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businessman who was present was “cruelly neglecting to tend his own mother’s grave” despite enjoying “many merry excursions with [his] lovely secretary

Shielding his eyes as though squinting into the heavens, he added that “Louise and many others are here with us tonight.”

We propose to contact our friends and ancestors on the other side,” he went on. “You cannot hide a nefarious deed from the spirits, and Mademoiselle Beatrice, a trained psychometric clairvoyant, will assist

A Magician among the Spirits, he wrote, “I associated myself with mediums, joining the rank and file and hold[ing] séances as an independent medium to fathom the truth of it all.

Spiritualism is nothing more or less than mental intoxication; intoxication of any sort when it becomes a habit is injurious to the body, but intoxication of the mind is always fatal to the mind

In December 1885, his beloved half brother Herman had died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-two.

Two nearly identical, walrus-mustached brothers from Buffalo, New York, Ira and William Davenport, had toured the world in the 1860s and 1870s with a show whose most famous effect saw them lashed together inside a packing crate—the so-called “spirit cabinet”—that also contained musical instruments such as a tambourine, a trumpet, and a violin.

professional psychic reunion” with the deceased, who had left behind various debts. The medium was apparently able to materialize Rabbi Weiss, who was reluctant to dwell on earthly or financial matters, but instead assured his son that he was “very happy.”

On a six-month tour of Europe in 1920, Houdini attended more than a hundred séances, and two years later was ready to sit in a darkened Atlantic City hotel room where he was rewarded by a fifteen-page letter, channeled through a medium, apparently dictated by his late mother.

The result was Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia (“Heavenly Secrets”), which appeared in eight volumes between 1749 and 1756, and whose closely argued central thesis defeated all but the most agile minds of the day. In 1766, Immanuel Kant published his own considered opinion that Swedenborg’s accounts were “nothing but illusions,” although even he allowed that there seemed to be “a strain of divine inspiration” to some of his writings.