TRANSCRIPT

Season 1, Episode 4 - The Heartbreak of Harry Houdini

Heather Freeman: A Spiritualist service begins like many church services around the United States: There's a welcome to the congregation, followed by singing — in this case, mostly Methodist hymns. There's a brief lecture. And then things begin to look a little different. 

Lauren: Then, there's typically 15 or 20 minutes of healing, which is laying on hands, but one doesn't really physically touch the body. It's more of — think Reiki. 

Heather: This is Lauren Thibodeau, a contemporary Spiritualist medium who lives in Lily Dale, one of the world's largest Spiritualist communities in upstate New York.

Lauren: They will, you know, lay hands around a person, but not on the person typically. And that is followed by message giving, which is where a medium — or several, depending — will get up and give a few messages to congregants or visitors.

Heather: Spiritualism is best known for this part of the service, because these messages are from the dead for the living. When a medium is contacted by a spirit, it’s very matter of fact. They will often identify an audience member who a spirit has a message for, describe the physical characteristics of that spirit, and then relay a message to the intended recipient in a very comfortable, conversational way.  Lauren explains that an effective message should be specific, and gives me an example of what she might say to someone visiting a Spiritualist service. 

Lauren: So I go to you in the pink shirt, and I have a lady here who stood five foot two, and she was known for having quite beautiful hands, and she really liked to wear jewelry to show this off, and whatever, and details of the personality. 

Heather: Being specific about who the spirit is, is important because it helps the recipient know if the message is accurate and valid. And Lauren says this sort of specificity helps assure good mediumship.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, my aunt Sally or whomever. And then from there, I like to move right into relevance. What is the relevance to my life today? It's nice to walk down memory lane and remember when she took you out figure skating or something, but it's more, I mean, we're here now and we need to understand what can help us through life. 

Heather: These messages are mostly practical and uplifting, but can occasionally be very specific. They can be anything from a grandmother encouraging her granddaughter to have confidence in herself, to a late husband telling his wife to look under the sofa for a missing gold watch.

Lauren: And then the last part would be for me that a good message is rewarding, that the person feels healed, uplifted, a little better for having had the encounter, if that makes sense. 

Heather: For some Americans, the idea of receiving messages from the beyond might seem uncanny or unsettling.  But Spiritualist mediums usually talk in an ordinary way in ordinary settings, such as a daylit living room, or even an office. Each medium is unique and experiences these messages in their own way. But they often see, hear, smell, or feel things others do not. And for Spiritualists, this communication with the beloved dead is deeply life-affirming.

Lauren: It's as natural as breathing to invite loved ones, family, friends, any spirit out there who wants to help you. For me, that's what spiritualism is all about. It helps you live a richer, more full life — not necessarily abundance in money terms, but abundance in the ways that matter.

Heather: Spiritualists attempt communication with the deceased through public services like the one we just described, and also through seances with smaller groups of people. Seances have been part of popular consciousness since the late 1800s, when Spiritualism exploded as a hot new religious movement. After the Civil War, some spiritualist mediums tried to help grieving families contact lost loved ones. This continued after War War I and the practice also spread to Europe. 

I'm Heather Freeman, and this is Magic in the United States. Today's episode is The Heartbreak of Harry Houdini. In this episode, we'll explore the American origins of Spiritualism, how fraudulent mediums capitalized on the nebulous space between entertainment and religion; why the famed illusionist and stage magician Harry Houdini made it his life's mission to root out frauds, and how Spiritualist mediums continue to relay messages from the beyond to this very day.

We'll be right back.

[BREAK]

Heather: This is Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

I want to take you back in time almost 200 years, to upstate New York, where Spiritualism began. 

In the 1800s, America's separation of church and state was unique in the world and, at that time, upstate New York was still sparsely settled by Europeans. So when a new wave of religious refugees were met with a scarcity of clergy, and with no requirements to be state recognized, devout enthusiasts began forming their own methods of religious expression – and their own religions. 

Sean McCloud is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Sean: All sorts of religious groups are springing up. So, there are lots of people out there who you might think of as seekers, right, who are out looking for religious ideas, beliefs, practices. Mormonism, for example, Shakers, the Oneida community, groups we know today, like Methodist Baptists — they're sprouting up at that time because they were kind of young, tiny upstarts. 

Heather: At the same time, there were new ideas emerging from science, too. From harnessing electricity into batteries to the first vaccines, science was proving there was much more to the natural world than meets the human eye. 

