The Spectacle of Illusion

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THE SPECTACLE OF

MAGIC, THE PA R A N O R M A L & T H E C O M P L I C I T Y OF T H E M I N D

M A T T H E W L. T O M P K I N S E X P E R I M E N TA L P S Y C H O L O G I S T & M A G I C I A N

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William S. Marriott demonstrates one way in which messages that u s e d during seances to tap out' replies to questions asked have allegedly been produced by a spiritual presence may be faked. b y the medium who was conducting the session.

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PAGES 4-5 S O R C E R Y M A N U A L From the 18th-century P A G E S 8-9 M A G I C P O S T E R American stage magician text ClovisinferniSiveMagiaAlbactNigra Approbata Meta trona H a r r y Kellar implies in this 1894 poster that he owed the success ('The Key ofHell with White and Black Magic Proven by Metatron'). o f many of his spiritualist-inspired tricks to the devil.

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ACT T W O

INTRODUCING THE ILLUSION

THE M A S T E R MAGICIANS

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ACT THREE

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P S Y C H I C A L

R E S E A R C H E R S

A C T FOUR

THEPARAPSYCHOLOGICAL INVESTIGATORS

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AFTER-WORD:

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF I L L U S I O N

A.R.HOPWOOD & HONOR BEHAR') EXHIBITION CURATORS, SMOKE & MIRRORS

ENDNOTES & FURTHER READING

INDEX

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SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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ABOUT T H E A U T H O R ii, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE. YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN

E v e r y o n e ' s heard, and most of us have told, a story about an uncanny or supernatural-seeming experience. Accounts of wondrous, impossible phenomena are common around the world and go back at least as far as we have written records: history is riddled with stories of gods and monsters, witches and ghosts, prophecies and premonitions. People have heard dead men speak, seen objects inexplicably vanish and reappear, and watched ectoplasm ooze from unexpected orifices. These extraordinary events often seem to be facilitated by extraordinary individuals: sorcerers, spiritual mediums, psychic sensitives. Such phenomena have even been reported under 'test conditions', witnessed by scientists - men professionally trained in the practice of empirical observation. The German astrophysicist Johann Karl Friedrich Zallner, for example, asserted that he had shaken hands with the disembodied limb of an extra-dimensional spirit being 'a friend from another world'. British chemist and physicist William Crookes reported that he had not only photographed a ghost, but had also taken its pulse and cut off some of its hair. The American philosopher and psychologist William James wrote that he had spoken to his deceased father through a spirit medium. Researchers at Washington University believed that they had discovered a pair of psychics with the ability to move objects using only the power of their minds. Physicists in the employ of the United States government have spent decades trying to weaponize spoon benders. But while scientists are trained in gathering evidence based on empirical observations, they are not necessarily trained in deception. Perhaps, in some circumstances, well-intentioned researchers are actually more prone to illusory experiences than the average observer. After all, microscopes and other laboratory equipment might malfunction and produce inaccurate readings, but they won't deliberately lie to you for the purpose of achieving fame and fortune. Enter the professional magician. Like psychics and mediums, magicians present themselves as exceptional individuals who can facilitate impossible phenomena. But, unlike spiritualists, magicians are artists who make it clear that they achieve these phenomena through trickery and illusion. The term 'misdirection' tends to evoke thoughts of smoke and mirrors or the quickness of the hand deceiving the eye. However,

INTRODUCING THE ILLUSION

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T H E N A T U R A L M A C I C m a g i c : consisting of all sorts of amusing and useful Die naturtiche Magie: aus allerhand belustigenden t r i c k s ' ) is a twenty-volume encyclopedia by Johann und nfitzlichen Kunststlicken bestehend ('The natural C h r i s t i a n Wiegleb and Gottfried Erich Rosenthal.

these ideas themselves arguably distract from the broader cognitive implications. Magicians have long known, and scientists are becoming increasingly aware, that misdirection can encompass much more than simply influencing where a spectator looks. Used effectively, misdirection can affect not just what we see, but how we reason and remember. Most of us recognize that we cannot always trust our eyes, but a deeper, more uncomfortable truth is that we cannot always trust our minds. Historically, many magicians have taken a professional satisfaction in exposing self-proclaimed spiritualists and psychics who also make use of trickery and misdirection. Instead of acknowledging their feats as illusions, such charlatans have attributed their powers to magnetic fields, spirits or extrasensory perception. Paradoxically, exposure of such chicanery has sometimes itself involved elaborate hoaxes and deceptions. Harry Houdini donned elaborate disguises and employed networks of spies to infiltrate and disrupt spiritualist organizations. James Randi orchestrated an elaborate hoax that ran for several years, in which fake psychics infiltrated a parapsychological lab. In effect, these plans involve stacking lies atop lies in an attempt to reach the truth. One of our prevailing cultural narratives is that scientific understanding of the world has been steadily marching forward in a neat, linear fashion. And certainly, we have made remarkable progress. But if you look closely, you might notice that many debunked concepts have a tendency to recur over and over again with slight variations. At one time, paranormal practitioners might claim to receive messages from spirits; later, they might claim that these messages were obtained through telepathy; and later still, they might attribute their powers

Published between 1789 and 1805, it features a wide range of magic tricks and illusions, together with electrical, optical and magnetic effects,

to extra-sensory perception. Each of these marvels can be effectively duplicated using the same kinds of magic tricks. Today's fraudulent bomb-detecting machines are quite probably simply the latest variation of Victorian table-tilting phenomena and dowsing. Far from being dated tales of archaic superstitions, these weird and apparently inexplicable phenomena represent timeless stories of human curiosity, credulity, ingenuity and guile. They are, by turns, comic and tragic, but consistently fascinating nonetheless. They highlight how illusions can combine with powerful emotional experiences, such as the fear of death or sorrow at a loss, to create what seem to be extraordinary paranormal experiences that appear to be unexplainable by our current natural scientific conceptions of the world. While neither magicians nor scientists can ever really 'prove' that past testimonies of supernatural phenomena are fraudulent or mistaken, contemporary researchers regularly demonstrate how eccentricities of healthy human perception, memory and cognition can result in vivid and robust illusions. In many cases, scientific explanations of how our minds can produce such illusions are at least as wondrous as the proposed supernatural explanations. For example, we now know that healthy adults who are on the brink of sleep can, under some circumstances, experience vivid dreams that blend seamlessly with their waking world. Indeed, some scientists are increasingly turning to magic as a tool to explore how sane, intelligent individuals can experience remarkably weird illusory episodes. Barring a genuine ability to psychically project your consciousness backwards through time, you cannot truly re-experience historic accounts of these wondrous phenomena. You weren't there. You didn't see it. 0 But this book can help reveal what you missed.

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An illustration of the invisible magnetic forces that mesmerists claimed to harness (c. 1845).

I i ADVERT Sucheventswere S T E R E O S C O P E CARD billed both as entertainment and A hypnotist gestures to manipulate scientific demonstration (1885). m a g n e t i c forces (undated).

of gathering his magnetic forces. While Mesmer did A s you read this, you are under the influence achieve some remarkable results, his methods and of invisible forces. These forces are always around reasoning were met with scepticism. In 1784, the you, unseen. They constrain you, just as they constrain distant stars. While they can't be directly French king Louis XVI established a committee to assess the scientific validity of Mesmer's claims. observed, evidence of their power is everywhere. Among the investigators were Benjamin Franklin — Go ahead: pick something up and drop it. While the better known as one of the instigators of the American precise details can get a bit complex, the presence of Revolution—and loseph-Ignace Guillotin—better gravity is relatively uncontroversial. It doesn't seem particularly magical but, with the right presentation, known for his revolutionary decapitation machine. The committee concluded that there was no evidence it can be made to seem almost mystical. for Mesmer's proposed magnetic life fluid, and It was upon this foundation that Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer (1734-1815) began to attributed his successes to 'imagination' on the part of his patients. Despite his questionable develop his rather more controversial theory of mechanistic explanations, Mesmer's results arguably 'animal magnetism'. A German physician with an interest in astronomy, Mesmer reasoned that the life laid a foundation for modern psychological work on hypnotism, suggestion and placebos. To this energy of a human body was a kind of magnetic fluid, day, clinical psychologists use the word 'rapport' which, when not in proper balance, brought about illness. Mesmer initially suggested that this substance to describe the relationships that they establish with their clients, a term that originates in Mesmer's was subject to the gravity of celestial objects, just as descriptions of the relationship between a magnetizer the Moon causes changes in the tides, and went on and subject. Modern-day researchers and clinicians to propose that perhaps other invisible forces—such as magnetism—could also influence it. He began using continue to explore the scientific problem of how magnets in an attempt to manipulate his patients' life trance states alter patients' consciousness and lead fluid and thereby restore them to 'balanced' health. to physical changes in their bodies. In other words, just as Franklin and the investigative committee discovered, Eventually, he did away with physical magnets, on the basis that he could summon magnetic forces using some aspects of mesmeric healing do seem to work, but definitely not for the reasons that Mesmer claimed: the energy within his own body. In practice, this the effects seemed to be induced through the minds involved waving his hands over (or laying them on) his patients—who were often young women. Mesmer of the patients themselves rather than via a mysterious established elaborate procedures in which he would outside physical force. Despite the lack of support treat groups of patients sitting in a circle. During these for Mesmer's mechanistic explanations, the practice proceedings, he wore a purple robe and waved a metal of animal magnetism, or 'mesmerism' as it came wand, claiming that both served the scientific purpose be known, would spread around the world.

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S K U L L Allegedly of Emanuel A N D R E W J A C K S O N Swedenborg: phrenologists D A V I S The Seer of t h robbed the mystic's grave (1910). P o u g h k e e p s i e (c. 1870). o v

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Mesmer maintained that his theories were grounded in science, but the mystical elements of his procedures resonated strongly with the public, particularly once news of his practices had spread across the Atlantic. At the time mesmerism was gaining popularity, a staggering variety of religious awakenings' were taking place in America. Conventional mystical and religious traditions sometimes became strangely blended with internationally sourced pseudoscientific practices, including mesmerism and phrenology. In particular, the region that is now New York State saw a steady and eclectic parade of Doomsday cults, prophets, seers and saviours. Some of these movements would develop into what are now relatively mainstream sects, such as Mormonism or the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. Echoes of Mesmer's theories resonated especially with the prophet Andrew Jackson Davis (1826-1910), a.k.a. 'The Poughkeepsie Seer'. He was a prolific author who claimed that by entering a mesmeric trance, he was able to psychically project his consciousness across space and time. Davis first published descriptions of his 'journeys' in 1847. He wrote that he was not merely inspired by the ideas of the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), but that he had been in direct contact with Swedenborg's spirit. Davis's track record as a prophet turned out to be somewhat mixed. He did make a number of surprisingly accurate predictions, such as the development of mechanical typewriters and the popularization of personal cars powered by internal combustion engines. He even wrote about two additional planets in our solar system (before

S E A N C E I N S E S S I O N This illustration, from late 19th century, shows Andrew Jackson Davis presiding r a sitting (undated).

Neptune and Pluto were officially discovered). He was less accurate with some of his other predictions, however, such as the existence of round-headed psychic 'people' on the planet Saturn and the claim that animal life could be spontaneously generated by heating chalk dust inside a sealed jar. In 1847, Davis published a prophecy on the topic of 'spiritual communion': '[The] truth', he declared, 'will ere long present itself in the form of a living demonstration. And all the world will hail with delight ushering in of that era.' Never one to underplay his hand, he added that such fluent communications between the living and the dead were already being enjoyed by our extraterrestrial neighbours on Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The popularity of Davis's writing and the timing of his prediction of a new spiritual era contributed to the attention that would be brought to bear on the Fox sisters the following year. Most religious believers endorse the idea that the spirit or soul survives beyond physical death. But proponents of spiritualism take this a controversial step farther, claiming that the spirits of the dead can physically interact with the living world a n d what's more, that these interactions can be empirically demonstrated. The birth of modem spiritualism can be traced back to one particular house on one particular night. The location was the town of Hydesville, in upstate New York. The house in question was the home of the Fox family. The occupants included John and Margaret Fox, their two youngest daughters Margaretta (also known as Maggie), then fourteen, and Catherine (also called Kate), aged eleven p l u s a mysterious invisible entity'.

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ABOVE M E S M E R I C T R E AT M E N T Taken from

OPPOSITE M A G N E T I C S L E E P Two 1840s

The Magnetic and Botanic Family Physician (1887), by D. Younger, these photographs illustrate various stages of the mesmeric process.

daguerreotypes demonstrate the concept of magnetic fluid', thought to pass from practitioner to patient via touch.

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TEACH Y O U R S E L F H Y P N O T I S M The fascination with hypnotic trance escalated in the 19th century. Seen here is a selection of related books and booklets, offering

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the prospect of practical techniques that one could learn independently at home. Professor L. A. Harraden's complete mail course (above, top left) offered 'Self-treatment and self-healing: the wonderful hypnotic

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methods for curing your own ailments without either drugs, doctors, expense or exposure.' The photographs of a hypnotist at work are from W. Wesley Cook's Practical Lessons in Hypnotism

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(1901) and boasted fanciful captions: (above, bottom left) 'The young gentleman believes himself to be once again a nursing infant while the young lady thinks she is a nurse in a foundling asylum.'

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I I ABOVE C O S M I C A F T E R L I F E A Stellar O P P O S I T E S P I R I T W O R L D S From The Seeress Key to The Summer Land (1867), by Andrew Jackson Davis, o f Prevorst, Being Revelations Concerning the Inner-Life offered scientific and philosophical evidences' of a world o f Man, and the Inter-Diffusion of a World of Spirits in after death. t h e One we Inhabit (1845).

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M E D I U M S F R O M ROCHESTER, NEW YORK Daguerreotype, c. 1852, by Thomas M. Easterly. 1 8 4

Throughout the spring of 1848, the young Fox sisters complained to their parents of being disturbed by knocks or rapping noises. The family searched the house, but failed to discover a source. On the night of 31 March 1848, a little after 8 p.m., the Fox family confronted the invisible entity. The raps had been especially insistent that evening, and as the family huddled together, Kate made a major breakthrough: 'Here Mr Split-foot,' she said, 'do as I do.' She snapped her fingers. And each snap was answered by a knock. Upon request, the entity was able to knock out the ages of the sisters, and their thirty-five-year old neighbour. It knew how many Fox children had been born (seven) and how many were still living (six). Finally, Margaret asked, 'Are you a man that knocks?' She was met with silence. Next, she asked it to knock twice, 'If you are a spirit.' She was answered with a definitive knock-knock. After further, more detailed interrogations, the family concluded that 'Mr Split-foot' must be the spirit of one Charles B. Rosna, a peddler who, years earlier, had reportedly been murdered and buried in their basement. News of the Fox sisters' ability to communicate with the spirits of the dead spread quickly, first to the local community and then beyond. Local lawyer E. E. Lewis interviewed the Fox family and their neighbours and published a pamphlet titled A Report of the Mysterious Noises Heard in the House of Mr John D. Fox, in Hydesville, Arcadia, Wayne Country (1848), which was internationally circulated. A second major development in the Fox sisters' story came when their older sister, Leah, aged thirty-five, began introducing the girls to a variety of spiritually curious Rochester

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FOX FA M I LY COTTAGE This modest house

i n Hydesville, NY, was the site for the 'paranormal' activities reported in 8 . In 1915, it was moved to Lily Dale, NY, where it burned down in 1955.

citizens, who had been primed for a breakthrough by Davis's recent prophecies. In consultation with the increasingly gregarious spirits, Leah and her supporters arranged for a demonstration of spirit rapping to be held in Corinthian Hall on 14 November 1849. It was advertised ambiguously as being either a revelation of 'new and startling developments or the exposure of one of the most cunningly devised and long-continued impositions ever practiced in this or any other community'. It was also pay-perview. Like a magic show, but without a disclaimer that the demonstration would involve tricks or illusions. Admission was set at 25 cents, or 50 cents for a gentleman and two ladies. The evening received somewhat mixed reviews, with a combination of sceptical and credulous reactions to the mysterious knocking that accompanied Maggie. That said, she played to a full house of four hundred. Despite their popularity, doubts about the Fox sisters' paranormal abilities were not in short supply. Perhaps the most compelling evidence against their spiritual communications actually came from Maggie Fox herself, albeit forty years after the initial events. Having spent her adult life working professionally as a spirit medium, she set out to expose the methods behind what she now maintained was a fraudulent practice. On 21 October 1888, Maggie took to the stage of the New York Academy of Music to publicly confess her deception and describe the methods she had used to accomplish it. A description of her presentation, along with a signed confession, was published the same day in the New York World. Maggie explained that it was she and Kate who had generated those

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S P I R I T R A P P I N G HAND During seances,

The table appears to be levitating in this photograph, taken on 25 November 1898. The venue was the Paris home of astronomer Camille Flammariono

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AND THAT IS THE WAY WE BEGAN° FIRST/ AS A MERE TRICK TO FRIGHTEN MOTHER, AND THEN, WHEN SO MANY PEOPLE CAME TO SEE US CHILDREN7 WE WERE. FORCED TO KEEP IT UPo MACCIE FOX, 1SSS

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such props could be used to 'rap Out' messages, ostensibly from beyond the grave, although actually controlled by the medium.

noises in her childhood home. The girls had used an apple tied to a piece of string: they hung the apple beneath their bed and pulled the string up and down, causing the apple to bounce off the floor and the bed frame. Maggie claimed that, as she and Kate were so young, they had been considered innocent of any intentional deception. Later, managed by their sister Leah, they developed new means of generating 'spirit raps', including snapping the knuckle joints of their toes. Despite the press attention, these admissions appeared to do little to impede the rise of the spiritualist movement. Ironically, Maggie herself later stated that her confession of fraud was itself fraudulent and tried—unsuccessfully —to resume her work as a professional medium. Maggie's revelation was re-published under the somewhat optimistic title The Death Blow to Spiritualism. But on the contrary, by 1888, spiritualism was an international movement; its popularity was far too great to be checked by one medium's selfdebunking. In spite of, and perhaps because of, their controversial claims that they had paranormal powers, the Fox sisters' escapades sparked a movement that would flourish internationally from the 1840s through to the 1920s and beyond. Across the world, people 'discovered' latent mediumistic abilities, then made them public and started charging for their services. Spiritual mediums sprung up around America, and subsequently throughout Europe, including England, France, Germany and Italy. Many self-proclaimed magnetic healers and mesmerists quickly adapted to the new paradigm, and began advertising themselves as spiritual mediums who could put paying customers in touch with the dead.

