spirit that was talking in the room thanks to him.

36:49Josh Clark:Amazing. So we had table turning. This isn't like a theatrical performance. This is in a small room. Everyone, and this, you 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. 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 sometime they had these rings on the medium's finger that were slotted and could move the table around without anyone noticing.

37:26Josh Clark:Just another little parlor trick, basically.

37:28Chuck Bryant:Yeah, or the idea that you're moving the table yourself like a Ouija board. I can't remember what it's called, But basically 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 and 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 seances wanted to believe or already believed in this stuff. Just the power of suggestion can be like, oh, it is raising a little bit.

38:05Chuck Bryant:I can feel it. I can tell. kind of thing.

38:08Josh Clark:Yeah, my favorite, and I bet your favorite too, is ectoplasmic manifestations.

38:15Chuck Bryant:That's a good one.

38:17Josh Clark:Yeah, it's pretty good. This is when you would actually, as a spiritualist, produce something physical, something would manifest itself, an 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. There 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.

38:55Josh Clark: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.

39:09Chuck Bryant: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, you know, 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 stuff 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.

39:51Josh Clark:Yeah, for sure. Maybe you're a little drunk.

39:54Chuck Bryant:Right? Tipsy on schnapps.

39:57Josh Clark: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.

40:08Chuck Bryant:It's just kind of hopping up and down in air, right?

40:11Josh Clark:No, it's... You're thinking of trampolines.

40:16Chuck Bryant:Oh.

40:17Josh Clark:That's not the same thing? No, people can see those.

40:20Chuck Bryant:Oh, okay.

40:21Josh Clark: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, like just your first three toes on your right foot. Wow. And you're hiding that with your other foot. So it looks like you're just sort of levitating a few inches off the ground. And then you act like you're unsteady and then you land back down and go, oh, boy, that was a good one. That was pretty powerful.

40:50Chuck Bryant:So wait a minute. David Blaine can raise his entire body weight with three toes.

40:57Josh Clark:Well, I mean, he's on his toes. I mean, I could do it at the time, too. This is in the 90s.

41:02Chuck Bryant:Man, that's impressive. I don't think I've ever had the kind of toe strength that is required to do that.

41:09Josh Clark:You can raise yourself up with one foot. In a seated position? No, no, no. You're standing.

41:16Chuck Bryant:Oh. Oh, I got you. Yeah, yeah.

41:18Josh Clark:So what you're doing is you're standing there. I got you. 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've got someone at the right angle, and I got pretty good at it. My roommate Justin was like, you're getting better, mate.

41:36Chuck Bryant:Right.

41:37Josh Clark:Well, I'm getting drunk. Well, both of those things were happening.

41:41Chuck Bryant: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 levitating. I was like, to do that with just three toes, that in and of itself is pretty impressive. But apparently no one does that.

41:57Josh Clark:All right, what are the other, there's another couple of things they did too. What are those?

42:00Chuck Bryant:Spirit 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. 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 on a table, so they were like, this is a spirit arm levitating on the table.

42:37Chuck Bryant:So they're like tying three things together, table turning, levitating, and spirit photography.

42:42Josh Clark:Those are great. I think the spirit photography, just because they were taking advantage of this new technology, people did not even understand.

42:48Chuck Bryant:Right. It was like the deep fake of the time.

42:51Josh Clark: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.

43:00Chuck Bryant:Right. And then people, like I said earlier too, a lot of the new age stuff that's tied into spiritualism today, like tarot readings or, or, oh, I don't know, astrology, that kind of stuff. That 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 or doctrine or anything like that. It was still very much tied into and born out of Christianity. So stuff like occult things would have been very much frowned upon by spiritualists.

43:50Josh Clark:Totally. Should we take another break?

43:52Chuck Bryant:I think we should.

43:54Josh Clark: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.

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46:58Josh Clark:All right. 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.

47:15Chuck Bryant:Kind of like looking at penguins in a zoo today. Like you know they're fake, but it's still fun to look at.