This spiritual merging of science and the invisible world relied on several key ideas. In the 1700s, Emanuel Swedenborg a Swedish scientist, philosopher, and mystic wrote theologies attempting to relate physical matter to spirit. He described speaking to both angels and the dead, and his ideas would become foundational to Spiritualism. 

Not long after this, German physician Franz Anton Mesmer developed his theories of animal magnetism: That all things radiate a magnetic force and that these can be used for healing. And his ideas became important to Spiritualist healings, too.

For a lot of people, theories like these collapsed the distance between science and religion — they weren't separate things. These were new and exciting scientific and theological ideas, and America was buzzing with enthusiasm for the scientific pursuit of the spirit world. 

And against this backdrop of scientific excitement and religious fervor enter two young women who are at the heart of Spiritualism's origin story: the Fox sisters. Here’s Spiritualist medium Lauren Thibodeau:

Lauren: Spiritualism began, with a couple of young girls, the Fox sisters, in a haunted home in upstate New York, not far from Rochester. It's kind of like modern murder mystery meets 1848, bored teenage girls, is kind of how it started.

Elizabeth: Margaret and Kate Fox started telling their parents that they had contacted the spirit of a peddler who had been murdered in their house. 

Heather: Elizabeth ‘Libby’ Tucker is a folklorist and distinguished service professor of English at Binghamton University.

Elizabeth: They used the term Mr. Splitfoot at first. And, their parents came in and heard rapping sounds. And then later, neighbors came in. And then, very suddenly, it exploded to telegraph messages to different United States cities, and other parts of the world. 

Heather: The Fox sisters communicated with the peddler’s spirit by asking him questions. Silence meant “no” and knocking meant “yes”. And from these earliest days, showmanship became part of mediumship as mediums conveyed messages from invisible spirits to increasingly large audiences. 

And the Fox sisters were good at entertaining an audience. Shannon Taggart is an artist who's been documenting contemporary Spiritualist seances and healings for over 20 years.

Shannon: The Fox sisters were media darlings. Margaret Fox has been compared to, like, a Britney Spears-style celebrity in her day. And, they were in the papers a lot. Kate and Margaret became quite famous and were doing sittings for famous people and had famous supporters. 

Heather: A sitting, by the way, is when a medium would sit with others and attempt to contact the dead. And it was this ability to communicate with the dead that drew people to the Fox sisters. 

Spiritualists believe there is no death of the soul, only a change of the physical body, and that communication with the spirit world is possible.

Now, this is not a new concept. There are many religions that practice communication with the dead. But the Fox sisters inspired others, and a loose network of people who practiced mediumship and public seances grew rapidly into the religious movement of Spiritualism. Professor Sean McCloud describes this.

Sean: By the 1850s, there are established mediums, they're mostly women, who the movement believes can actually communicate with the dead, so sometimes they would get up in large lecture halls and they would give lectures as Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson.

Sometimes, especially later in the 19th century, they might gather around a table and talk to your deceased Aunt Tilly. But the practices were all around finding information about the afterlife and about your present life from the dead who were supposed to know more because they were in a different kind of higher plane of existence.

Heather: While many spiritualists called 1848 the year their religion began, it was an informal movement inspired by the Fox sisters, not founded by them, and it was influenced by Swedenborg, Mesmer, and other new religious movements springing up at that time. 

But the Fox sisters’ knocking ghost? Well, Sean Mcleod has a spoiler:

Sean: The Fox sisters were faking it. They were snapping, I think, their toe bones, and one of the Fox sisters admitted this eventually. The other said it never happened and went ahead and kept making lots of money. So it started to become an entertainment as well, right? 

Heather: So let's take a beat and look at this. 

On one hand, you have the Fox sisters who said they could communicate with the dead. And by most accounts, they were faking it. 

On the other hand, their supposed ability to communicate with the dead inspired an entire religious movement that was -- and continues to be -- deeply meaningful for many Americans. 

So the Fox sisters never sat down and founded Spiritualism -- they just inspired it. And by the time they were exposed as frauds, the Spiritualist religious movement was well-established in American culture. 

As Spiritualism exploded into a massive national movement, the Chautauqua Circuit was instrumental in exposing new audiences to Spiritualist mediums. The Chautauqua was an adult education movement started in the 1870s by Methodists in upstate New York. Today, we'd probably call it "edutainment” and speakers included academics, politicians, teachers, musicians, showmen, preachers, and more — including spiritualist mediums.