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I S P I R I T T R U M P E T Made out of metal, this t apparatus is around 36.5 cm long. During a seance, the t medium would have placed it on a table and then dimmed

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lights. Once the room was dark and the session had begun, trumpet would mysteriously begin to rise and float in air, emitting 'spirit voices' and perhaps even ectoplasm.

S P I R I T L O C K (Top) This spirit lock was made during the 1940s by magician and mechanic John Martin. The design was inspired by Karl Germain (a.k.a. 'Germain the Wizard').

(Bottom) This spirit bell and wand dates from the 1920s. The bell is suspended in the air, apparently free from any interference, but magically rings in response to questions from a spectator.

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ABOVE G H O S T L Y P R E S E N C E German magician O P P O S I T E F L O A T I N G W O R L D Again. Jacoby-Harms Jacoby-Harms (a.k.a. Hans Joachim Jacob Harms) appears to be i s bemused by objects floating above. Both photographs were overcome at the sight of airborne instruments in this 1866 image. c r e a t e d by f. A. DahlstrOm, using double exposures.

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OVERLEAF S E A N C E I N P R O C R E S S Magician T h i s was one of many glass lantern slides used by psychic investigator William S. Marriott stands in the background, ostensibly witnessing H a r r y Price in his talks, to demonstrate the methods and equipment the emergence of a female apparition carrying a 'spirit' bird and flowers, r e g u l a r l y used by fraudulent mediums at the time.

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A MEDIUM'S TOOLS OF THE TRADE Another example from Hany Price's archive, this photograph shows props that disreputable mediums sometimes used. Seen here are masks, dummies,

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wigs and cheesecloth that might serve as ectoplasm. Unconvincing in the light, these would assume an altogether more impressive character in the tense atmosphere of a seance in a dark room.

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MARRIOTT AND THREE OMINOUS M A T E R I A L I Z A T I O N S William S. Marriott seems lost in deep thought as a trio of mysterious spirit forms approach him.

I The magician worked tirelessly to expose the tricks that mediums used to exploit credulous individuals, who may well have been seeking contact from recently deceased loved ones. The photograph dates from 1910.

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IF MR M I N T O N IS A CONJURER HE IS UNDOUBTEDLY ONE OF THE CLEVEREST WHO EVER LIVED° MASKELYNE AND COOK [SIC] ARE NOT A PATCH UPON MR EGLINTONO WESTERN MORNING NEWS 18711 •

And simple rapping communications were just the beginning. Increasingly elaborate and spectacular 'proofs' of spiritual communication quickly developed. Some mediums, such as William 'Willie' Eglington (1857-1933), practised 'slate writing' or psychography. In a typical psychographic séance, Eglington would be seated at a small table with three or four other participants (a.k.a. 'sitters') and would ask one of them to direct a question to the spirits. Eglington would then display a pair of chalk writing slates, of the kind that were common in schoolrooms at the time, and demonstrate that they were free of writing. Next, he would produce a small piece of chalk and arrange the slates on the table so that one was resting atop the other, with the chalk sandwiched between them. Eglington might then hold the slates above the table, in full view of the sitters. Sitters often reported hearing a distinctive scratch-scratch sound, and finally Eglington would separate the slates to reveal a message that had appeared. The exact nature of the wording varied between different mediums and individual circumstances—typically, the message was either short and specific or lengthy and vague. In each case, however, the communication, which was apparently dissociated from any worldly agency, would be attributed to spirits. As time passed, a sort of psychic arms race developed in the spiritualist community, with mediums establishing increasingly direct lines of communication with the spirit world. Apparent manifestations of the dead had long been a feature of smoke-and-mirrors-style stage entertainment in phantasmagoria shows, but spiritualists' demonstrations offered something different: empirical evidence of a new religion. Trance mediums asserted that their bodies could be directly controlled by the spirits of the dead, which could speak via the medium's voice and write using the medium's hands. Spiritualists' demonstrations were not limited to communications. A variety of other physical phenomena were reportedly on show during

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seances. Furniture and even people might appear to levitate and float with no discernible means of support. In some cases, spirits would animate musical instruments, ringing bells or even operating accordions. Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-86) was famous for his reported ability to fly—multiple witnesses claimed that they had seen him float out of a high window and soar more than 85 feet above the ground. With 'apports'—another class of spectacular events—objects and people would mysteriously wink into and out of existence. In a sign of the times, even seemingly mundane experiences such as misplacing keys were attributed to mischievous (or incompetently helpful) spirits who had either levitated them or absconded with them into a parallel dimension. Some 'apport mediums', including Madam d'Esperance (1855-1919), made the miraculous appearance of flowers a signature of their seances. Other mediums produced somewhat grosser souvenirs for their sitters. Eusapia Palladino (18541918) was an Italian medium famous for producing elaborate physical demonstrations of spirit agency. During her seances, she seemed to be able to move objects in the room around her with no more than a thought and gesture. Sometimes, these forces were invisible to the sitters. On other occasions, Palladino would manifest supernumerary limbs composed of a semi-visible whitish substance. In later life, she was described as a 'small, elderly peasant woman', but her supernatural extra arm was reportedly capable of exerting forces that far exceeded the strength of grown men. Although she began by holding private gatherings, Palladino went on to develop a reputation that attracted the attention of Italian scientists, including Dr Ercole Chiaia (c. 1850-1905), whose reports of her gravity-defying powers drew curious scrutiny from researchers worldwide. One of Palladino's most notorious seances was witnessed by physicist Oliver Lodge (1851-1940), Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Charles Richet (1850-1935) and psychical researcher Frederic Myers (1843-1901).

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I. t I I I A D I N O These images were taken at a seance held by the Italian medium on 12 July 1906. The table appears to be levitating. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a staunch supporter,

but conceded in 1926: It may be most truthfully said of her that no medium has ever more certainly been proved to have psychic powers, and no medium was ever more certainly a cheat upon occasions.'

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M E S S A G E S F R O M T H E A F T E R L I F E ? The F r e d P. Evans, Known as the 'Independent slate-writer (1893), by completed slates seen here are all taken from Psychography: Marvelous J . J. Owen. 'The grave is no longer voiceless,' the introduction of the book Manifestations of Psychic Power Given through the Mediumship of b o l d l y claimed. 'It speaks to us with myriad tongues and in many ways.'

ACT ONE

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SLATE-WRITING TECHNIQUES (Clockwise from top left) using part of a pencil attached to a thimble to write on the slate from beneath a table; changing one slate for another that

the medium is sitting on; the use of a magnet to trace the passage of a pencil, containing iron filings, on the slate; a piece of chalk attached to part of an umbrella rib is inserted between two plates tied together.

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I I OPPOSITE S P I R I T A R T Seen here are pages from Samuel A B O V E T R A N C E D R A W I N G S These intricate, Guppy's Mar y lane: Or, Spiritualism Chemically Explained, with g e o m e t r i c artworks, made between 1924 and 1934, were created Spirit Drawings (1863). 'Mary Jane' was a spirit in the household, b y artists in when semi-conscious or allegedly possessed by a spirit.

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IN T H E PRESENCE OF ANOTHER The images above come from a carte-de-visite album of spirit photographs created by the American photographer William H. Mumier. They were made

ACT ONE

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between 1862 and 1875. In the wake of the American Civil War, Mumler had many clients whose relatives had died in the conflict. After his trial, however, his credibility was ruined and his career ended.

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THERE PROCEEDED FROM HER BODY MATERIAL FORMS HAVING THE APPEARANCE OF L I F E WHICH I SHALL D E S C R I B E . UNDER THE NAME OF ECTOPLASMSO CHARLES RICHET,1925 (o)

The sitting took place in 1894, at Richet's home on the Mediterranean island of Ile Roubaud. In a darkened room, the men sat on either side and held Palladino's arms tightly. According to their subsequent report, she was indeed able to move furniture about through mysterious forces: a small flick of her wrist could apparently cause a heavy table on the other side of the room to rock and slide across the floor. The men reported being groped and patted by what felt like invisible hands, and at one point Palladino was even able to manifest a visible supernumerary ghostly limb that extended out from her body. Charles Richet coined the term 'ectoplasm' to describe the extraordinary substance that made up Palladino's mysterious supernatural limbs. Ectoplasm would go on to become a staple of physical mediumship demonstrations: subsequent practitioners would claim to manifest not just supernumerary appendages, but faces and even entire figures. Mediums produced ectoplasmic excretions from every conceivable orifice, although whenever investigators were able to secure samples, the substance was usually indistinguishable from either cheesecloth or animal intestines. Lodge and Myers would both go on to become outspoken supporters of scientifically testing mediums. Lodge acknowledged that some of what they saw included 'the kinds of things conjurers have sought to imitate under their own conditions', but he maintained that some of the phenomena must have been genuine. Subsequent investigations of Palladino were less supportive. She was frequently caught cheating and denounced by a variety of observers, including the magicians John Nevil Maskelyne (1839-1917) and Harry Houdini (1874-1926) and the psychologist Hugo Mfinsterberg (1863-1916), each of whom reported a variety of ways that they had seen Palladino surreptitiously free herself from what were supposed to be restrictive scientific controls. Overall, in the early days of the spiritualist movement, eyewitness testimonies of mediumistic

demonstrations served as the foundation for spiritualist claims. But in 1862, a Boston-based photographer named William H. Mumler (1832-84) began advertising that, for a very reasonable fee of $5, he could produce photographs of ghosts. Mumler's spirit photos proved immensely popular; his clients were able to glimpse the forms of their deceased friends and loved ones. Following the assassination of president Abraham Lincoln, his widow Mary Todd Lincoln sat for one of Mumler's portraits. The finished product depicted a sombre Mrs Lincoln gazing into the lens, while the semi-transparent form of what appeared to be the president's shade stood over her. Mumler was able to raise his prices to $10. He even set up a mail-order service. At the height of his career, Mumler was arrested and tried for fraud. His trial was sensational. P. T. Barnum (1810-91), who had achieved fame by charging spectators to see a 'mermaid', which was actually a taxidermied monkey stitched to a fish, took the stand for the prosecution. Somewhat paradoxically, the notorious huckster was called to act as an expert in hoaxing, and he declared Mumler and his attorney to be humbugs'. Barnum even presented his own (explicitly fake but visually similar) Lincoln ghost portrait. In contrast, Mumler's defenders compared the spirit photographer directly to Galileo, arguing that scepticism about spiritualism was akin to past scepticism about the heliocentric solar system. Ultimately, Mumler was acquitted, the judge noting that while his photos were almost certainly faked, the prosecution had been unable to prove so. Mumler always maintained his innocence. Fascinatingly, not even open admissions of deception were sufficient to shake some people's faith in spirit photos. At another trial in France, Parisian spirit photographer Edouard Isidore Buguet (18401901) explicitly confessed to fraudulently manufacturing his otherworldly portraits. After he was arrested, the police seized a variety of paraphernalia from his studio, including a mannequin with a range of interchangeable heads.

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EARLY MESMERIC & SPIRITUALIST P H E N O M E N A

M Y S T E R I O U S M A N I F E S TAT I O N S This album of spirit pictures was produced c. 1897 by London-based British medium and photographer Richard Boursnell, who

ACT ONE

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sometimes worked with I. Evans Starling. Boursnell was later discredited, as the ethereal forms in his spirit photographs could frequently be traced to existing images in books.

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A S P I R I T K N E E L S A ghostly figure appears at the o n l y noticed the otherworldly presence after the photograph altar of St Nicholas Anglican church in Arundel, West Sussex. w a s developed. It has been suggested that the image is that The picture was taken c. 1940 by a visitor, who reportedly o f a robed priest in prayer.

ACT ONE

' T H E B R O W N L A D Y O F R A N : H A M m a g a z i n e photographers Captain Hubert C. Provand and his H A L L ' Supposedly the spirit of Dorothy Walpole (sister a s s i s t a n t in 1936 at a country house in Norfolk. The figure's of Robert Walpole) this image was captured by Country Life n a m e derived from its brocade dress, said to be brown.

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MISS ADA EMMA DEANE'S S P I R I T P H O T O G R A P H S Deane's images typically show a person accompanied by a floating disembodied head. She remains best

ACT ONE

1 known, however, for the Armistice Day photographs that she made from 1922 to 1924, which appeared to show the faces of dead soldiers alongside the mourners at the Cenotaph on Whitehall in London.

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WITNESS 2 'THE PORTRAIT OF MY WIFE, WHICH I HAD ESPECIALLY ASKED FOR, IS SO LIKE HER THAT WHEN I SHOWED IT TO ONE OF MY RELATIVES HE EXCLAIMED, "IT'S MY COUSINI"1 COURT s' 'WAS THAT CHANCE, BUGUET?' BUGUET2 'YES, PURE CHANCE° I HAD NO PHOTOGRAPH OF MME DESSNONol FROM THE TRIAL OF EDOUARD ISIDORE BUGUET 1 8 7 3 (6)

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Buguet explained that he would use the dummy or one of his assistants to play the role of the spirits and dress them up based on his customers' description of their lost loved ones. When he developed his photographs, he would double-expose the plates to insert the artificial apparitions along with the original sitters. Buguet even explained how one apparition could be used to service multiple customers. He presented one image that had been recognized by three different customers as three distinct people: the hazy image was a cousin to one patron, a sister to another and a wife to a third. Despite his detailed confession, a number of Buguet's customers still spoke at the trial to argue that the pictures were genuine. The witnesses for the defence included a musician, a history professor, an optician and a photography expert. Each one maintained that there was no way that they could confuse an image of their departed loved one with that of a doll covered in drapery. Even if some of Buguet's other portraits were fake, they argued, it did not mean that theirs were not genuine. Outside observers also engaged in some particularly tortured reasoning: William Stainton Moses (1839-1892), one of Buguet's most tenacious supporters, asserted that the photographer did have mediumistic powers and that he must have been bribed or coerced into making a false admission. Ultimately, the strength of Buguet's confession was enough for him to be convicted of fraud. He was sentenced to a year's imprisonment and a fine of 500 francs. Ironically, he went on to create openly faked photographs for public entertainment as a self-described 'conjurer photographer'.

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While it's debatable whether the Fox sisters' 1848 debut really marked the spiritual breakthrough that Andrew Jackson Davis had predicted, there was certainly a breakthrough for frauds and conartists looking to cash in on the latest trend. It should be noted too, that physical phenomena and demonstrations were just one aspect of spiritualism. The concept of demonstrable religious miracles indisputably set the stage for deception, self-deception, frauds and hoaxes; these elements were part of a larger, complex socio-cultural movement. Spiritualism was also strongly associated with progressive political causes such as abolitionism and women's suffrage. Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927), for example—a magnetic healer and spiritualist medium w a s also the first female candidate for president of the United States. She ran in 1872, on a platform of universal human rights to suffrage and equal pay, which, at the time, was almost as radical as claiming to talk to the dead. Spiritualism flourished throughout the late 19th century and experienced a notable resurgence in the international chaos that accompanied World War I, when the trauma of so many families being torn apart by conflict led many people to seek solace in promises of a tangible spirit world. While the movement waned in the later half of the 20th century, spiritualism still exists in various forms today. The odds are that, with very little effort, you can find and attend a demonstration of mediumship—in a style highly reminiscent of those staged by the Fox sisters—taking place nearby sometime this week. ©

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S P I R I T P H O T O G R A P H Y A L B U M The images a small Brownie Kodak camera. The pictures display a range of shown on these pages come from a collection of fifty-nine 'psychic' c l a s s i c spiritualist phenomena, including 'extras', 'spirits' appearing photographs that were taken by a Mrs Vance Thompson using t o emerge from the sitters' hair and examples of 'ectoplasm'.