47:21Josh Clark:Right. Why not go pay a nickel to see Madam whatever do her little erotic because we'll get into that. He's got a little sexy at times too. Her little ghost shimmy. This is part of the draw, the ghost shimmy. 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, you know, we've been talking 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 a cult it was just shut down kind of from the beginning in the South

48:09Chuck Bryant:they're like we'll stick to our voodoo thank you very much

48:13Josh Clark:yeah exactly

48:14Chuck Bryant:keep that spiritualism stuff out

48:17Josh Clark: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 seances. Sometimes they would get in touch with a family member, but oftentimes it would just be kind of the same as the stage 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.

48:41Chuck Bryant:Sure. But that was for, like, 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, you know, went off to fight and just never came back, never heard from again, know nothing, have no idea where they died, where they were buried. And so that kind of grief, you know, 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.

49:22Chuck Bryant:And it just so happened that at the time, there was a movement afoot that said, oh, well, this guy over here is actually really good at getting in touch with the dead. Why don't you have a seance with him? You just have to, you know, pay him to do this work because it is 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 seances, these performances were decreased in size, but vastly increased in frequency.

49:58Josh Clark:Yeah, a lot more spiritualists doing smaller mediums for families or smaller seances for families. And this same thing happened after World War I as well. So it's, you know, it's kind of all fun and games until it gets to this level. If it's a big theater show, fine whatever uh go pay your money and get entertained for an hour but 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

50:24Chuck Bryant:you ask me right and that's where i think a lot of the genuine skeptics who who beat this kind of stuff to a pulp that's the place that they're coming from you know not not not necessarily that it's like an affront 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. You don't take advantage of people who are undergoing grief. That's a pretty shoddy thing to do. That's a life lesson right there for everybody listening, especially the youngsters.

51:00Josh Clark: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 seances, you know?

51:08Chuck Bryant:Right. That's true.

51:09Josh Clark:Like sell the family farm, like stuff like that.

51:12Chuck Bryant: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 wants you to do.

51:20Josh Clark:For what? Something's coming through. They're saying pennies on the dollar.

51:25Chuck Bryant:That's great.

51:27Josh Clark:Oh, wait, that's the opposite of great. 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.

51:56Chuck Bryant:Yeah, go big or go home, but eventually you're going to go home anyway.

52:01Josh Clark:That's the end of that saying. I love it. Right.

52:03Chuck Bryant: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 to just be total frauds. And 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 controlled 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.

52:51Chuck Bryant:And so as these reports kept 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 hokum and bunk. But the thing is, is not everyone did. And even still today, go ask Dan Aykroyd, there is a group of people who adhere to spiritualism as a religion.

53:21Josh Clark:No, for sure. And one of the big reasons that it didn't completely go away was spiritualists were very smart in 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 my flyer or whatever what's it called a pull quote no no the uh that that fallacy the logical fallacy appeal to authority i think oh yeah yeah the appeal to authority sure okay yeah which you know makes a lot of sense if people see, oh, well, they did a science for the Prince of Monaco or Sammy Davis Jr., then it's got to be good enough for me.

54:21Josh Clark:It's not pseudoscience at all, because why would Sammy Davis Jr. believe in pseudoscience?

54:26Chuck Bryant: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 expose written in 1897 and by god if i can't i can't find it anywhere in my tabs but it was basically uh oh revelations of a spirit medium is what it was called 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.

55:12Chuck Bryant: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 gullible. 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.

55:33Josh Clark:Yeah, even if you talk to 100 scientists and one of them was a top heavy who said something valuable to you, that's the only one. You're the 10th dentist of the 9 out of 10 dentists.

55:44Chuck Bryant:Right, exactly. Exactly. And that's all you need, especially if the other nine dentists just keep their traps shut because they have better things to do. But there were a bunch of people who would not keep their traps shut. But I guess actually one of a legendary top heavy, even though he wasn't a scientist credentialed or otherwise, was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm sorry. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

56:15Josh Clark: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.

56:21Chuck Bryant:That's a good one. Remember those Trident commercials? I think it was four out of five dentists. How was it 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.

56:34Josh Clark:Maybe it should be the fifth. It is four out of five. It's not nine out of ten.