Chautauqua audiences were mostly white, Protestant, and middle-class, and as these events began to include social activists speaking about humanistic ideals, religious tolerance, social progress, and equality, their audiences grew. They eventually became a national phenomenon with Chautauquas happening all over the country, and there are still some to this day. 

Professor Sean McCloud again.

Sean: Chautauquas are these kind of people coming into town, giving lectures. Spiritualist mediums were often people giving these lecture, but not as themselves, not as Mary Smith, but again, as I noted earlier, as Benjamin Franklin, as Thomas Jefferson.

And what did they talk about? They talked about things like women's rights, they talked about abolitionism. So spiritualism was tied to a certain kind of cultural politics of the time that was equality for all people, anti-slavery, a lot more power for women. 

I think our stereotype today is that if a medium is getting up and speaking, they're going to use a strange voice and say, ‘I am now Uncle Bill.’ That's not what happened, right? The woman — because it was 90 percent of the time a woman — would stand up and say, ‘Hello, I'm Benjamin Franklin, and I'm going to give a lecture to you tonight about the equality of all races.’ And then talk for like an hour and a half.

And what's fascinating about that practice is that at the time period, there are doctors like R. L. Dabney who believe that it is impossible for women to speak in public or — and I'm not making this up — he said their uteruses will shrivel up, they will start growing hair, and they will go insane because they can't be educated and they can't speak to public.

So, interestingly, when, I don't know, Mary Smith is speaking as Benjamin Franklin, sometimes detractors are like, ‘It has to be real because we all know a woman could never speak with power and force for an hour like this, it has to be Benjamin Franklin.’ 

Heather: In part, because of these socially progressive messages, Spiritualism became a huge religious movement by the end of the 19th century, drawing in tens of thousands of people from across race, class, and gender. 

Although Spiritualism was socially progressive for its time, some aspects were culturally problematic. Again, most mediums were white, female, and from Protestant backgrounds, and some conveyed messages from Native American spirits that either created or perpetuated stereotypes about Native Americans. Unfortunately, these stereotypes continued into the 20th century, and are still common in much media to this day. We’ll definitely revisit this topic in a future episode. 

The Civil War and World War I also drew additional adherents, for another reason: the sudden death of over half a million family members. Professor Libby Tucker again.

Elizabeth: Many people turned to Spiritualism to find a connection to the loved ones that they'd lost and found that this was enormously comforting to them. 

Heather: During the Civil and Great Wars, when men were killed in battle, it was sometimes impossible to retrieve the body. In many cases, the lack of a body and lack of information about the loved ones' last days, weeks, or even months before death, left grieving families struggling to find closure.

At the same time, for those not affected by personal loss, this communication with the dead could be… well, spooky entertainment. Today we have ghost tours, but back then, you might visit a psychic medium act. 

Again, while some mediums were sincere, others used seances to provide entertainment for thrill seekers. And still others used it as a way to fleece the gullible. The challenge is that they all called themselves mediums'. 

Expert Shannon Taggart describes a dark room seance.

Shannon: All the windows would be blacked out. There would likely be a cabinet, where the medium would be seated. And the medium would be in the cabinet and you would be holding hands so that you were convinced that, the people next to you are not creating the phenomena and you may hear voices or things might fly around. You might see ectoplasm and the only light in the room would likely be a red light because that enabled photographers to have their big, bulky cameras with plates that are very low light sensitive so that the photographers could work.

Heather: For grieving families looking for closure, there was no real way to discern between a sincere spiritualist medium; a medium who is working for ‘entertainment purposes only’; and a fraud who's out to rip them off. 

There was a real risk that they'd be swindled, and all of this was headed towards a collision point. 

The stage is set for our next act.

After the break, Spiritualism clashes with one of the most famous stage illusionists of his time -- and one of the best-known magicians to this day --Harry Houdini, who helped expose fraudulent mediums, but also reshaped public perception of Spiritualism. 

[BREAK]

Heather: This is Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman. 

Spiritualism spread rapidly across the United States from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries. While all this is happening, stage magic, also called stage illusion or stage conjuring, became popular in both vaudeville and the Chautauqua educational circuits. 

Joe Culpepper is Associate Researcher at Montreal's National Circus School, and researches the golden age of stage conjuring. He describes a typical stage magic act of that era.

Joe Culpepper: The magician and usually the magician's assistant would be dressed formally. There would be playing card manipulations; coin manipulations, where coins appear out of thin air, out of spectators’ clothing and hair; grand illusions, for sure.