ACT ONE

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THE D I S C O V E R I E OF W I T C H C R A F T (1584D Reginald Scot reveals a method presenting a living, apparently severed head on a platter.

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LUDWIG DOBLERThemagician's T H E GREAT L A FAY E T T E signature act saw him produce a bouquet A . k . a . Sigmund Neuberger, Lafayette travelled of flowers from thin air, as shown in this t h e world performing elaborate stage lithograph, Flora's Gifts (c. 1825-50). i l l u s i o n s featuring his beloved dog, Beauty.

T h e history of performance magic is intimately intertwined with scepticism towards magical or paranormal phenomena. One of the first accounts of sleight of hand in English appeared in the book The Discoverie of Witchcraft, by Reginald Scot (153899). Published in 1584, the text provides detailed, sophisticated explanations for the methods and presentation of a variety of magic tricks. Included are simple conjuring manoeuvres, such as how 'to throwe a peece of monie awaie, and find it againe whre you list', as well as more elaborate stage-style tricks, such as a method 'to cut off ones head, and laie it in a platter', whereby the performer's head, apparently severed from his body, can continue to converse with the audience. In his book, Scot apologized to performers for spoiling the secrets behind their tricks, but explained that he believed the revelations were justified because they demonstrated that seemingly supernatural phenomena could have entirely natural explanations. Sadly, the Discoverie proved relatively unsuccessful in curbing subsequent witch hunting, but the book did stand as one of the definitive texts on magic tricks until the 19th century. The ascendance of spiritualism in that century coincided with a golden age of performance magic. From a certain perspective, a professional magic show is a distorted reflection of a fraudulent psychic or mediumistic demonstration. Both involve wondrous events that appear to defy natural explanations, although in a magic show the audience is expected to understand that they are experiencing illusions. Performance magic exists at an odd intersection between science, supernatural demonstration and

ACT T W O

theatre. Magic shows appear to involve impossible or otherworldly phenomena that seem to defy conventional laws of physics. The Viennese magician Ludwig DObler (1801-1864) would apparently materialize freshly cut flowers from an empty hat and could dramatically light one hundred candles with a single pistol shot. Thomas Nelson Downs (1867-1938), a.k.a. 'The King of Koins', was known for producing a seemingly endless quantity of silver dollars from thin air. Howard Thurston (1869-1936), who adopted a more traditional spelling for his title 'The King of Cards', astonished audiences by not only causing playing cards to vanish and reappear, but also making the cards selected by his audience mysteriously float about his stages. Charles Joseph Carter (1874-1936), or 'Carter the Great', performed a trick called the 'Phantom Bride', in which he caused his wife, Corinne, to vanish in a puff of smoke. The story goes that Carter initially wanted to call the trick 'A Magical Divorce', but Corinne vetoed the title. Sigmund Neuburger (1871-1911), 'The Great Lafayette', was known for bringing a live lion onto the stage to menace his assistant. At the last possible moment before the animal apparently attacked her, it was revealed that beast had transformed into the Great Lafayette himself. As performers competed to generate ever more dramatic tension, the threat of danger or death frequently became interwoven into magic acts. The magician Percy Thomas Tibbles (1881-1938) caused a sensation when he became the first performer to apparently saw one of his assistants in half before restoring her. Various magicians seemed to defy death by catching bullets from guns fired directly at them.

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P o To S E L B I T In 1910, Selbit (a.k.a. P. T. Tibbles) toured an illusion in which paintings in the style of famous artists seemed to appear on a canvas.

BLACK HERMAN Theleading C H U N G LING 5OO Made c 1910, African-American magician of his age, he t h i s card shows the performer with 'Suee Seen' made his reputation with tricks involving a n d 'Bamboo Flower'. Soo was actually a his apparent death and resurrection, w h i t e man who appeared in 'yellowface'.

In contrast to many magic effects, the bullet-catch trick often involved very non-illusory risks. The magician William Robinson (1861-1918), who performed under the stage-name Chung Ling Soo, died when one of his trick guns malfunctioned. Benjamin Rucker (18891934), who performed under the stage name 'Black Herman', could apparently bury himself alive for days at a time before emerging unharmed. He became so famous for this act that when he actually died, many of his fans initially believed it was another publicity stunt. The most successful magicians did not merely present deceptive tricks, though. They were entertainment superstars, and in many cases part of their celebrity came from presenting themselves as harbingers of scientific and cultural progress. Picture the archetypal magician. Not a sorcerer or wizard like Gandalf or Harry Potter with fictional fantastical powers, but a real-life entertainer, someone who performs illusions using a combination of trickery, clever apparatus and misdirection. For many people, among the first pictures that spring to mind may be that of a man in Victorian-era evening dress—an outfit consisting of a dark tail coat and trousers, white shirt, a bowtie and a top hat. For you, such a figure is anachronistic. But around the time that spiritualism was in its ascendancy, this image of the magician actually represented a cutting-edge presentation of 'modern magic'. The French magician Jean Eugene RobertHoudin (1805-71) is generally credited with popularizing this costume, and, at the time he introduced the look, it was revolutionary because the outfit was so contemporary. Robert-Houdin

began his career as a clockmaker, but was inspired to begin performing after watching routines such as the cups and balls of Giovanni Bartolomeo Bosco (17931863), and the Chinese linking rings of French magician Phillippe (a.k.a. Jacques-Noel Talon, 1802-78). When Robert-Houdin began his act in the 1840s, it was not unusual for magicians to perform while wearing flowing robes, sometimes bedecked with stars. But for his stage shows, Robert-Houdin dressed himself in the fashionable evening attire of his cosmopolitan Parisian audiences. He performed for packed theatres, and stories of his feats spread throughout the world and were etched into the history of magic. His earliest tricks featured automata elaborate mechanical devices such as singing clockwork birds — that helped establish his signature theatrical blending of technology and deception. He first achieved international attention for constructing an elaborate clockwork man a n android that could write messages. His subsequent stage show featured a clockwork orange tree, which bloomed and bore real fruit. In another trick, he would present a thin portfolio, of the kind that might be used to hold paper documents; he would open the case to display pictures of items, such as doves and cooking pans. Then he would appear to produce the actual items themselves from the impossibly thin portfolio, ending by withdrawing his own son, Emile. The latter featured in a variety of Robert-Houdin's routines, including the 'Second Sight' trick, which saw the blindfolded boy describe objects presented by various audience members, apparently with no hints from Robert-Houdin himself.

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THE MASTER MAGICIANS

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ACT TWO

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ABOVE W H I T E M A G I C Excerpts from Supplement a La Magie Blanche Devoilee (1785)—an expose of the tricks performed by magician Giuseppe Pinetti — written by a Monsieur Decremps.

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THE MASTER M A G I C I A N S

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AT T H E T H E AT R E R O B E R T- H O U D I N a magician pulls a

JEAN EUGENE R O B E R T- H O U D I N

rabbit from a spectator's jacket, much to the crowd's amazement. The illustration, by Gustave Dore, appeared in the lournaiAmusant. No. 53, dated 3 January 1857.

O N S T A G E The stylish conjurer performs his trick 'Le Destin' in this 1861 wood engraving.

In the Etheric Levitation act, Emile was mysteriously suspended in the air above the stage. His father would offer audiences an ostensibly scientific explanation for this extraordinary feat: 'I have just discovered a new, truly wondrous property of ether. When this liquid is at its highest degree of concentration, if a living being breathes it, the body of the patient becomes in a few moments as light as a balloon.' Today, Robert-Houdin is often cited as the 'Father of Modern Magic'—not just for the quality of his performances and his inventive illusions, but also for the fact that he wrote prolifically on the theory and practice of his art. He is perhaps best known for one particular line: '(in prestidigitateur n'est point un iongleur; c'est un acteur jouant un role de magicien'...In other words, a professional magician was best thought of not as a performer of juggling tricks, but rather as an actor who played the role of someone who possessed supernatural powers. A magic show is an explicitly fictional experience, but it involves something significantly stranger than the suspension of disbelief that is inherent in other types of theatre. The historian Peter Lamont has highlighted what makes magic shows different by comparing the experience of watching a live performance of Peter Pan with watching a magician such as David Copperfield appear to fly on stage. Watching Peter Pan in a theatre, the audience can often clearly see the wires that suspend the 'flying' actors. However, in the context of the play the audience is expected to disregard the wires, in the same way they disregard the fact that many rooms on a theatre set are missing their fourth walls.

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By contrast, in a magic show, the audience is supposed to actively look for (and fail to see) the wires that might allow the magician to suspend himself in the air. The flying magician should appear to really be flying, in a way that defies the audience's understanding of the physical world. But nonetheless, even when they see something inexplicable in a magic show, the audience is expected to understand that what they're seeing is explicable, no matter how impossible it seems; ultimately, it is an illusion, a trick of the mind. These efforts to present honest illusions of impossibility, to openly deceive an audience, are simultaneously very similar and fundamentally different from a fraudulent demonstration of a paranormal phenomenon. And this relationship has often led to direct conflicts between magicians and individuals who claim to possess genuine supernatural abilities. Robert-Houdin always presented his effects as cutting-edge scientific and technological marvels. At the height of his career, he was even recruited by the French government to serve as a diplomat in Algeria. The magician was sent to North Africa with the mission of countering the influence of local mystics, who had allegedly been using demonstrations of divine miracles to stir up opposition to the French colonists. He worked up a special act just for the occasion, using modified versions of routines he had developed for European audiences. The show consisted of several tricks, including a bullet catch and the vanishing and reappearance of an audience member. One of the most iconic pieces was known as the 'Light and Heavy Chest'. Robert-Houdin presented his audience with a small box. He would select a

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L E V I T A T I N G E U G E N E In image from No. 242 of I:Illustration: Journal Universe!, published on 16 October 1857, Robert-Houdin appears to suspend his son in mid-air.

image from I:Illustration: Journal Universe! (No. 51, 2 October 1852), Robert-Houdin seems to refill countless glasses from the same vessel.

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I DEVOURED THE MYSTERIOUS PACES, AND THE FURTHER MY READING ADVANCED, THE MORE I SAW LAID BARE BEFORE ME THE SECRETS OF AN ART FOR WHICH I WAS. PREDESTINED° JEAN EUGENE ROBERT-HOUDIN, I 8 5 9

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large volunteer and ask him to come on stage and lift it. Initially, the man could do so easily. But after Robert-Houdin instructed his volunteer to replace the box on the stage, he declared that he would magically steal the man's strength. Sure enough, the volunteer would subsequently find it impossible to raise the box. In reality, an offstage volunteer would activate an electromagnet that affixed the box to the stage. For his Algerian audiences, Robert-Houdin literally weaponized the trick. After allowing the volunteer to struggle with the magnetized box, a second signal was given, and this time the off-stage assistant would flick a switch, sending a jolt of electricity through the handle and into the struggling man's hands, causing him to convulse on stage. According to Robert-Houdin's account, his volunteers would sometimes then flee the stage in terror. In the aftermath of his performances, the magician made sure to circulate the fact that his performance, which seemed miraculous, was actually the result of illusion and technical skill, and the French government celebrated his tour as a victory of reason and civilization over superstition. While Robert-Houdin's descriptions of his North African exploits are difficult to corroborate, his stories nonetheless serve as an excellent illustration of how history's quintessential magician viewed his illusions in terms of deception, science and the supernatural. A great number of magicians have defined themselves as debunkers of false supernatural claims. The rise of spiritualism, and the accompanying rise of frauds, served to fuel and even launch the careers of many illustrious magicians.

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THE MASTER MAGICIANS

B E H I N D T H E S C E N E S The illustrations on these pages expose the carefully planned deception behind well-known magic tricks. Included here are decapitation acts, vanishing ladies,

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spirit manifestations that hurl objects through the air and levitation. All are taken from Magic: Stage Illusions and Sdentific Diversions, Including Trick Photography (1897), compiled by Albert A. Hopkins.

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i I AsovE HOWARD THURSTON PERFORMS O P P O S I T E E T H E R E A L A P P E A L Thisposter from Spectacular productions saw Thurston succeed Kellar as the world's c . 1915 plays on the public's fascination with mysticism and the premier magician. Houdini, among others, studied him closely. s u p e r n a t u r a l , which Thurston consciously exploited in his act.

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'MANIFESTATIONS' WHICH I HOLD TO BE ALTOGETHER MUNDANE IN THEIR ORIGIN/ AND MAINLY ATTRIBUTABLE TO GROSS AND HARMFUL TRICKERY AND FRAUD° JOHN NEVIL MASKELYNE 18 76 (6)

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But not everyone shared such a generous The mediums Ira and William Davenport (1839interpretation of their feats. During one of the 1911 and 1841-77 respectively) inadvertently acted brothers' demonstrations, in Cheltenham, as particularly effective catalysts for a number of Gloucestershire, on 7 March 1865, John Nevil performers who came afterwards. The Davenport Maskelyne—a twenty-five-year-old watchmaker brothers began giving mediumistic demonstrations and amateur magician w a s selected as a member in upstate New York a few months after the Fox of the investigative committee. During the act, sisters had made their Rochester debut, although Maskelyne claimed that he had glimpsed, through a the brothers claimed that they had been in touch gap in the cabinet, a distinctly unbound Ira rigorously with spirits for several years before Kate and clanging one of the bells. After failing to convince Maggie's raps made contact with Mr Split-foot. The his fellow audience members that the brothers had Davenports would ultimately set out on a world tour. been cheating, Maskelyne built his own version of One spiritualist writer described their travels as a the Davenports' spirit cabinet with the help of George mission to conquer, by appropriate means, the hard Alfred Cooke (1825-1905). Maskelyne and Cooke materialisms and scepticism' of non-spiritualists. spent several months rigorously training themselves The siblings operated in many ways like professional to escape from ropes, and later that year they debuted entertainers, performing their spiritualistic their own anti-spiritualist demonstration. Not only demonstrations in theatres in front of ticketed did they apparently duplicate the feats that the audiences. However, they made sure to state that Davenports had performed, they also held their first they were 'not mere jugglers', and would frame show in the same theatre where Maskelyne had their demonstrations as 'experiments'. glimpsed Ira's surreptitious bell-clanging. Like the A typical demonstration involved a large Davenports, they charged admission. Unlike the wooden cabinet, similar in size to a wardrobe and Davenports, they explicitly declared that their feats fitted with bench seats. Various musical instruments, were the result of trickery. Newspapers gleefully such as a guitar, trumpet and tambourine, were hung reported the performances as 'The Davenport upon the wall of the cabinet or laid out on the floor. The brothers would invite an 'investigative committee' Brothers Outdone'. Maskelyne capitalized on the publicity of audience members on stage to examine the apparatus, then seat themselves on the benches within to launch a lifetime career as a stage magician. His spirit-cabinet routine remained a staple of the cabinet, and instruct the committee members to his show for decades, and he remained a brazenly bind their hands and feet with ropes. Then, the doors outspoken critic of the spiritualist movement. of the cabinet would be locked and the lights of the theatre would be dimmed. In time, music would begin 'A magician and a conjuror means the same thing,' to emanate from the cabinet; sometimes the audience he stated, further arguing that 'A bad conjurer will make a good medium any day.' His reasoning was might see glowing, disembodied hands floating that a performing magician must always produce around the stage. When the lights were re-lit, and the cabinet unlocked, the brothers would be found sitting impossible effects on stage, while a spirit medium, when faced with a failed trick, could always attribute calmly, still bound by the ropes. To spiritualists, such -ffeliEk of results to unhelpfdrifoitits or even to demonstrations represented empirical proof that the the scepticism of the audience themselves. Davenports were in contact with powerful invisible As a celebrity magician, he also served as and intelligent forces that operated outside the an expert in court cases related to spiritual fraud. bounds of known science.

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THEDAVENPORTBROTHER PUBLICCABINET SEANCE.

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C A B I N E T O F C U R I O S I T Y A poster from 1865 for a London performance promotes the Davenports' signature showpiece. Having been securely bound, the siblings were placed within a cabinet

along with various musical instruments. These miraculously began to *play' themselves after the cabinet's doors were closed, while ghostly hands sometimes appeared from walls of the box.

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THESEPAGES SEANCE A N T I C S (Opposite) Illustrations OVERLEAF E G Y P T I A N H A L L Located in London's from an 1869 biography of the Davenports. (Above) John Nevil P i c c a d i l l y , this venue hosted countless magic acts. Maskelyne Maskelyne shows how the illusion may have been achieved, p e r f o r m e d there for more than thirty years. It is shown c. 1890.

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M A S K E L Y N E A N D C O O K E A quartet of posters from the late 19th century advertise the duo's residency at 'England's Home of Mystery' in Piccadilly. The magicians promoted themselves

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partly on the basis that their feats, openly achieved through tricks and deception, were more astonishing than those achieved by reputed mystics hence the reference to mahatmas here.