56:37Chuck Bryant:Do you remember that, though?

56:38Josh Clark:No.

56:39Chuck Bryant:It was a great—

56:40Josh Clark:Was that the— Very shocking. What was the—what was the—was it, We Make Holes in Teeth? Oh, yeah. Remember that, the cartoon?

56:48Chuck Bryant:That was Crest.

56:50Josh Clark:Oh, okay.

56:50Chuck Bryant: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 works. What's funny 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, and it's mine.

57:26Josh Clark:That was from the 80s?

57:27Chuck Bryant:No, it is now. But I'm saying the crest takeover of my mind didn't work.

57:31Josh Clark:Gotcha.

57:32Chuck Bryant:I'm an aquafish boy now.

57:34Josh Clark:Is that the one with the tricolor?

57:36Chuck Bryant: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.

57:44Josh Clark:You're like an Arthur Conan Doyle.

57:46Chuck Bryant: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 um and he always he bought into this he was just convinced um 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's wrong. My esteemed colleague has been taken. But then the head of those guys was Harry Houdini, amazingly enough.

58:24Josh Clark:Yeah, Houdini, which makes it super ironic that at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles, they have long had Harry Houdini seance nights.

58:33Chuck Bryant:Oh, yeah.

58:34Josh Clark:Where you can go into the Harry Houdini room and do a seance. That's neat. 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.

59:00Chuck Bryant: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 you're scheduled to pitch there tonight. Do you remember that scary stories to tell in the dark book? Yeah. Where was that? What that was from? It was like two friends who played baseball together. Yeah. They had a pact like Harry Houdini and his wife, apparently.

59:23Josh Clark:I think there's different versions of that joke, though.

59:26Chuck Bryant:Man, the illustrations in that book were just bar none.

59:30Josh Clark:Yeah, that was great stuff. and by the way we should give a big rest in peace to Mr. Mort Drucker who passed away

59:38Chuck Bryant:oh yeah

59:39Josh Clark: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 agreed he passed on and he was one of the greats

59:51Chuck Bryant:he definitely shaped my childhood in a very large way yeah big time with his drawings R.I.P. 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, he's like, yeah, Josh is going to flub it and Chuck's going to have to be brought in for the save. So Harry Houdini created this longstanding tradition of stage magicians exposing the fraud of spiritualism, basically. Yeah, because 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.

1:00:38Chuck Bryant:And he was relentless at it.

1:00:41Josh Clark:Yeah, he was very relentless.

1:00:42Chuck Bryant: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 Sheldrake 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. But 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, the table did levitate or all the stuff that he's studying under these controlled conditions.

1:01:23Chuck Bryant:And it's basically shown not just that the medium himself or more often herself, as we'll see, was engaging in fraud, but also that the audience had a willing suspension of disbelief and were part of this too by saying like, I felt the phantom arm tap 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?

1:01:52Josh Clark:Yeah, pretty interesting.

1:01:53Chuck Bryant:It is pretty interesting.

1:01:54Josh Clark:So we'll finish up here with this. I thought this was 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 toe knuckles. 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.

1:02:35Josh Clark: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. So that's a good thing. It gave them some agency, but 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.

1:03:16Josh Clark:And if not, they will come back and haunt you all. And that kind of ended up happening in some ways.

1:03:22Chuck Bryant:Yeah, there was a huge connection between spiritualism and spiritualist movement and abolitionism, the women's suffrage movement, the temperance movement. A lot of these progressive movements, workers' rights. And, 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.

1:04:11Josh Clark:Yeah, it's almost like one could say anything at all at 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.

1:04:22Chuck Bryant:Exactly, especially if they'd attach their ego to you and your success. Very strange. So I just want to give two shouts out. One to probably the greatest ghost movie that involves seances ever.

1:04:39Josh Clark:Ghost?