Heather: One such grand delusion is called Metamorphosis, in which the assistant locks the magician in a box. Then the assistant raises a curtain hiding himself and the magician. Then he drops it. And their positions are switched, so the magician must release the assistant from the locked box. And this was one of the first stage illusions performed by Harry Houdini.

Joe: Yeah, so, Harry Houdini — his real name was Ehrich Weiss. He was born in Budapest, and he and his family immigrated to the States. Houdini had, you know, a pretty nice childhood for his first seven years. But then his father lost his job as the town Rabbi. And this kind of began a tumultuous economic period for Harry and his family. 

Heather: The teenage Ehrich Weiss worked various odd jobs to help support his family. But as a young adult he became Harry Houdini after getting inspired by the circus, contortion, and stage magic. His name was an homage to the famous French stage magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin.

Prior to Robert-Houdin, magicians often specialized in sleight of hand tricks, but some street performers had a reputation for being cheats. Robert-Houdin elevated the craft to the stage, and transformed it into an entertainment worthy of aristocratic audiences.

Harry Houdini's acts included his wife Bess, and early in his career — at the height of the spiritualist explosion and when mediumship performances were vogue in the vaudeville circuit — he and Bess decided to try out a mediumship act.

Joe: Houdini talks about just arriving in the small town a day or two ahead of time, visiting the local graveyard, getting a little tour with a local to explain the family history. And, you know, in the show, all the spectators think that it would be impossible for Harry and Bess to know any of that. 

And, of course, when they ask questions during the show, Bess would reveal very specific, personal information that then led the audience to believe that she actually had powers of a medium. And that was his first experience really performing a medium component that was performed in a serious way, as if Bess actually knew the past, present, and future of audience members. And Houdini decides that he feels ethically uncomfortable with it. 

Heather: Mediums communicate with the dead and share their messages with the living. But Houdini was uncomfortable with the emotional power of claiming to transmit information from deceased loved ones. He was a stage conjurer: His performances were expertly crafted illusions, and he was transparent about that with his audiences. Houdini was open to the possibility of an invisible world and said later in his life that he believed in a supernatural power, but he was a skeptic, and these personal spiritual beliefs were separate from his stage magic act.

As a child, Houdini attended some seances to contact his deceased half-brother. And later in life, he accompanied his mother as she tried to reach his father. But these experiences seem to have encouraged Houdini to be more of a skeptic rather than a believer. Still, Houdini was devoted to his mom, and when she died, Harry was heartbroken. But despite Harry's yearning for his mother, he was still a skeptic of psychic mediums and faced his grief on his own. 

But then, something happened that pushed his skepticism towards spiritualist mediums into disdain.

Houdini was friends with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was a Spiritualist, and his wife conducted a sitting in which she contacted Houdini's mother who had been dead for almost a decade. 

Shannon Taggart takes up the tale.

Shannon: Arthur Conan Doyle had a seance where Conan Doyle's wife wrote a letter that was supposedly from Harry Houdini's mother, but it had a Christian cross on it and it wasn't in the language she spoke, and he was very offended by this and it caused a big break within the relationship because Arthur Conan Doyle was an ardent Spiritualist, he was like a missionary for Spiritualism. 

Heather: Doyle's wife might've been sincere — and we'll probably never know. But Houdini was deeply offended. Perhaps it was picking at an old pain, but the event triggered him into action. 

Houdini spent the rest of his life on a personal mission to debunk false mediums wherever and whenever he found them. He felt these mediums were deceiving the grieving and even lobbied Congress to support a bill banning fortune telling, which was often associated with mediumship.

Now Houdini was already internationally famous at that time, and he used his public relations savvy to challenge mediums to prove that their communications with the dead were genuine. 

Shannon: Harry Houdini set out to debunk many of the physical mediums who are working in darkness and claiming to bring forth spirits. You know, and he rightly pointed out that you can do the same with magic tricks and in a dark room. You know, how can you discern what is magic and what is spirits?

Heather: Joe Culpepper continues.

Joe: Harry Houdini was testing the medium who was claiming this ability and then discovering that they were just using essentially conjuring tricks or logical methods to create the illusion that it was possible to communicate with the dead. 

Heather: Houdini's methods for debunking false mediums soon extended to a small network of stage magicians.

Joe: All of the people would be in the seance, they would be holding hands. One of Houdini's operatives would be sitting at the seance table looking for evidence of trickery. Houdini's operatives would even grab hold of the medium's hand during the seance to kind of reveal or debunk this trickery. So it got quite intense. It was, often quite, a big conflict. Sometimes it was more subtle.