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NOTHING HAS BEEN REVEALED TO CONVINCE ME THAT INTERCOMMUNICATION HAS BEEN ESTABLISHED BETWEEN THE SPIRITS OF THE DEPARTED AND THOSE STILL IN THE FLESH° HARRY H0UDINI,1924 co)

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In 1876, Maskelyne appeared in Bow Street Court in London to serve as a witness against a slate-writing medium, Dr Henry Slade (1835-1905). Slade stood accused of fraudulently accepting money for receiving written messages from the spirits of the dead. Despite protests from both the defence attorneys and the presiding judge, Maskelyne effectively delivered an impromptu magic show for the packed courtroom. He performed a series of slate-writing demonstrations, showing how he could make written messages appear and disappear on slates using chemically treated sponges; he showed that he could write legibly on a slate by holding a bit of chalk in his teeth.This was a useful skill, he explained, for a fraudulent medium who might wish to perform in a dark room with his arms bound. The prosecutors argued that Maskelyne's tricks supported their contention that Slade himself used trickery in his work, while Slade's defence attorneys argued that, just because Maskelyne had been able to duplicate Slade's phenomenon by using magic tricks, it did not logically follow that Slade himself must have been using the same methods. Maskelyne became a mythological figure in English magic. His anti-spiritualistic tricks were just one component of many varied performances; for example, following in the footsteps of RobertHoudin, he also turned his watchmaking skills to developing mystifying automata, including 'Psycho', an android that could apparently play cards, and 'Zoe', a clockwork figure that would pen sketches of Maskelyne's audience members. His shows ran for years, first with his partner Cooke and later with the magician David Davant (1868-1941), and he established a magic dynasty that extended to his son and grandson, Nevil and Jasper, both of whom went on to become successful magicians. Maskelyne continued to perform magic and clash with spiritualists throughout his life, working onstage until his death at the age of seventy-seven. Shortly before he passed away, Maskelyne also established the Occult Committee of The Magic

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Circle—an investigative branch of this professional organization of magicians a n d its sole purpose was to use its members' knowledge of magic tricks to examine so-called supernatural phenomena. Among the committee's targets was spirit photography. Teaming up with the psychic investigator Harry Price (1881-1948), the magicians contacted various spirit photographers in London, including a professional photographer, Mr J. Veamcombe, who advertised that he could produce 'spirit extras', and a medium named Ada Emma Deane. The spirit photographers claimed that they did not need to handle the photographic plates in order to create photos of spirits, and the magicians designed special packages that would reveal tampering. In a series of tests, the spirits only appeared on plates that had clearly been tampered with. The committee also turned its attentions to the phenomena known as the 'Indian Rope' trick, the British magicians declaring that this apparently supernatural feat must have be attributable to unreliable testimony. Perhaps the most famous magician of all time — one who would build his career on a combination of Maskelyene-style self-aggrandizing, anti-spiritualist, Davenport-style escape artistry, and Robert-Houdininspired showmanship—was a Hungarian-born American magician named Ehrich Weiss. His birthplace was Budapest, Hungary, and he emigrated to the USA in 1878 with his family. His fascination with magic began when he discovered a copy of Robert-Houdin's memoirs; the young man set out to emulate his hero, practising and performing under the stage name Harry Houdini. Early in his career, Houdini appeared on small stages—circuses and dime museums—mostly performing card tricks. He even briefly worked as a spiritual medium, a practice he would later come to view with shame. Houdini's rise to fame began after he adapted his act to focus on escape acts. From a certain point of view, escape tricks might be viewed as exposed variations of a cabinet séance.

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THE MASTER M A G I C I A N S

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OPPOSITE A U T O M A T A A C T S This poster from c. 1878 A B O V E ' P S Y C H O ' The automaton could apparently solve singles out two mechanical marvels. Psycho' debuted at the m a t h e m a t i c a l problems and perform conjuring tricks, but is best Egyptian Hall in 1875, with 'Zoe' appearing there two years later, r e m e m b e r e d for the ability to play whist with audience members.

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ABOVE T R I C K PHOTOGRAPH A montage from the 1898 silent film tin Homme de Tetes ('The Four Troublesome Heads'), starring and directed by Georges Wiles.

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Famous Illusionist (1937), Jasper Maskelyne —grandson of John Nevil —appears to feast on a succession of blades.

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HOW TO LEARN S L E I G H T OF HAND A poster from 1929 advertises an education in conjuring, with sixty tricks on show. The previous year, Dr Halan Tarbell had produced

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a home-study course. He later went on to create an eightvolume encyclopedia, the Torben Course in Magic, which became a useful reference book both for aspiring and working magicians.

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I T A R B E L L M A G I C K I T Pictured above is a range w a n d tubes, coloured magic wafers with holed centres, a trick thumb of magician's equipment that was issued with the 'Tarbell System t i p and metal balls with cutaways so that they sit vertically on a table. Incorporated: Magic' correspondence course. It includes magic T a r b e l l sold 10,000 complete courses in the years up to 1931.

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WILL COLDSION S MAGICAL SCRAPS Dating from c. 1916, this volume of cuttings includes instructions and illustrations explaining how to reproduce parts of the British

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magician's act, even down to what to say when performing certain tricks. Answering those who criticized him for revealing his secrets, Goldston argued 'Magic must live after its creators have passed on.'

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THE L E V I TAT I O N OF PRINCESS a concealed machine, connected to a board hidden within his K A R N A C ' One of Harry Kellar's most famous tricks a s s i s t a n t ' s dress, to achieve the effect. The poster opposite dates saw him raise a 'Hindu princess' into the air. In fact, he used f r o m c. 1894; the picture above is from some five years earlier.

THE MASTER MAGICIANS

V A N D R E D I M A G I C R E V U E This German poster, h a v e involved apparent harm to a magician's female assistant. from 1923, shows one of the best-known stage tricks a n d serves as T h e origins of this trick remain obscure, but it is likely that the a reminder that many of the history's most dramatic magic routines c o n c e p t was not put into practice until the 1920s. R T. Selbit

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may well have given its first public performance, in January 1921 at London's Finsbury Park Empire theatre. Selbit had presented it privately the previous December, however, before an invited

audience of agents and promoters. to try to secure himself bookings. In that early version of the trick, his assistant was bound but entirely hidden within a fastened wooden box.

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I T O P S Y T U R V Y British magician Robert Harbin created this trick, which - like the illusion depicted opposite - involves the unlikely reorientation of a body. A co-performer enters a box that resembles

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an Egyptian sarcophagus, which the magician then pivots into an upside-down position. When a panel on the box is opened, the co-performer appears to have remained in an upright position.

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T H E ' Z I C - Z A G G I R L I n this trick - also invented by Robert Harbin - the co-performer is placed within a vertical cabinet with her or his head, hands and left foot visible to the audience at

all times. Metal blades are then slotted through the cabinet and the central section pulled away, although a door within it may be opened to expose the co-performer's midriff.

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i1 THE YOUNG H O U D I N I The A R I S I N G STAR In this magician is shown here in early life, wearing track team medals, in New York, He was still known as Ehrich Weiss at the time (C. 1890).

promotional poster from c. 1895, Harry Houdini sports the evening dress inspired by his hero, Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin.

In a rare example of camaraderie towards a spiritualist performer, Houdini actually kept up a friendly correspondence with Ira Davenport, whom he affectionately referred to as 'the old showman'. The two also met in person to discuss rope and cabinet escape techniques. Houdini always emphasized that his own feats were accomplished by skill and trickery, and his greatest skill was arguably self-promotion. As he developed his escape artist act, he began to bill himself as the 'Hand-Cuff King'. For publicity stunts, he would challenge police departments, allowing himself to be stripped, searched, handcuffed, manacled and locked into cells before escaping. Ironically, given his later antipathy towards spiritualism, it was Houdini's incorporation of the possibility that he might actually die during one of his shows that led to some of his best-remembered performances. In time, he raised the element of risk in his escapes. In his 'Milk Can' stunt, Houdini was handcuffed and sealed within an oversized milk can. Before he began the trick, he would invite the audience to hold their breath along with him, and remind them that his failure would mean death by drowning. When other performers began to replicate his performance, Houdini raised the dramatic stakes by introducing a new escape, the 'Chinese Water Torture Cell', which, in contrast to the opaque milk jug, allowed the audience watch his struggles. Early in his career, Houdini himself actually performed mediumistic tricks for paying audiences, and years later would shamefully recall that he had found his deceptions amusing. He wrote that he came to appreciate the seriousness of mediumistic fraud

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M I L K - C A N ESCAPE A keen self-publicist, Houdini poses as if in midact, in a giant water-filled receptacle. The photograph was taken in St Louis in 1908.

following the death of his own mother in 1913. The grieving Houdini began to seriously attempt to contact his mother through mediums, and was appalled that what he saw during seances often amounted to reframed magic tricks designed to defraud bereaved families. Subsequently, Houdini set out not only to investigate the possibilities of spiritualism, but also to combat fraudulent mediums, whom he described as a global 'menace to health and sanity'. He made death pacts with his friends and family, establishing secret codes by which each might contact the other from beyond the grave. Houdini also made his opposition to dishonest spiritualists a feature of his public persona. He advertised cash rewards to any medium or psychic who could demonstrate genuine abilities and then ruthlessly unmasked them as tricksters. When Spanish newspapers reported that the nobleman Joaquin Argamasilla (1905-1985) had developed the psychic power to see through solid objects, Houdini invited the 'Spaniard with the X-Ray Eyes' to New York City. There, Houdini, revealed on stage how Argamasilla could have used trickery to secretly peek beneath a blindfold and into apparently sealed boxes. Houdini also served as a judge for Scientific American magazine, which announced that it would award a cash prize of $2,500 to any medium who could physically demonstrate their powers. When the committee announced that they had discovered a genuine medium, Mina Crandon (1888-1941) w h o gave sittings under the pseudonym 'Margery' - Houdini intervened to debunk her powers, and successfully prevented

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P R E PA R I N G T H E ACT

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Harry Houdini is strapped into a straitjacket s l i p s out of a straitjacket while suspended d o c t o r e d photograph from c. 1920, Houdini as he pre pares for a stunt on top of a railroad u p s i d e down over Broadway and 46th Street f a k e s a spirit photograph by appearing in car. The picture was taken c. 1915. i n New York City. g h o s t l y form behind his own seated self.

THE AUTHOR HAS SEEN NUMEROUS PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE ECTOPLASMIC FLOW FROM 'MARGERY' AND HAS NO H E S I TAT I O N . IN SAYING THAT IT I S . GENUINE° SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, 1926

her from collecting the prize; he also began integrating replications (with disclaimers) of her powers into his own performances. Not only did he make exposures of spiritualiststyle tricks a part of his stage show, but off-stage he would frequently disguise himself as an old man in order to infiltrate seances, setting traps, disrupting and exposing countless mediums. For example, when one individual claimed that he could induce spirits to play instruments, including a trumpet and a guitar, in a dark room, Houdini posed as a believer and waited until the lights had been dimmed for the séance. In the darkness, he secretly coated the instruments with lampblack. Then, midway through the séance, he broke away from the circle, and turned up the lights, revealing the medium with his lips and hands coated in black. He would team up with local police forces in order to arrange for the arrest of scammers, and he even testified before Congress in the USA to promote a bill that imposed fines and prison sentences on 'any person pretending to tell fortunes for reward or compensation'. During the hearing, Houdini demonstrated how magic tricks could be used to recreate seemingly paranormal phenomenon. He also revealed that he had employed a private detective, Rose Mackenberg, to infiltrate local spiritualist circles and uncover the identities of multiple senators who had themselves sought spiritual guidance from mediums in the Washington, D.C. area. Unsurprisingly, Houdini's crusade made him unpopular with proponents of spiritualism, who often accused him of fraudulence in turn. t i

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'THE G R E AT HOUDINI'Datingfromc.1895to 1914, these posters display the evolution of Houdini's act, from the escapology for which he is best remembered today to the

sicight-of-hand tricks with which he first became a magician. Houdini's apparent fearlessness in the face of physical threats was part of his self-promotion, although indirectly it contributed to his eventual death.

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H O U D I N I ' S S T R A I T J A C K E T One of the magician's showpiece tricks involved him being strapped into this garment and suspended upside down from a high point, in full view of the crowds

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below, which sometimes ran into thousands. On one occasion, high winds threw him against the side of a building. Thereafter, he wore a safety wire so that he could be pulled away from danger in future.

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T H E C R A T E E S C A P E The photographs on these pages were taken in New York Harbor on 7 July 1912 and document the first public performance of one of Houdini's signature tricks.

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The magician was bound in leg-irons and handcuffs and placed within a packing container, which was nailed fast and roped tight, then weighed down with 200lb of lead, before being lowered into

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secured. The authorities had prevented the magician from using one of the harbour's piers, so he was forced to perform his daredevil escape from a rented tugboat instead.

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I H O U D I N E S H A N D C U F F S Shown above, from top, are a set of single-lock and double-lock Hiatt Eight cuffs that belonged to the magician. Competition from imitators saw

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him abandon handcuff escapes in around 1908 and move on to more daring and spectacular tricks. On the opposite page is a well-known image of a chained Houdini taken c. 1899.

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ROSE MACKENBERCg UNDERCOVER ACENTHoudini employed a team of investigators, led by

Mackenberg (heavily disguised) to gather evidence about charlatan mediums. The photographs above appeared in an article

IT IS WITH THE DEEPEST INTEREST AND CONCERN THAT I HAVE WATCHED THIS GREAT WAVE OF SPIRITUALISM SWEEP THE WORLD.IT HAD BECOME A MENACE TO HEALTH AND SANITY° HARRY HOUDINI,1924

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she wrote in 1929, in which she refuted a claim by Arthur Ford that he had received a secret code from the late Houdini in a séance that year.

Mina Crandon, for example, always maintained that Houdini had rigged her Scientific American test, planting evidence that would falsely debunk her genuine powers. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), best known today as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was one of Houdini's most prominent critics. Perhaps ironically, given his legacy of creating a literary character who was a paragon of scepticism, Doyle was a lifelong evangelist for spiritualist causes. The writer had originally trained as an ophthalmologist and had some problematic ideas about eye-witness testimony. He stated that he had spoken, face-to-face with the spirits of his deceased mother and brother. When questioned about the possibility of fraud in such cases, he responded 'All these things I have told you are absolutely true. They occurred to me always in the presence of witnesses...1f a man cannot believe the evidence of his own senses, and the evidence of every man in the room, what can he believe?' Yet deceiving the senses of everyone in the room was the basis of Houdini's career in show business. The author and the magician had a decadeslong, often strained friendship. Houdini maintained that Doyle was irrationally credulous; Doyle argued that Houdini was irrationally sceptical. Doyle once arranged for his wife, Jean, who was a practising medium, to hold a séance in a hotel room in Atlantic City to contact Houdini's mother, to whom the performer had been very close. Houdini was unimpressed: 'Although my sainted mother had been in America for nearly fifty years,' he later reflected, 'she could not speak, nor read nor write English - and

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HOUDI A N D \ NN, L A , I i A N The arch-sceptic magician F A K E S 1, U I. I t R I 1 IN(, hi this photograph, exposed Fay's spiritualist techniques, but surprisingly, the two went on to H o u d i n i shows how fraudulent spirit messages can be produced become friends. Fay died the year after Houdini. d u r i n g a seance with the aid of an accomplice.

Lady Doyle's message was in perfect English.' In turn, he would perform magic tricks for Doyle, including elaborate slate-writing demonstrations. Houdini argued that the fact that he could accomplish such feats through trickery should encourage Doyle to be more cautious in his beliefs. His plan backfired. Doyle took the tricks as evidence that Houdini was actually a medium. Despite Houdini's protests, Doyle developed an unshakable conviction that There was a psychic element which was essential to every one of his feats.' Doyle and Houdini's relationship nicely illustrates the fact that boundaries between mediums and magicians were not always as clear-cut as RobertHoudin's definitions would suggest. Indeed, many performers would deliberately blur the line between debunkers and genuine demonstrators. One of the most dramatic examples of this can be observed in the career of one Washington Irving Bishop (1855-1889). Bishop began his show-business career as a promoter and stage assistant for the medium Anna Eva Fay (1851-1927). He would vociferously and publicly declare that Fay's physical phenomena were uncontestably real—until they had a falling-out, whereupon he declared her to be a fraud and began performing his own show, asserting that he would expose all of his erstwhile colleague's tricks. Immediately after his break with Fay, Bishop maintained that spiritualism was deceitful, but as he developed his own performing persona, he began to claim that he himself had the power to read thoughts. Confusingly, Bishop was not always entirely consistent as to whether these powers constituted supernatural abilities, but he was very consistent in claiming that

he was always consistent. He demonstrated his talents by apparently reading the minds of his audience members. To promote his mind-reading shows, he would careen around cities at high speeds in a horsedrawn carriage while blindfolded, demonstrating his extraordinary powers of'second sight' by apparently guiding the horse. In a macabre twist, Bishop's ambiguous boasts about his abilities may have actually contributed to his own death. When he collapsed onstage in 1889 during a performance in New York City, local doctors almost immediately performed an autopsy on his body, not just to determine the cause of death, but to examine his brain for anomalies that might explain his preternatural senses. The autopsy failed to illuminate Bishop's powers, but did have one very interesting legal consequence. Bishop's family, who had not been consulted about the procedure, declared that the performer had actually been alive prior to having his head carved open. The mind-reader had a medical history of catalepsy and may have merely been unconscious when the over-eager doctors went for his brain. Bishop's mother's accusations resulted in the doctors being brought to trial, which ultimately resulted in a hung jury and no charges. Houdini himself was always unambiguously clear that his own powers were the result of natural training and trickery. He tragically demonstrated his own mortality in 1926, when a stunt went wrong, resulting in his accidental death from peritonitis and a ruptured appendix. The celebrated debunker and escape artist has never credibly reached out 0 from beyond the grave.