1:04:40Chuck Bryant:No. Whoopi Goldberg? No. All right. The Others with Nicole Kidman. Yeah, that was good. It was so good. Don't spoil it. The greatest short story involving seances 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. 27 um nightside look it up and thank me later it's seriously just bone chilling how good it is

1:05:15Josh Clark:i wonder if we could uh get in touch with her and read that for our halloween episode i tweeted to

1:05:21Chuck Bryant:her once kind of crassly um and never heard anything back even though she was on twitter

1:05:26Josh Clark:i know she saw that tweet hey at joyce carol oates you think you're so cool right um i would

1:05:33Chuck Bryant: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, and or her publisher, please, we would love to read in our ad free episode, one of her short stories for Halloween. That's right.

1:06:02Josh Clark:So I think she might like that aspect.

1:06:04Chuck Bryant:Okay. Oh, one last thing, Chuck. There's a place called Lilydale 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 Listener Mail.

1:06:27Josh Clark: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 you might like 2004 my family bought a new house in the suburbs of Detroit it was designed and built by an exceptionally pragmatic efficient yet lacking in aesthetic appreciation engineer. To our surprise, in my husband's delight, as he is from Spain, the master bathroom included a separate bidet unit. Now remember, this is 2004 and people were not as familiar in this country.

1:07:07Josh Clark:Most people that visited our home had no idea what it was, and we also made the decision to not give advance notice when they went to the bathroom. Invariably, people would emerge from the bathroom trip either a little wet or with an embarrassed look on their face as they confessed to having explored the contraption and released a stream of water onto themselves and into our bathroom. It was always good for a laugh. I sure appreciate you guys when we moved from Michigan to the South Carolina.

1:07:35Chuck Bryant:What?

1:07:36Josh Clark:I said the South.

1:07:37Chuck Bryant:Wait, was she once Miss South Carolina? Because that would explain that last bit.

1:07:41Josh Clark:No, I thought it was she meant the South, and I didn't see on the next line it said Carolina, so that was just me.

1:07:47Chuck Bryant:Oh, okay.

1:07:48Josh Clark:Your voices accompanied us as we made many 12-hour trips back and forth. We enjoy the knowledge and the tangents, even the tangents. And now you continue to soothe and educate me as I go on my four to five mile recreational walks during the pandemic quarantine and temporary, hopefully furlough. And that is from Michelle Salcedo.

1:08:11Chuck Bryant:Nice. Thanks a lot, Michelle. We're glad to know that you're doing OK there, hanging out, waiting for things to get back to normal.

1:08:17Josh Clark:In the South Carolina.

1:08:19Chuck Bryant:That's right, Chuck. And as it will eventually go back to normal. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us like Michelle did to let us know some silly story about a bidet or what have you, you can get in touch with us. Send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

1:09:17Chuck Bryant:Then ship it free and earn Trashy Cash points instantly. Guaranteed. Keep earning points when you shop exclusive Trashy deals and redeem them for gift cards to brands you love. Or even donate them to charity. It's simple, it's satisfying, and it's sustainable. Since 95 % of what you send gets reused or recycled. So, you know those excuses that keep you from decluttering? You don't have time, you don't know what they'll take. Trashy solves all that. Just get it back, fill it, send it. It's never been easier to turn clutter into shopping power. Buy your bag and start decluttering today at Trashy.io.

1:09:54Chuck Bryant:That's T-R-A-S-H-I-E dot I-O.

1:09:58Josh Clark:Friends Like These, The Murder of Skylar Nees is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+.

1:10:03Chuck Bryant:911, do you have an emergency?

1:10:04Josh Clark:I have a 16-year-old daughter. Can't get a hold of her. I am scared to death.

1:10:08Chuck Bryant:We wanted to talk to Skylar's friends.

1:10:11Josh Clark:They're not telling the full story. The truth is gruesomely horrific.

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1:10:17Josh Clark:There's a darker secret that's not been said. Watch the new Hulu original series, Friends Like These, The Murder of Skylar Nees, on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. For bundle subscribers, terms apply. Are you a fraud-paying American? One in four tax-paying Americans has been a victim of identity fraud. With LifeLock, if your identity is stolen, they fix it. Guaranteed or your money back. Last year, billions in refunds were stolen. Could be from your salary, overtime, or second job.

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1:10:58Josh Clark:This is an iHeart Podcast.

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