Heather: Houdini's public efforts to expose mediums became its own kind of entertainment. But for many Spiritualists, these efforts confused fraud with sincere practices. Professor Sean McLeod explains.

Sean: The debunkers of the turn of the 20th century are really doing work of trying to prevent people from getting ripped off, but at the same time they're defining spiritualism in such a way that it also is fortune telling and things that spiritualism never were.

Heather: The title "medium" was borrowed by fortune tellers, vaudeville entertainers, and frauds alike at this time. But these were activities that were very far from the civic and religiously minded Spiritualist mediums.

Harry Houdini died on Halloween in 1926 at the age of 52.  Before he died, he and Bess made a plan so he could continue to disprove mediumship, even beyond the grave. (It was very meta.)  Harry and Bess agreed upon a secret word, only they knew. If his ghost was summoned, he would give the word, and the afterlife would be proven.

Bess held seances for 10 years and the secret word functionally never came up as intended. But some magicians still hold Halloween seances to this day, to celebrate the legacy of the great illusionist and escape artist Harry Houdini. 

Harry Houdini and other debunkers made a lasting impact on Spiritualism, although this religion is still practiced by many Americans to this day. But fortune telling is illegal in the state of New York, the state that birthed Spiritualism and the Chautauqua lecture circuit. Tarot card readers and Spiritualist mediums alike must list their services as ‘for entertainment only’.

Here's Spiritualist medium Lauren Thibodeau:

Lauren: We are classified as entertainers, which is amusing in its own way, especially for those of us who have a depth of training in psychological areas, you know, psychological support, counseling. An awful lot of mediums have backgrounds in human services, psychology, teaching — the people fields, right? 

Heather: For Lauren, mediumship has been part of her life since she was a child in upstate New York. 

Lauren: We were first Episcopalian and then we became Lutheran. But through the whole time my father was a Freemason and I was raised in the tradition of the Eastern Star. It taught me a lot of good things, but it also taught me to rely largely on my inner resources. 

Heather: At the age of four, Lauren was electrocuted and this event triggered her mediumship abilities. As a little girl, she often knew things about people in the neighborhood, and this unsettled the adults.

Lauren: Neighbors would come up to me and say, ‘How did you know about their getting a divorce? Were you listening when I was on the phone?’ and it's, ‘No, no.’ I just, I never have understood why other people can't pick up the true tones of what's going on. You can tell when things are unsettled in someone's life. Mediums are just more sensitive to it. 

My family was unnerved by this and they really wanted me not to be intuitive and I agreed. Right? Nobody in their teenage years wants to be unlike others. 

Heather: So Lauren tried to ignore the spirits and forge a life that was more "left brain," as she put it. After first going to school for engineering, she then worked as an economist, and later got her MBA. 

But despite a successful corporate career, Lauren never felt like she fit in with that world. So before the age of 30, she gave up her corporate life and became a full-time medium. 

Lauren: I'm very happy with the life I've built because I get to spend my days really supporting people through grief and bereavement, life choices, how to find a spiritual path that works for them…. 

Heather: The history of Spiritualism reminds us that it's possible to be rational, skeptical, and discerning, and also open to the world being more than it seems. For some, this might still seem like a paradox. But many of the 18th and 19th century's best known scientists, inventors, and thinkers contemplated a spiritual world -- with seriousness and sincerity.

From a warm breeze, to the scent of a loved one's perfume, to the very memory of their touch, there are many ways for the world to be real. Even if you can’t see them. 

—

Next week on Magic in the United States, we'll explore the incredible cultural remixing of Hoodoo, Rootwork, and Conjure, and learn how enslaved African-Americans forged these practices in the American colonies. And we'll also discover how the Great Migration of the 20th century forced African-Americans to redefine their practices and home.

Magic in the United States is written and hosted by me, Heather Freeman. The show is produced by Amber Walker and edited by Lucy Perkins. Our associate producer is Noor Gill and the show is mixed by Jennie Cataldo. Fact checking by Dania Suleman. The Executive Producer for PRX productions is Jocelyn Gonzalez. The show's music is from APM Music and Epidemic Sound, and our project managers are Edwin Ochoa and Morgan Church. Thanks to advisors Helen Berger, Sean McLeod, and Meg Whalen. Thanks to guests Joe Culpepper, Sean McCloud, Shannon Taggart, Lauren Thibodeau, and Libby Tucker. This production was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and The University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Wherever you are in the United States, the East, the West, the North, or the South: remember, that magic is everywhere. I'm Heather Freeman. And I'll see you at the crossroads.