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F A K E H A N D S A N D P R I N T S Houdini shows how a cast of the hand of a dead workman to make a fake hand. He used 'spirit hands can be made from wax. In A Magician Among the Spirits i t that night in a seam!, copying the prints using lampblack. Of (1924), he notes that once, a medium who was also a sculptor took c o u r s e , these matched those of the corpse - by then in the morgue.

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T R I C K E R Y E X P O S E D Anna Clark Benninghoffer, a self-confessed fraudulent medium, is shown in the top two pictures here, along with a 'spirit trumpet'. Above left, Houdini

sits within a cabinet, mimicking the controls placed on medium Mina Crandon to test her claims of psychic powers. Shown above right,the magician scrutinizes a length of rope.

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THE H I G H P R I E S T E S S OF M Y S T I C I S M

THE PSYCHICAL RESEARCHERS

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O L I V E R L O D G E The English physicist and writer is seen O U G L I E L M O M A R C O N I The Italian radio pioneer built on the here in a tinted photograph from c. 1920. Beginning in the 1880s, w o r k of earlier figures, including Lodge. The apparatus before him includes Lodge developed a firm belief in the existence of a spirit world. a 10-inch induction coil spark transmitter, Morse inker and grasshopper key.

A s spiritualists and magicians clashed, members of the scientific community sought to establish methods for objectively addressing issues such as the possibility of thought transference and survival after death, alongside physical phenomena including apparitions and apports. Far from presenting a united front of enlightened scepticism, professional scientists confronted with spiritual and paranormal problems were often bitterly and dramatically divided. Although they sought to establish themselves as authorities on the empirical observation of the physical world, natural scientists were often unprepared for the problems associated with dealing with human subjects. To appreciate how scientists became fascinated with spiritualism, and in some cases left themselves vulnerable to being manipulated by fraudulent mediums, it is useful to consider the tumultuous state of science and technology that existed at the turn of the 20th century. Again and again, researchers were uncovering invisible physical forces that had once been almost unimaginable. The scientific community embraced developments in radiation and electromagnetism; was it so much of leap, some wondered, to consider emerging mediums such as the Fox sisters as a new sort of 'spiritual telegraph'? The physicist Sir Oliver Lodge conducted revolutionary research that had a major impact on the development of wireless telegraphy and radio; he was also a devoted spiritualist. He was convinced that, through mediums, he had repeatedly enjoyed direct communications with his dead son, Raymond. Lodge's autobiography, published in 1931, provides a fascinating insight into his views on what he considered to be parallel

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scientific and mystical developments that he witnessed throughout his lifetime. He reminisced that he had 'walked through the back streets of London...With a sense of unreality in everything around, an opening of deep things in the universe, which put all ordinary objects of sense into the shade, so that the square and its railings, the houses, the carts, and the people, seemed shadowy unrealities, phantasmal appearances, partly screening, but partly permeated by, the mental and spiritual reality behind. In 1894, before the Royal Society of London, Lodge revealed a new method for proving the existence of electromagnetic waves. Before a crowd of scientists, he demonstrated that he could wirelessly transmit an electrical signal across a lecture theatre. The effect was simple: he created a spark in the front of the room, which caused a loud gunshot-like crack to sound at the back. For Lodge, the wireless trick was merely a convenient demonstration of the scientific principle of invisible 'Hertzian waves'. While Lodge went on to investigate spiritualist phenomena, such as Eusapia Palladino's ectoplasmic manifestations, it was left to the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi to capitalize on the enormous commercial potential of Lodge's apparatus as a mechanism for wireless telegraphy. Marie Sklodowska Curie, a French-Polish chemist, likewise devoted time to investigating Palladino, following the death of her husband Pierre Curie, who had believed that Palladino's mediumship might have been related to another unseen force: radioactivity. The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823.1913) was a particularly controversial figure when it came to the science of spiritualism. Wallace rose

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T H E C A S E F O R T E L E P A T H V Phantasms of the Living E N E R C V F L O W Taken from the frontispiece to Spiritual (first volume, 1886) explored apparition sightings in the context of telepathic a n d Animal Magnetism (1871), this diagram purports to show communication between individuals, of which these sketches were evidence', a n exchange of positive and negative electricity.

to prominence as the co-discoverer, along with Charles Darwin, of the principle of natural selection. He rigorously promoted and defended the theory of evolution in the face of more conservative scientists. In 1876, Wallace sparked intense controversy when he invited the physicist William Fletcher Barrett (1844-1925) to read a paper on the topic of thought reading before the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Wallace would eventually go on to assert not only that spiritualism was a legitimate topic for scientific investigation, but also that the reality of spiritualist phenomena was undeniable, given the number of reports from what he considered to be credible witnesses. He served as an expert witness in courtroom trials, speaking in defence of the legitimacy of mediums accused of fraud. This brought him into conflict with sceptics, including John Nevil Maskelyne, and even his friend and colleague Darwin, who was adamantly opposed to spiritualism. Wallace's career was riddled with scientific controversies. In addition to serving as an outspoken champion both of spiritualism and the theory of evolution, he also clashed publicly with the Flat Earth Society and campaigned against mandatory vaccinations. Barrett would go on to co-found a new scientific organization for the investigation of paranormal phenomena: the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). The SPR and its subsequent transatlantic counterpart, the American Society for Psychical Research, boasted many prominent scientists and intellectual figures, including the mathematician and writer Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll), Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, the

American satirist Mark Twain, and many prominent early American psychologists such as Joseph Jastrow (1863-1944), G. Stanley Hall (1846-1924) and William James (1842-1910). Overall, SPR worked to legitimize scientific research into paranormal phenomena. Spiritualists used the reputations of sympathetic scientists and intellectuals to bolster the legitimacy of their beliefs, and they were eager to link spiritual phenomena with emerging technological advancements. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in discussing the Fox sisters and Daniel Dunglas Home, argued that a medium was 'a telegraph instrument and telegraph boy united as one', capable of receiving and delivering messages from our material world and the land of the dead. Spiritualists also argued that scientific methods and observations could never truly rule out the possibility that supernatural forces existed. Nicolas Camille Flammarion (1842-1925), a French astronomer and psychical researcher, offered a particularly vivid version of this argument. He asserted that not only was it plausible that 'the spirits of the dead may survive, and wander to and fro, and hold communication with us', but it was even 'possible that we are surrounded by invisible non-human beings gnomes, spirits and hobgoblins'. Science, he concluded, did not have the absolute right to reject any of these claims. In America, the philosopher William James, today revered as the founding father of American psychology, became one of the leading proponents of SPR-style paranormal research. James's bestknown book, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is credited with helping to establish psychology as a respected scientific discipline.

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W O N D E R S O F T H E A C E Shown above are a range of 19th-century communication devices. Clockwise from top left: Wheatstone's portable ABC telegraph (1858). Cooke and

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Wheatstone's ABC telegraph transmitter 11840), Clark's block signalling telegraph instrument (1854) and Siemens and Halske's ABC telegraph (1850-97). On the opposite page is a photograph

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I of William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone's five-needle t h e five needles in the device would swing, pointing to letters of the telegraph, first demonstrated in 1837. Simple to use, it represented a l p h a b e t . In all, twenty needle positions were possible—the letters history's first practical telegraph system. When running, any two of ' C ' , '1, 'Q 'U', 'X' and 'Z' were not included.

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T E S L A C O I L E X P E R I M E N T S Taken in 1899, these i n v e n t o r , Nikola Tesla. In the bottom picture on this page, an electrical images show spectacular electrical streamers sparking from a large Tesla oscillator produces a 12-million-volt discharge, causing nitrogen Coil. The location was the Colorado Springs laboratory of the machine's a n d oxygen in the air to bum and create a 20-metre-wide display.

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1 I 1 1 LEONORA P I P E R Thewhite A U T O M A T I C W R I T I N G These lines,made W I L L I A M JAMES Crow' of mediums spent decades producing b y Leonora Piper in a seance in 1911, were alleged to have T h e psychologist, brother of alleged spirit communications for researchers, c o m e from the late parapsychologist Dr Richard Hodgson. w r i t e r Henry, seen in 1865.

His work is a fixture of modem-day experimental psychology courses. But many contemporary psychologists do not realize that James was also steadfastly sympathetic to psychical research. In addition to establishing the psychology department at Harvard University, he also served as the president of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR). He even declared that he had personally discovered at least one genuine spiritual medium, a Bostonian woman named Leonora Piper (1857-1950). In a speech delivered to the ASPR in 1896, James argued that it would only take one genuine medium to legitimize the scientific possibility of the survival of the human soul after death. He noted that If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white,' and he declared that Leonora Piper represented his 'white crow'. Piper claimed that she could enter into a special trance state in which she was able to receive psychic messages from particular spirit guides', including a French physician named 'Phinuie. Her advocates came to believe that in some instances when Ms Piper entered her trance, the spirit guides would take control of her voice, and at other times they would take control of her hand so that they could write messages. When in a trance, she would refer to herself as 'the Machine' and sitters who wished to communicate with the spirits that she channelled were instructed to hold her hand up to their mouths and speak into it, as if she were a physical telephone. She would sometimes admonish sitters to speak more loudly into her hand, as if there were a bad connection

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and they were communicating over a great distance. Piper was a favourite subject for psychical researchers both in the USA and England, conducting hundreds of sittings with investigators that generated thousands of pages of transcripts. In some instances, she and her spirits carried on after the death of her investigators. Following the death of the psychical researcher Richard Hodgson (1855-1905), who had conducted many sittings with Piper, the medium began to claim that she was speaking with the voice of his spirit. However, after her claim was tested extensively by psychologists Amy Tanner (1870-1956) and G. Stanley Hall (1846-1924), they concluded that 'What was present of him, if anything, was not only fragmentary but incredibly stupid, oblivious and changed.' Piper's mediumship represents a particularly interesting case study, in that her most celebrated feats involved no physical phenomena. Nonetheless, sceptical critics have proposed a number of ways in which she may have acquired her uncanny insights through trickery. For example, the magician Martin Gardner (1914-2010) suggested that much of Piper's apparently impossible knowledge may be attributable to techniques magicians refer to as 'cold' and 'hot' reading. Cold reading occurs when a performer, usually faced with an audience that he or she genuinely knows nothing about, can use a variety of rhetorical tricks to disguise a dialogue as a monologue. For example, a cold reader can present vague or ambiguous statements that listeners may interpret in specific ways. They can also reflect information gained from the audience back at them. A medium might open by vaguely stating that they sense that

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I M I TAT I O N S P I R I T PHOTOS The examples seen here are taken from The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism, Fraudulent

and Genuine (1907, by Hereward Carrington). a p p a r e n t l y otherworldly effects - such as spirit This book examined the evidence for paranormal p h o t o g r a p h s could be counterfeited. Dr Richard occurrences and also explained how some H o d g s o n poses in the first picture.

I HAVE NEVER HAD ANY OCCASION TO CHANCE MY MIND ON THE S U B J E C T. IT IS QUITE TRUE THAT A CONNECTION HAS BEEN SET UP BETWEEN THIS WORLD AND THE NEXTO SIR WILLIAM CROOKES, 1917

the sitter has recently lost someone (a fairly safe bet, given that the sitter has opted to visit a medium) and the sitter might respond that their mother recently died. Then the medium can confidently claim that 'Yes, I can sense your mother's presence here, very strongly.' On paper, such techniques can sound trivial, but in emotionally charged circumstances, when the sitters are highly motivated, perhaps hoping to confirm their theory about life after death or as a recently bereaved family member seeking reassurance, cold-reading tricks can become surprisingly powerful. Hot reading, by contrast, occurs when the performer is secretly able to gather information about their audience before the show, and then present that information as if they are magically learning it. In Piper's time, other professional mediums were known to keep records of seance participants, lists of key information about them and those close to them (such as the names and ages of their recently deceased family members). These 'blue books' were circulated among networks of fraudulent mediums. Thus, information revealed by a sitter at one seance might be 'miraculously divined' later by another medium that the sitter might never have met in person before. Today, magicians and fake psychics can easily use social media to glean inside information about their audiences. One researcher whose work particularly highlights the pitfalls of a physical scientist attempting to apply his experimental expertise to the study of mediums was Sir William Crookes (1832-1919). This pioneering chemist first achieved international acclaim for his discovery of the element thallium.

THE PSYCHICAL RESEARCHERS

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OPPOSITE M I N D OVER S P I R I T S ? The Mysteries of Human Nature Explained (1860) by J. S. Grimes sought to explain occult phenomena in terms of phrenology.

Images of hemispheres of the brain, taken from William James's The Principles of Psychology (1890).

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A PSYCHIC'S BIOGRAPHY These artworks are taken from Tioixt Two Worlds: A Narrative of the Life and Work of William Eglinton (1886), by John S. Farmer. Shown opposite, Eglinton

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appears to manifest an otherworldly presence known as •Abdullah'. A trunk in his possession was found to contain a costume (including robe and false beard) suspiciously similar to that of the spirit.

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PAGES 121-23 S P I R I T I S M E X P O S E D Dating from c. 1882, this poster promotes a performance at St James's Hall in Piccadilly, London. Baldwin was a trenchant critic of spiritualism and

his early shows, performed with his then wife Clara, sought to demystify 'supernatural' feats. In this instance, the subject is the manifestation of the spirit 'Katie King', recorded by William Crookes in the 1870s.

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no- 2.

SPIRITED PERFORMANCE William Crookes's Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (1874) describes an experiment

he undertook with Daniel Dunglas Home. The latter held an accordion, placed in a cage beneath a table, by his fingertips. Although Home's fingers

He was celebrated for his use of flame spectroscopy to reveal a bright green emission spectrum that had never been seen by any previous researchers. After the notorious American spirit medium Henry Slade briefly passed through London in 1870, Crookes announced that he would adapt his scientific skill set, expertly honed in his chemistry lab, towards investigating the problem of spiritualism. He wrote that he expected his attentions to contribute to driving the worthless residuum of spiritualism hence into the unknown limbo of magic and necromancy'. The Scottish medium Daniel Dunglas Home readily volunteered to be a subject for Crookes's fledgling experimental programme. After assessing Home's powers, however, Crookes declared conclusively' the existence of a new 'psychic force'. He had developed a variety of experimental apparatus just for the occasion, setting up a makeshift laboratory in his home at 20 Mornington Road in London. One of Crookes's most dramatic and bizarre tests involved the mysterious animation of an accordion. The instrument was new, purchased by the chemist himself, and Home had never seen it before the test. Crookes had constructed a steel mesh cage, putting the accordion within it and then placing the cage beneath a table. Home's task was to sit at the table, with witnesses on either side of him, and cause the accordion to play. According to Crookes's report, Home reached into the cage with one hand and caused the accordion to begin playing. Crookes's assistants looked under the table and saw that Home's hand was still, but the accordion was nonetheless pulsating up and down. And if that were not enough, Home proceeded to

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never touched the keys, Crookes reported that he made the instrument play and rotate, even after Home removed his hand altogether.

remove his hand from the cage, and the accordion remained floating with no visible means of support. In subsequent tests, Crookes claimed that when the accordion was hung from his own fingertips, Home was able to cause the instrument to play, and could even make it float freely about the room, playing all the time. Many subsequent writers have proposed ways that Home might have accomplished his feats by natural means, including the use of translucent catgut thread and the allegation that he actually created the music not by playing the accordion but by concealing a mouth organ in his flowing moustache. Crookes always maintained that his accordion tests were set up so as to completely preclude any form of trickery. He went on to test a variety of mediums, including a visiting Kate Fox, whom he wholeheartedly endorsed as a genuine medium. Perhaps his most notorious case involved fifteen-year-old medium Florence Cook (1856-1904). Florence claimed that she was in mystical contact with a spirit named Katie King. 'Katie' stood apart from the spirit companions of other contemporary mediums. She did not limit her interactions to disembodied rapping, voice communications, or mysterious written scrawling. Instead, she manifested physically, as a fully formed spirit body—appearing as an attractive young woman, about Florence's age, dressed in a white gown. In a typical séance, Florence would be shut in a Davenportesque cabinet. Inside the cabinet, she explained, she would enter a deep trance. After a while, Katie would manifest and display and herself to sitters and investigators. She even posed for photographs. At the end of the séance, Katie would depart and Florence

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FLOREN( I. C o o k A ) t) k X I IE K I N G ' Possibly produced during seances held at William Crookes' house during the 1870s, these

images allegedly show a spirit - named 'Katie King' - evoked by the medium Florence Cook (seen in the first picture, apparently in a trance),

A Fellow of the Royal Society, Crookes had been knighted for his services to science in 1897 but his defence of Cook drew widespread ridicule,

would rejoin the sitters. In 1873, a suspicious sitter but asserted that he as a 'physical investigator' named William Volkman disrupted the séance in an was more than able to see through any illusions attempt to expose Florence as a fraud. In the midst of that might be attempted by 'a conjurer'. He added the session, Mr Volkman attempted to physically grab that it was ridiculous to imagine that Florence, an Katie. The other sitters, outraged that Volkman would 'innocent school girl', could successfully accomplish disrupt the sacred ambience of the séance, promptly such a 'gigantic imposture'. In light of his evidence, tackled him. Katie managed to free herself from he concluded that believing Katie to be a fraud was the melee, fleeing directly into the cabinet that was significantly more insane than believing her to be supposed to contain an entranced Florence. Moments a spirit person. later, a dishevelled-looking Florence did emerge from Crookes also investigated the medium Anna the cabinet, with her clothing in obvious disarray. Eva Fay (1851-1927) who, like Florence, sought When Volkman proceeded to tell his story to the him out to legitimize her mediumship after she press, Florence's explanation that Katie had entered faced accusations of deception. Once again, Crookes the cabinet and quickly dematerialized was generally asserted that her powers were genuine. Fay represents met with scepticism. Katie and her family turned a particularly interesting case, because she later to Crookes to rehabilitate her image as a genuine openly acknowledged that she had tricked Crookes. medium, and Crookes cheerfully obliged. He set up his She detailed her methods to Harry Houdini and, library to serve as a dark cabinet, and invited Florence later in her life, was actually admitted to The Magic and her relatives to his London home. The chemist's Circle as an honorary female member. When Crookes subsequent endorsement of her mediumship reveals published his reports of his experiences with Daniel some of the most problematic aspects of his approach Dunglas Home, Kate Fox, Florence Cook and Anna to spiritual investigations. Crookes firmly believed Eva Fay, his findings were largely embraced by the that Katie and Florence were separate entities. While spiritualist community but received hostile reactions he was not entirely convinced that Katie was a ghost, from many of his fellow scientists. Crookes was he was certain that she was the manifestation of evidently surprised by the hostility of his peers. He an otherwise invisible intelligent being that had never renounced his conclusions, but did eventually previously been unknown to science. His efforts to give up trying to convince his fellow scientists of the convince his readers were somewhat questionable. legitimacy of his spiritual investigations. Decades later, For example, he reported that during one séance he in 1913, he would be elected as president of the Royal had taken Katie's pulse, which he recorded as being Society, one of the oldest and most distinguished 75 beats per minute, and had soon after taken the scientific institutions in the world, which in the past pulse of Florence, which he recorded at 90 beats per had been presided over by luminaries such as minute. He acknowledged the possibility of trickery, Sir Isaac Newton and Lord Lister.

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ANNA EVA FAY Dating from 1906, this is a signed postcard of the well-known medium.

T O T h e s e coin-like objects were sold as 'mascots'. 'The Fays' were Anna Eva Fay's son John (whom she had trained) and his wife, who had their own show.

Despite the limitations of his methodologies and the heavily publicized accusations of fraud, Crookes's spiritualist investigations were not universally rejected by contemporary scientists. His reports captured the imagination of the German physicist Johann Karl Friedrich Milner (1834-82). Milner held the chair of physical astronomy (what would be astrophysics today) at the University of Leipzig and had an established reputation as a physicist and experimentalist. He was well known throughout Europe at the time for his contributions to physics, astronomy and philosophy. Prior to becoming interested in spiritualism, he had invented several pieces of laboratory equipment, including a device called an astrophotometer that could be used to make measurements of distant stars. He also, perhaps ironically, cultivated an interest in optical illusions. Milner came to believe that the miraculous phenomena being reported in séance rooms and Crookes's makeshift lab might provide him with empirical evidence to revolutionize the field of physics. In 1877, Milner eagerly seized the opportunity to conduct his own tests of spiritualist phenomena when the American spirit medium Dr Henry Slade passed through Germany. Slade's title of 'doctor' was not derived from any medical or academic institution, but rather was adopted by him during his work as a 'clairvoyant physician', which saw him travel about the USA claiming to heal the sick by realigning their magnetic life forces. His breakthrough came when he began to advertise himself as a spirit medium. He claimed to be able to communicate with the spirits of the

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FAY IN ENGLAND Dating from 1874, this poster advertises one of Anna Eva Fay's first shows in the UK,

dead, mostly receiving these exchanges in the form of written messages that mysteriously appeared on slates. Having established himself in America, Slade - allegedly accompanied by the spirit of his deceased wife, Alcinda - embarked on a world tour to demonstrate his skills as a slate-writing medium. At his first stop, in London, he was promptly arrested and put on trial for fraud. The sensational court case, which took place in the autumn of 1876, drew massive crowds and international media attention. Slade, who charged admission to his seances, stood accused of using fraudulent methods to fake spiritual communications. The prosecution called John Nevil Maskelyne to the stand to demonstrate how Slade's powers could be duplicated using magic trick methods. Charles Darwin himself did not personally attend Slade's trial, but did personally contribute £10 (about £1,000 in today's currency) to the prosecution. Despite his defence team's bold strategy of equating him with scientific revolutionaries such as Galileo, Slade was ultimately convicted of fraud and sentenced to three months of hard labour. But in a twist, his conviction was overturned on a legal technicality, and Slade fled England before he could be arrested again and re-tried. After leaving the country early in the winter of 1877, Slade travelled extensively throughout Europe, demonstrating his powers in France, Holland and Denmark. He began performing in Germany and was soon invited to Leipzig. Milner arranged for Slade to take tea with him on 16 November 1877. At Z011ner's request, Slade demonstrated that he could deflect a compass needle with his apparently empty hand.

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HENRY SLADE The controversial figure is pictured here in a late 19th century photograph.

i I S L A D E A N D Z O L L N E R This image of the two men in a study session comes from Carl Willmann's Moderne Wunder (1897).

THE EVIDENCE IS OUR WHOLE CONCERN. IF IT STOOD EVERY TEST AND EVERY CRITICISM. I WOULD A C C E P T. A N Y MARVEL IN THE ARABIAN NIGHTS OR GULLIVER'S TRAVELS° Jo Ko Fo ZOLLNERISSO

14 L H 1,1,11 M I N D I c, L A B Wundt, shown (seated) c. 1890, founded the first experimental psychology laboratory in Leipzig.

M i n e r was impressed, and continued to test Slade's powers at a series of thirty sittings (or seances) that took place in Leipzig throughout the winter of 1877 and the spring of 1878. Miner rushed to publish his findings and theories as a multi-volume set entitled Wissenschafiliche Abhandlungen ('Scientific Papers'), which contained more than two thousand pages describing his investigations of Slade. The writings stirred controversy not only in Germany but around the world. ZOllner also published selections of his papers in the The Quarterly Journal of Science, which was edited by William Crookes. Translations of Zollner's writings proved to be popular, particularly with English-speaking spiritualists, and were republished in multiple editions. Throughout his writing, Miner maintained that his investigations of Slade, most of which he conducted in his own sitting room, took place under scientifically rigorous conditions. He variously referred to the sittings with Slade as experiments or seances. In his reports, he seemed to view himself as the lead investigator, while Slade was treated as both a collaborator and test subject. Crucially, Milner was aware of the accusations that Slade was a fake. However, he wrote that Slade gave him 'the impression of being a gentleman', and asserted that the American was an honest man who was being unfairly slandered by small-minded people. ZOllner's investigations did not take the form of what might be considered a controlled psychological experiment today. After his casual demonstration of deflecting the compass needle, Slade went on to participate in more 'formal' sittings.

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INVESTIGATING STELLA Co HarryPrice carried out three sets of sittings with medium Stella Cranshaw in 1923. 1926 and 1928, using equipment he developed to test mediums. Clockwise

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from top left: interior view of pressure apparatus, dismantled telekinetoscope, Negretti and Zembra transmitting thermograph, shadow apparatus, double cage table and 'flap' contact apparatus.

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MODEL PSYCHIC LABORATORY In January 1926 Harry Price set up a suite of rooms in Qyeensbury Place, London, in which mediums and psychics could be scientifically tested. Shown

here are the chemical and physical laboratory (top) with microscopes, photographic enlargers and bunsen burners, and the seance room (above) with cameras, dictaphones, and inverted ceiling light

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P S 1 t 111 U K 1\ O T S Ftorn Johann Karl Friedrich Zollner's Transcendental Physics (1878), this illustration shows the scientist's hands along with two leather bands, each ending in a seal. In an

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experiment conducted with Henry Slade. Zolliter placed his hands over the bandmvith Slade's hands hovering above his and claimed that Slade had been able to knot the bands by psychic power alone.

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I D E C E P T I V E R U S E S Investigations into the ways in which mediums might fraudulently achieve their feats were plentiful. These pictures, showing how ropes may be slipped

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and other sleight-of-hand tricks, are from The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism, Fraudulent and Genuine (1907) by Hereward Carrington of the Society for Psychical Research.

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THE MOST SCATHING EXPOSURE DOES NOT SHAKE THE FIRM FAITH OF THOROUGHGOING SPIRITUALISTS.WHAT WONDER, THEN, THAT LESS CREDULOUS PERSONS ARE CHARY OF ACCEPTING THEIR EVIDENCE ANCELO LEWIS (A.K.A. 'PROFESSOR HOFFMANN), 1889

He then took his counterattack further by accusing Wundt of criminally slandering Slade, even suggesting that the magnetic forces associated with Slade's powers might have literally disrupted Wundt's brain, or left him open to possession by malign fourth-dimensional spirits. Z011ner's writings were so inflammatory that his critics would later hold them up as evidence that he himself was mentally unsound. Various magicians and researchers went on to propose that sleight of hand might be behind Slade's feats. The German magician Carl Willmann (18491934) suggested a variety of methods to recreate the impossible knots and disembodied limbs described by Milner. American researchers at the University of Pennsylvania formed an investigative committee, the Seybert Commission, to assess the scientific validity of spiritualism; they made Z011ner's experiments with Slade a special focus. In 1885, they even invited Slade, who by that time had returned to America, to visit them in Philadelphia and demonstrate his slate-writing skills. The commission was highly unimpressed with Slade's feats—concluding that they were performed in a manner so closely resembling fraud as to be indistinguishable from it'. The researchers believed that they saw Slade attempting to switch pre-written slates for ostensibly blank ones, and even saw him use his foot to try to create the illusion of levitating furniture around him. Significantly, they also consulted a professional stage magician, Harry Kellar (1849-1922), who demonstrated his own slate-writing 'powers' to the committee. The results were judged by the committee to be much more convincing than Slade's. Following his performance, Kellar demonstrated the methods behind his tricks. Work by investigators such as Crookes and Milner inspired other researchers to conduct groundbreaking research on illusions and human perception. For example, in the late 1880s, Eleanor Sidgwick (née Balfour, 1845-1936), one of the founding members of the Society for Psychical Research, reached out to

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Angelo Lewis (1839-1919), a British barrister and magician who published prolifically on magic under the pseudonym 'Professor Hoffmann'. Sidgwick asked him to give his opinion, as an expert in conjuring, on the possibility of fraud in reports of mediumistic seances. In particular, she was interested in those points during observations when witnesses 'might be defective or misdirected'. Lewis responded that there was little value in any attempt to assess written reports for evidence of fraud. He argued that, when fraud was a possibility, then witnesses' descriptions must inevitably 'be taken to represent (as do all descriptions of conjuring effects by uninitiated persons) not what the witnesses actually see, but what they believe they saw, which is a very different matter'. Given that post-seance reports were usually seen as a poor way to assess the reliability of testimony, two other SPR members Richard Hodgson (1855-1905) and Samuel John Davey (1863-90)—took it upon themselves to develop a more formal investigation. Instead of using a self-professed 'genuine' medium, they choreographed their own fake seances, which allowed them to control exactly what phenomena each witness was presented with. Their study was published in 1887 under the title 'The Possibilities of Mal-Observation and Lapse of Memory from a Practical Point of View', and it's arguable that it highlighted mechanisms of human perception that would not be appreciated by mainstream psychologists for many decades. Neither Hodgson nor Davey would have considered themselves to be experimental psychologists. In 1887, the discipline of experimental psychology was only just beginning to garner recognition as an independent scientific discipline, through the popularization of work by figures such as William James at Harvard and Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig. Hodgson and Davey were 'psychical researchers', investigators of paranormal phenomena including manifestations of dead spirits through spirit mediums.

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S L A T E W R I T I N C In Moderne Wunder (1897), the magician Carl Willmann, assesses one of the most enduring psychic feats of the 19th century - the appearance of messages on a slate, created

by an unseen hand. Willmann - who alludes in his book to Johann Karl Friedrich Z011ner's research with noted slate-writing medium Henry Slade - examines how this effect might be replicated.

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E V A D I N G E X P O S U R E O n these pages, British escapologist Val Walker demonstrates how a medium could extricate him- or herself from restraints in order to perform

a fraudulent psychic act. Seen opposite, Walker frees himself from his coat, even though he is tied up. On, this page he is shown fully escaping from the ropes with which he has been bound to his chair.

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I I I THE P H I L O S O P H E R AND E L E A N O R S I D C W I C K

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T H E M E D I U M Henry Sidgwick and T h i s co-founder of the Society for Psychical B L A V A T S K Y T h e Russian mystic Eusapia Palladino are shown here c. 1890. R e s e a r c h was also Henry's wife, a n d writer is pictured here c. 1891.

In particular, they were interested in fake mediumship. They wanted to explore how participants in seances could be deceived into thinking they had witnessed supernatural events when they had really seen something that might be more accurately described as a magic trick. Richard Hodgson was born in Melbourne, Australia, and obtained a degree in law from Cambridge University. During his time at Cambridge, Hodgson befriended Professor Henry Sidgwick and joined the recently formed Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Hodgson quickly established a reputation as a talented detective debunker of spiritualist mediums and led the SPR's first major investigation into spiritualism. He travelled to India to investigate Countess Helena Petrova de Blavatsky (1831-91), a Russian occultist who had attracted a significant following based on her reported supernatural abilities. She claimed that she was channelling the spiritual teachings of dead mystics and that she could project her body into an astral form'. Hodgson spent two months in India attempting to verify Blavatsky's claims. In his eventual report, which he published through the SPR in 1885, he declared that the phenomena she claimed credit for were entirely fraudulent. The letters she had allegedly received from spirits of the dead were written in her own hand, and the spirit forms she took were simply her human accomplices wearing disguises. He argued that her followers were 'excessively credulous and deficient in observation', and that she was actually the centre of a 'huge fraudulent system'. The Blavatsky investigation was arguably what sparked Hodgson's

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interest in the relationship between magic tricks and eye-witness testimony. Before he began practising magic, Davey was a true believer in the reality of spiritualist phenomena. He wrote that his initial inspiration came after he saw a recently deceased friend in a dream. He was further intrigued after reading an English translation of Miner's Transcendental Physics, and personally witnessing the apparently miraculous talents of the spirit medium William Eglington. Davey was particularly fascinated by the phenomenon of slate writing. For a time, he believed that he was genuinely in contact with spirits who would leave messages for him around his house — until he realized that the messages were actually a complex trick orchestrated by his friends. The joint report was based on an elaborate series of hoaxes that were conducted by combining Davey's conjuring expertise with Hodgson's first-hand experience in debunking professional mediums. Over the course of several months, the two would invite various members of the public to attend seances hosted by Davey. Most, although not all, of the seances took place in his home. The seances were loosely scripted and would vary between different audiences as Davey improvised around individual circumstances and reactions. At the start of each performance, he would always specifically caution his audience to be mindful of any form of trickery or deception, but he did not specifically tell them that he was going to be presenting magic tricks, nor did he ever explicitly attribute his performance to supernatural powers. At the conclusion of each seance, audience members were asked to provide written accounts in the form

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THE PARANORMAL MADE b y H. Price and E. J. Dingwall. Its aim was to reveal ' I n 1891, when it was first published, fraudulent M A N I F E S T Revelations of a Spirit Medium t h e magic tricks behind apparently paranormal m e d i u m s h i p had attained a vogue which it ( 1 8 9 1 ) was written by 'A. Medium', and printed e v e n t s . The preface of the 1922 edition noted w o u l d be difficult to over-estimate.'

of letters, describing everything that they had participants' reports consistently failed to mention experienced during the session. that the slate had been placed beneath the table. These In total, the 'Mal-Observation' report collects omissions created a powerful illusion of impossibility 27 distinct accounts from 17 separate performances. for the sitters, and anyone reading their reports alone Each was reproduced in full and accompanied by would have been unable to reconstruct the sleight of commentary from Hodgson and Davey about some hand behind the trick. Modern cognitive psychologists of the key ways in which the sitters' memories have dubbed a very similar phenomenon of the events deviated from the actual events. 'inattentional blindness': viewers may fail to perceive Those who reported that they had witnessed seemingly obvious visual events when their attention supernatural phenomena committed predictable is otherwise engaged. Davey's actions were clearly and systematic errors in their statements. Their visible and in plain sight of the sitters, and yet the writing typically omitted crucial elements of the latter consistently expressed the belief that the writing seances—specifically, elements that were instrumental was produced while they held the slates and they either for the accomplishment of the conjuring tricks. For failed to detect or failed to remember Davey's crucial example, in one of the scripted segments of the seance action of placing the slate below the table. Davey would surreptitiously switch a blank slate for Reactions to the 'Mal-Observation' report also another slate that had been pre-marked with writing indicate just how radical the results were perceived before the sitting began. He conducted most of his to be. One of those who participated in Davey's performances while seated at a table. He would begin performance was Alfred Russel Wallace. After by showing the blank slate clearly, then place the slate sitting through one of the seances, Wallace had been under the table, where he would switch it for the slate utterly convinced that he had witnessed genuine that had writing on it. He would remove the slate with supernatural phenomena. Even after the report was writing on it under the table, and, without revealing published, and Hodgson and Davey had explicitly the writing to the sitters, feign disappointment that revealed that they had been using trickery, Wallace no spirits had been in contact. Then he would place remained convinced that the séance he had witnessed the pre-written slate on top of the table (writing side had been supernatural in nature. He wrote an angry down) and ask the sitters to place their hands upon it. letter to the SPR, stating that Hodgson and Davey were After a brief time, he would then ask them to turn engaged in a deliberate cover-up of Davey's genuine over the slate, revealing the writing, which he would mediumistic talents. Wallace believed that the errors pretend had just appeared while the sitters' hands in the testimonies were impossibly extensive, and were on the slate. The trick was only effective because that the observations made by himself and the he was able to put the blank slate under the table other sitters must have been more accurate and replace it with the pre-written one. But the than Hodgson and Davey had indicated.

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I A D E M O N S T R A T I O N The selection of images here shows US magician loseph Dunninger duplicating tricks that might be employed by mediums and spiritists. These include using a

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portable wireless set (this page, top row), which could be used to create otherworldly sound effects. Pictured opposite is a mechanical apparatus for producing spirit raps on doors or walls.

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OPPOSITE R E S E A R C H T O O L , A diagram showing A B O V E S T U D Y C R O U P Photographs taken during Harry the wiring for electronically controlling a medium, as used P r i c e ' s investigation into the mediumistic powers of brothers by psychic researcher Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing. R u d i and Willi Schneider in 1932.

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OPPOSITE F R O M A S E A N C E Another picture from Price's 1932 sessions with the Schneiders, this is a double photograph of a table from above.

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ABOVE PSYCHIC DIACRAMIhissketch illustrates methods for controlling Rudi Schneider in a sitting, to prevent him from faking paranormal events.

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WHO WE ARE MAY BE SHAPED BY OUR MEMORIES, BUT OUR MEMORIES ARE SHAPED BY WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE HAVE BEEN LED TO BELIEVE° ELIZABETH LOFTUS, 2005 ce)

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The report is also particularly notable as many of Hodgson and Davey's ideas about unreliable testimony would be borne out by more formal psychological research conducted decades later. Modern cognitive psychologists have since conducted a variety of research into failures of awareness and distortions of memory. In 1999, the psychologists Irvin Rock (1922-95) and Arien Mack (b. 1931) published a series of experiments based on inattentional blindness, a term that they devised. Mack and Rock conducted their first experiments using simple computerized displays, but subsequent researchers were able to extend the idea to more complex stimuli, including video recordings and even live demonstrations. Daniel Simons (b. 1969) and Christopher Chabris (b. 1966) famously demonstrated that individuals engaged in watching a video of a basketball game could be intentionally blind to a person in a gorilla costume who walks slowly through the frame of the video. And even when we do accurately perceive events, our memories can easily become distorted. When most people think about the limits of human memory, they usually think of forgetting. But contemporary experts believe that the process of recalling events can be best conceptualized as a reconstructive process, meaning that memories can contain not only elements that were actually witnessed, but also elements drawn from the imagination and from external suggestions. The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus (b. 1944) coined the term 'misinformation effect' to describe exposure to false information that can actually change a witness's recollection of events in predictable, sometimes powerful ways. In 1974, during one of her first experiments, Loftus and her graduate student John Palmer demonstrated that simple verbal suggestions could change the way that their research participants recalled a video of a car accident. Since then, similar experiments have shown that exposure to false information can lead healthy, mentally sound individuals to create strong memories

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of entirely fictitious events, such as a childhood trip to Disneyland or a hot-air balloon ride. In 2015, a study by forensic psychologists Julia Shaw (b. 1987) and Stephen Porter demonstrated that participants could be induced to falsely remember and even confess to fictional crimes. In studies more closely echoing the spirit of the 'Mal-Observation' report, the psychologist Richard Wiseman (b. 1966) reported multiple studies demonstrating that participants who view hoax stagings of paranormal phenomena can be induced by verbal suggestion to recall elements of the demonstrations that never really happened. Another line of psychological research that can be traced back to early investigations of spiritualist phenomena concerns the concept of the 'ideomotor' effect. Table tilting was one of the original spiritualist proofs of direct spiritual intervention in the physical world. In its most basic form, a table-tilting test could simply involve a group of participants sitting around a table. Each would place their fingertips on the table, and apparently without any effort on the part of the sitters the table would mysteriously begin to sway, sometimes even float into the air. For believers, table-tilting effects served to reinforce their belief that external invisible forces could indeed act on the physical world. While anyone who had felt or seen the table tilt could agree that a force was at work, the precise nature of that force has been the subject of intense and distinctly odd debates. Some observers feared that the movement of the table resulted from the actions of demonic forces drawn by the unholy urges of the deviant spiritualists. Mesmerists, such as the self-proclaimed 'Electrical Psychologist' John Bovee Dodds (1795-1872), speculated that such movements might result from 'electro-magnetically charging the table from a living battery of many human hands', that 'the million pores in the table are filled with the electromagnetism from human brains' and that the electro-magnetism was 'lighter than gas', causing the table to rise, like a balloon.

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S P I R I T U A L INVESTIGATIONS Thesefour images document Haley's experiments into spirit photography, including a bell machine operated by a man and woman (bottom left) and a

practical method of listening for tiny raps ordinarily undetectable to the ear (bottom right). Haley conducted research in this area, along with Earl Gilmore, in San Francisco, California, in the early 1930s.

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PHOTOGRAPHY FROM A SEANCE These images were taken during various sittings with medium Thomas Lynn in the 1920s. The picture above purports to

show a 'psychic rod' forming near the zither on the table. Lynn himself is shown here, between the curtains. Both images are part of the Harry Price archive.

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EXPERIMENTS IN L E V I TAT I O N These photographs record levitation seances that were held at the home of Danish photographer Sven Tfirck in the 1940s. In 1945, M i r k published

his findings in a book entitled leg Var Dus Med Aanderne el Was on Familiar Terms with the Spirits'). The airborne figure seen opposite is believed to be Berge Michaelson, a medium.

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W I L L I A M So M A R R I O T T CONDUCTS

T H E D E V I L ' S W O R K ? Titled 'The Pope's Solution of TableLifting', this illustration is from George Cruikshank's anti-spiritism work A Discovery Concerning Ghosts; With a Rap at the 'Spirit-Rappers' (1863).

A S E A N C E In a photograph from 1910, the magician (standing to the rear) shows how a table can be lifted' surreptitiously by hand.

Most spiritualists were of the opinion that the forces were actually physical manifestations of the souls of the dead. In 1916, Oliver Lodge wrote that his spiritualist convictions were reinforced when a medium spelled out the name of his late son, Raymond, by counting the movements of a table and assigning them letters. But one of the most appealing aspects of table tilting was the fact that it could be practised at home, without the need for a medium or any special equipment, and countless amateur investigators could experience the mysterious powers for themselves. A less ghostly explanation for the forces was reported in 1853 by the physicist Michael Faraday (1791-1867), who developed a simple apparatus that surreptitiously recorded the muscle movements of sitters. Faraday concluded that the movements of the table could be attributed to non-conscious muscle movements by the sitters themselves. In other words, the tilts were not necessarily even intended to be deceptive. Believers were actually moving their own bodies while being unaware of their motions, and because they were unaware of their actions, they attributed them to external forces. In 1888, physiologist William Carpenter (181385) coined the term 'ideomotor effect' to describe these unconscious muscular actions. Carpenter extended Faraday's findings to other ostensibly occult instruments. He argued that ideomotor phenomena could explain the mystery underpinning a variety of uncanny objects including the dowsing rods, pendulums and the planchettes of Ouija boards — in each case, the ostensibly external forces that

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operators reported experiencing may have actually been misidentified internal forces. Carpenter's experiments showed that these instruments could only provide accurate results if the operators themselves already knew the correct responses. In other words, the Ouija boards never provided answers that sitters themselves did not know, further reinforcing the idea that the energies driving the planchette were internally sourced, rather than externally generated. Misunderstandings about the ideomotor effect have continued well into the present day. For example, in 2014, James McCormick, a British businessman, was convicted of selling fake bomb detectors to various international police forces, McCormick's devices were marketed as using principles similar to dowsing, with extreme life-or-death stakes. The operator was supposed to hold the device, called the 'ADE 651', like a wand, and allow its subtle movements to direct them towards dangerous substances. The devices themselves have been determined to be entirely non-functional. But thanks in part to the ideomotor effect, they could easily feel functional, especially if the operator were confidant in their legitimacy. Since the late 1990s, non-functional detection devices with names such as 'Sniffex', 'GT 200' and 'Alpha 6' were sold by various scammers to governments throughout the world, including those of Iraq, Egypt, Syria, India, Thailand and Mexico. The World Peace Foundation of Tufts University, which tracks corruption related to international arms trading, estimates that fake bomb detectors generated more than $100 million in profit between 1999 and 2010.

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D O W S I N G R O D A tool intended to detect invisible external F A K E B O M B D E T E C T O R This 'ADE 651' is one example forces that can guide the user to water or other substances. Such forces o f ersatz bomb-detecting devices used by the military. They were based are most likely internally generated by the user's mind, however, o n a plastic toy called 'Gopher: The Amazing Golf Ball Finder!'

UNDER A VARIETY OF CIRCUMSTANCES? OUR MUSCLES WILL BEHAVE UNCONSCIOUSLY IN ACCORDANCE WITH AN IMPLANTED EXPECTATION. WE OURSELVES ARE THE SOURCE OF THE RESULTING ACTION° RAY HYMAN,1999

The concept of ideomotor action has also been the driving force for some contemporary psychological research. In 2015, a team of researchers at the University of British Columbia led by Helene L. Gauchou demonstrated that Ouija boards could actually be used as a tool to tap into participants' own unconscious knowledge. In these experiments, volunteers were provided with a series of general knowledge questions that required yes/no answers (e.g. 'Is Buenos Aires the capital of Brazil?'). The researchers revealed that when people were instructed to 'ask' a Ouija board for an answer they did not consciously remember, they were significantly more accurate than when they simply attempted to guess without the board. Another recent study, published in 2018, arguably represents a contemporary update of Faraday's procedure. Marc Andersen and his colleagues at Aarhus University set up eye-tracking cameras to study attendees at a Ouija board conference. Their results demonstrated that the spooky movements reported by participants may be attributable not simply to their own unconscious muscular actions. The interactive movements of multiple individuals, each of whom has their hands on the planchette, may equally be responsible. 'Our study solves the apparent paradox that participants on the one hand are producing the Ouija responses themselves, while they on the other hand are unable to predict those very same responses at an individual level,' Andersen explains. 'In that sense, you could say that the "spirit" is actually a representation of the collective "we".'

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W H E E L E D K I R B Y P L A N C H E T T E Immensely t o experiment with spirit communication themselves. Two wheeled popular throughout the U.S. during the mid-nineteenth century, c a s t o r s were fixed beneath a heart-shaped piece of wood containing planchettes, such as the example above, offered users the opportunity a pencil-holding aperture to facilitate automatic writing.

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OPERATING A PLANCHETTE This photograph from the collection of the magician William Marriott shows a young girl operating a planchette. Spiritualists claimed that mysterious external

forces would guide the user's hands, generating written messages. Early psychologists argued that the forces moving the planchette were unconscious muscle actions driven by the user's mind.

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T H E SIDER1C P E N D U L U M was believed that this device could be used to spell messages from the spirit world.

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JASTROW P H O T O G R A P H I C GUN

image appeared in 1892, in Fliegende Matter, a satirical magazine. S e e n here in 1934, he was perhaps A chmnophotographic device for The top line reads 'Which animals are most like each other?' t h e first 'pop' psychologist, r a p i d l y capturing a series of photos.

I F. T H E SPECTATOR IS ONCE CONVINCED THAT HE HAS EVIDENCE OF THE SUPERNATURAL, HE SOON SEES IT IN E V E R Y. INCIDENT OF THE PERFORMANCE JOSEPH JASTROW, 1888

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As psychology was emerging as a formal science, various researchers published articles on the science of deception, with particular attention to the performance and perception of magic tricks. Psychologists were struggling to establish their discipline as a legitimate branch of science. This strive for acceptance applied both to the experimental psychologists such as Wundt and James, and to psychical researchers looking to investigate spiritualistic claims about thought reading or survival after death. Records of psychologists interested in applying psychological science to the study of magic can be traced back to 1888, when Joseph Jastrow wrote a short article on deception and illusion, with particular emphasis on conjuring tricks. Jastrow was a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Wisconsin from 1888 to 1927 and might be labelled the world's first 'popular psychologist'. His focus was on the general perception of psychology, using the scientific method to educate the lay public. He tirelessly promoted the science of psychology through various media, including formal papers, newspaper and magazine articles, public lectures, self-help books and even radio lectures. He also wrote on the topic of spiritualist frauds, Ouija boards, optical illusions (he was also responsible for introducing the duck-rabbit figure to psychology), belief and dreams. Jastrow collaborated with fellow experimental psychologists Hugo Munsterberg and G. Stanley Hall to present a psychology exhibit at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. And towards the end of his life, he attempted to publish a psychological analysis of Hitler and Nazi Germany.

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K E L L A R & H E R R M A N N These master magicians m e n also volunteered as research subjects for the psychologist loesph competed for audiences with spectacular stage performances, such l a s t r o w . A poster from 1897 (opposite) references Kellar's decapitation as the bullet-catching and spirit cabinet routines shown above. Both a c t , in which his severed head seemed to float above the stage.

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THESEPAGES M A G I C A N D M E L I E S The image above is from Georges Melies's 1902 movie La Voyage Dana La Lune CA Trip to the Moon'). The bottom image is from his 1907 film L'Eclipse du Soleil

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en Pfeifle Lune (The Eclipse: Courtship of the Sun and Moon). Seen opposite is a poster from 1891 for a fantasy spectacular. Melies purchased the Theatre Robert-Houdin in 1888.

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OVERLEAF M A G I C A L T H E A T R E Robert-Houdin founded the venue that bears his name in 1854, on the first floor of a Paris building on the Boulevard des Itallen& After buying the property,

Georges Melies worked on many stage illusions there, some of which eventually reappeared in his ground-breaking films, which often used complex sets similar to those used in a theatre,

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CONSORTU I MVAFFIC'HA : A C E M E N T PESEQVE

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THE P S Y C H I C A L RESEARCHERS

THE ' M AT E R I A L I Z I N G MEDIUM OF DUNDEE' The undervest shown here was employed

by the medium Helen Duncan to represent a spirit ectoplasm (but which bore a strong resemblance named Peggy during seances. Duncan herself is to cheesecloth). In 1944, she was convicted and shown far-right, emitting what she claimed to be imprisoned under the British Witchcraft Act of 1735.

I n many ways, society's relationship with paranormal phenomena is both constantly evolving and at the same time fundamentally static. Fashionable belief frameworks rise and fall, but these are usually just new labels for timeless concepts that emerge over and over again. As the table rapping and ectoplasmic phenomena that characterized the spiritualist movement waned in popularity, new pseudoscientific frameworks rose to take their place. Whereas paranormal manifestations had once been attributed to magnetism, psychics now pointed to atomic energy - and subsequently, quantum mechanics - to explain how they could apparently read thoughts, predict the future or manipulate objects with their minds. Repeatedly debunked paranormal concepts such as witchcraft and ectoplasm have proved surprisingly resilient - perennially declared dead by sceptics, only to rise again. You may be surprised to learn, for example, that the final two trials for witchcraft took place in the UK as late as 1944. The last of the convicted witches was a seventy-twoyear-old woman named Jane Rebecca Yorke (18721953), who for a modest fee had allegedly delivered reassuring messages from departed spirits to bereaved family members. Yorke was arrested in a sort of psychic sting operation, after she unknowingly put an undercover police officer in touch with the spirit of a fictional relative. She was summarily convicted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735, sentenced to pay £5 and ordered to promise the court that she would never do it again. The penultimate witchcraft conviction, that of a medium named Helen Duncan

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(1897-1956), had proved considerably more dramatic. Physical mediumship feats such as ectoplasmic manifestation had fallen increasingly out of fashion as the 20th century progressed, but Duncan, the 'Materializing Medium of Dundee', made this substance a feature of her seances. She also took paid work as a 'test medium' for scientists interested in investigating psychical phenomena, and gentlemanly researchers initially marvelled at her ability to produce ectoplasm, apparently from nowhere. It was later determined, by rather less courteous investigators, that Duncan was concealing rolls of cheesecloth in a variety of her bodily orifices. Today, the archives of Cambridge University Library still hold a sample of Duncan's alleged ectoplasm. The card accompanying the material (which is indistinguishable from fabric) notes that the sample had been 'captured' in 1939 from 'Mrs Helen Duncan, materializing medium' and that investigators at the time believed that the most likely explanation for its manifestation was that Duncan had 'secreted' it in her vagina. She also reportedly devised alternative methods of concealing 'ectoplasm' on her person that could confound even a full-body cavity search. The paranormal investigator Harry Price penned a particularly damning expose of Duncan under the title 'The Cheese-Cloth Worshippers' (1933), in which he revealed that, according to investigations conducted in his National Laboratory of Psychical Research, she appeared to have developed a technique for regurgitating cloth, which she would consume prior to her seances. Regurgitation as a standalone stunt was actually a relatively popular carnival act

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S P I R I T H A N D This plaster cast was created in 1925 from a wax mould of what was purported to be the hand of a materlialized spirit. Franek Kluski, a Polish medium, conducted the seance.

W A X U L M / E Kluski conducted a seance in Warsaw, Poland, during which this wax impression of a 'spirit hand' was taken. It has since been alleged that he confessed to faking such objects.

at the turn of the century: performers would swallow items and then vomit them up on command, by way of family entertainment. (The magician David Blaine recently reintroduced the general public to this classic effect by regurgitating live frogs as part of his 2016 television special.) In an effort to mount a defence against Price's accusations, Duncan and her husband suggested that she had actually been consuming the cloth 'unconsciously'. During one of her seances, she claimed to have received top-secret military intelligence from the ghost of a dead British sailor. On balance, it's more plausible that Duncan obtained the information from a leak in Westminster rather than directly from the cheesecloth, but regardless of the explanation, the wartime British government was deeply unamused. She was arrested and tried under the harshest law the prosecutors could dig up, which turned out to be a section of the Witchcraft Acts that related to fraudulently communing with spirits. Harry Price testified at her trial, and she was convicted and sentenced to nine months' imprisonment. By the time of Yorke and Duncan's convictions, paranormal researchers were already moving on from problems of mediumship and physical phenomena that had captivated researchers such as ZOllner, Crookes and Lodge. Methodological issues and outright deceptions continued to confound paranormal investigations well into the 20th century and beyond. Consistent accusations of fraud largely discredited early spiritualist demonstrations such as spirit rapping, ectoplasmic effects and slate writing, but in their place arose new phenomena, or at least new labels, such as

extra-sensory perception (ESP), remote viewing and psychokinesis. Paranormal research received a significant rebranding in the 1930s courtesy of the researcher Joseph Banks Rhine (1895-1980), who established America's first parapsychology laboratory at Duke University in 1927. Doctor Rhine, whose PhD was actually in botany, was tempted away from plant science towards psychical research after attending a lecture on spiritualism delivered by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that had been established in honour of the psychical investigator Richard Hodgson. Rhine began attending seances and investigating alleged paranormal phenomena 'in the wild', but soon grew frustrated by the uncontrolled conditions. Two of his notable early cases included the physical medium Mina 'Margery' Crandon (1888-1941) and Lady Wonder, a psychic horse. Rhine would denounce Crandon for 'brazen trickery', although he and his wife Louisa did endorse Lady Wonder's powers in a paper titled 'An Investigation of a Mind-Reading Horse' (1929). Rhine first began conducting formal paranormal research at Harvard under the tutelage of the psychologist William McDougall (1871-1938). McDougall had served as the president of the Society for Psychical Research and the American Society of Psychical Research. At Harvard, he occupied the chair that had been established by William James, and his research with Rhine was partially financed by the Richard Hodgson memorial fund. When McDougall moved to Harvard in 1927, he invited Rhine to join him in establishing a new laboratory.

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THE PARAPSYCHOLOGICAL INVESTIGATORS

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of medium Mary Marshall. It was often found that the 'ectoplasm' was actually cheesecloth, although dolls' heads, masks and egg whites were also used.

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THE PA R A P S Y C H O L O G I C A L I N V E S T I G ATO R S

L C 111 O N C A M E R A Evidence of ectoplasm t h a t were investigated (and photographed) by psychical rarely looks convincing in photographs. Irish medium r e s e a r c h e r William Jackson Crawford. He thought her genuine, Kathleen Goligher and some of her family held seances b u t Goligher was roundly debunked as a fraud by others.

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I N V E S T I G AT I N G 'MARCERY'Aboveare two photographs showing controls applied to the American medium Mina Crandon, who claimed to be able to manifest

a spirit named 'Margery'. Crandon is shown in séance on the opposite page. She is apparently producing ectoplasmic flows while in a trance-like state.

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T E L E P L A S M I C H A N D All the photographs seen here were taken during a seance with Mina Crandon. during which an mysterious hand appeared to emerge from the medium's groin area,

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lying motionless on the table before abruptly vanishing again. It only manifested when Crandon's husband was by her side. Closer investigation suggested that the object was a lump of animal liver.

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had now become her spirit guide. In due course, her dentist — Dr Frederick Caldwell—revealed that the Crandons had asked him how to use the wax to take fingerprint impressions,

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and that he had given them some that he had made himself. Unsurprisingly, his own prints matched those of Walter. The discovery came to light when E. E. Dudley w h o had once been

an office of the American Society for Psychical Research t o o k fingerprints from all those who had ever attended Crandon's seances. Samples of the thumbprints in question are shown here.

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THE PARAPSYCHOLOGICAL INVESTIGATORS

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EXTRA-SENSORY P E R C E P T I O N Joseph Rhine's book, in which he outlined the nature of his investigations

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into ESP at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, was originally published in 1934. Rhine's research methods and lack of scientific

Rhine wrote that he respected earlier attempts to conduct scientific research into paranormal phenomena, particularly noting his admiration for Oliver Lodge, whose thoughts on mediums Rhine considered to represent a 'masterpiece of scientific judgment'. Nonetheless, for his own lab Rhine chose to move away from the old terminology 'psychical' and embrace the label 'parapsychology', a term that had originally been suggested by the German philosopher and amateur magician Max Dessoir (1867-1947) in 1889. Rhine also distanced his work from spiritualist-style claims regarding survival after death, and focused instead on the concept of ESP, a phenomenon that he defined as 'perception without the function of recognized senses'. Within this category, he included general concepts such as telepathy (mind reading), clairvoyance (impossible visions across space and time), precognition (sensing future events) and other experiences such as possession, mediumship, fortune telling and dowsing. He also moved away from testing self-proclaimed mediums and focused instead on exploring the possibility of latent psychic powers in the general population. Rhine's most enduring experimental paradigm is probably his card-guessing task. Early psychical researchers had conducted mind-reading experiments using playing cards, but Rhine believed these to be unscientific. His reservations were unrelated to the fact that playing cards have a long history of being used deceptively in gambling and magic. Rather, he was concerned that card faces were not perceptually distinct enough—that it was relatively easy, for example, to mistake a King of Spades

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rigour were called into question while attempts by other scientists to replicate his studies failed to produce similar results.

for a ()peen of Spades. To this end, he worked with a perceptual psychologist, Karl Edward Zener (1903-64), to create a set of simple symbols that would be readily discernable. The original 'Zener cards' consisted of five symbols: a circle, cross, 'wavy' lines, a square and a five-pointed star. Over the course of decades, Rhine and his colleagues conducted thousands of trials to determine if participants could sense or predict the symbols on his cards when they were obscured from view. In 1934, he published his initial experiments in a book titled Extra-Sensory Perception. Rhine was convinced that his card experiments demonstrated definitively that participants could identify the symbols more accurately than chance guessing alone would predict, and that therefore they must be perceiving the cards via a psychic mechanism that evaded our current understandings of the laws of physics and biology. Critics, such as the psychologist Joseph Jastrow, pointed out that despite Rhine's new branding, the concept of ESP was not new, and the historical problems of fraud and methodological errors remained just as relevant as they had been for past psychical research programmes. The thrust of the argument against Rhine's ESP research was that pure chance and genuine psychic powers were not the only possible explanations for his results. Despite Rhine's calls for scientists to investigate a new form of psychic energy, sceptics pointed out numerous methodological and statistical issues that could provide alternative, more mundane explanations for his experiments. For example, in some experiments participants might have actually been able to glimpse

178 )

P S \ C H I C S T U D V Edyth Hull is shown here carrying out an ESP test, during which she matched nine out of twenty-five cards. The photograph first appeared in Life magazine in April 1940.

L E I N E R C A R D S Rhine is shown above conducting an experiment involving these well-known aids. He places a card down and the volunteer on the other side of the screen attempts to divine his choice.

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the symbols or to at least pick up on cues by watching the reactions of the experimenter. In other instances, poor shuffling techniques may have skewed the statistical analyses. To Rhine's credit, he continuously adapted his system in attempts to address various criticisms. However, the more controls he introduced, the less impressive his results became, and attempts to replicate his results in other laboratories consistently met with failure. In an echo of the spiritualist investigators before him, Rhine insisted that rejection of his results was due to irrational bigotry on the part of his critics; he even suggested that failed replications may have occurred because the very presence of sceptical thoughts might disrupt an individual's psychic abilities. Rhine continued to conduct ESP research throughout his lifetime. In the 1960s, he moved his lab from Duke to an independent institute—the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, which still exists today as the Rhine Research Center. It continues to produce a specialist academic, Journal of Parapsychology, maintains an extensive historical archive of parapsychological research and sells official Zener cards. Given the significant criticisms associated with Rhine's guessing experiments, modern parapsychologists have moved away from such tests, although cards remain entrenched in popular culture. One of Rhine's enduring legacies has been his assertion that psychic potential was highly prevalent in the general population. He estimated that as many as one in five people had the potential to develop significant ESP.

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THE PARAPSYCHOLOGICAL INVESTIGATORS

MASS ESP E X P E R I M E N T These drawings. produced during the mid to late 1940s, formed part of large-scale research by Dr. Donald I. West into potential

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mass telepathic abilities. Eventually, researchers concluded that there was little evidence for the widespread existence of latent ESP powers among the general population.

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THE PA R A P S Y C H O L O G I C A L I N V E S T I G ATO R S

E X P E R I M E N T A L P H O T O G R A P H Y Shown T h e y were produced between c. 1918 and 1932. The portrait above on these pages are a cross-section of images that were made during i s that of Dr Haley himself, taken on 8 December 1932 by Gilmore. research into spirit photography by Dr P. S. Haley and Earl Gilmore. O f the photographs shown opposite, two of the more visually

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striking examples include: an image created by allowing the ball of a thumb to rest on sensitized emulsion beneath developing solution, allegedly showing 'zones of energy about periphery' (third row, left)

and a series of 'skotographs' produced by Dr Haley by allowing his fingertips to rest on printing paper beneath the developer (bottom row, right).

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FESTING THE NATION'S P S Y C H I C P O W E R S I n the 10 March 1939 edition of John Olondon's Weekly magazine, Harry Price proposed that a national test should

be carried out using his Telepatha cards. The editor of the magazine agreed, and a competition began in the following issue. Shown above are a range of score cards from tests carried out that same year.

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THE PA R A P S Y C H O L O G I C A L I N V E S T I G ATO R S

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for initial experiments, in 1930, Rhine and his colleagues used other packs, including some with alphabetical or numerical faces. Above right: the

While the science behind this statement is, at best, highly questionable, the concept nevertheless connects with the general public's enduring fascination with paranormal phenomena. He also encouraged people to conduct their own parapsychological experiments, and made Zener card-testing sheets available to the general public. 'Investigations on such simple lines', he argued, 'does no one any harm' and 'is commonly good entertainment'. Many magicians have certainly taken that sentiment to heart. While Zener cards have fallen out of vogue in parapsychology laboratories, they are a central prop in many contemporary magic performances and are especially popular among mentalists—magicians whose acts are specifically framed around the idea of fictional psychic powers. Parapsychological investigations after Rhine have moved on from card guessing, although the question of whether they reflect scientific progress remains controversial. One notable development has been another rebranding: since the 1940s, parapsychologists have used the term 'psi' as a general umbrella term to encompass any paranormal phenomenon regarded as inexplicable by contemporary science. As with investigations of spiritual manifestations and ESP, psi investigations have continued the well-established pattern of extraordinary claims that are followed by resounding methodological criticisms. For example, in the 1970s and 1980s the physicist Helmut Schmidt (1928-2011) attempted to address the issues with Rhine's card-shuffling methodology by substituting random number generators for cards; he claimed that

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top row here constitutes the original Zener cards. The star and wavy lines changed over time. Rhine called the bottom two rows simply 'ESP cards'.

individuals could psychically influence the number generators in ways that were significantly different from chance. Two other physicists, Russell Targ (b. 1934) and Harold Puthoff (b. 1936), claimed to have established the reality of psi with demonstrations of remote viewing -- the ability of laboratory participants, apparently isolated in a test environment, to psychically glean information about distant locations in the outside world. In both instances, critics—such as the psychologist James Alcock (b. 1942) and the statistician and magician Ray Hyman (b. 1928) — were able to identify significant flaws in the studies' methods and analyses that rendered the researchers' conclusions highly untenable. The 1970s marked a resurgence of interest in paranormal research. Even the United States Army concluded that they were suffering from a psi gap, leaving them potentially vulnerable to psychic attack from the Soviet Union. They set out to plug that gap with a series of outlandish programmes to weaponize potential psychic phenomena, which came to be known collectively as the Stargate Project. It ran secretly from 1978 until it was shuttered in 1995, following an independent review concluding that years of experiments had collectively failed to establish the reality of paranormal phenomena, let alone provide any practical value. In 2017, the CIA released the project's records online. They show how the army explored a variety of failed applications, from using remote viewing as an espionage tool to attempting to use psychokinesis as a weapon, a practice they hoped to hone by instructing psychics to stare at goats and try to stop their hearts with the power of their minds.

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were simply taking part in a survey. The US Army attempted to exclude participants who may have skewed the research because they were either

The documents also reveal that one of the civilian contractors who had been recruited into the Stargate Project was an Israeli named Uri Geller (b. 1946). Before being taken on as a potential psychic weapon to be aimed by the US military at the Soviet Union, Geller had already achieved international notoriety with highly publicized assertions that he had supernatural psychic abilities. He claimed to possess a variety of paranormal skills, including dowsing, psychokinesis and telepathy. His signature psychokinetic act was to bend spoons and other cutlery, seemingly using only the power of his mind. In a particularly deft example of showmanship, Geller would sometimes invite television audiences watching him at home to take out their own silverware, which he promised he would attempt to bend from the television studio. Geller claims that one female TV viewer attempted to sue him, on the basis that she became pregnant shortly after watching his demonstration, and believed that his remote metal-bending powers had disrupted her intrauterine device. One of his first major breaks occurred when the parapsychologist Andrija Puharich (1918-95) endorsed him as a genuine psychic. Puharich brought him to the USA, where Geller proceeded to mystify American television audiences with apparently paranormal feats. According to the parapsychologist, Geller represented something entirely new in the history of paranormal phenomena. Based on interviews conducted while Geller was under hypnosis, he concluded that Geller's psychic powers were the result of an extraterrestrial intelligence originating from the distant planet Hoova,

too closed or too open to psychic experiences. The project was abandoned in 1995. These illustrations were produced during research.

and that his powers were beamed from a slightly less distant spaceship. Geller's numerous critics have included an array of magicians and scientists who argue that these phenomena are not new but simply another example of magic illusions being fraudulently presented as miracles. Perhaps Geller's most vocal critic has been the magician Randall James Hamilton Zwinge, better known as James Randi (b. 1928). Following Houdini, he is the magician who has most aggressively investigated and contested supernatural claims. He performed around the world as a magician and escape artist under the stage name The Amazing Randi' and throughout the mid-20th century was a regular fixture on US and Canadian television, appearing on various programmes including his own The Amazing Randi Show and the children's series Wonderama. Randi cemented his reputation as a debunker in 1972, when he publicly clashed with Uri Geller. He replicated Geller's psychic demonstrations, including the ability to apparently bend metal without physical contact. In 1986, Randi was awarded a McArthur Genius Grant in recognition of his efforts as a paranormal investigator who combined scientific methods with his knowledge of conjuring techniques to educate the general public about the dangers of psychics, faith healers and other quacks. Following his denouncement of Geller, Randi exposed television evangelist Peter Popoff (b. 1946). The latter claimed to receive psychic insight about his audience members by way of divine inspiration, and used these demonstrations to inspire his followers to donate to his ministry.

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R A D E 11 / N R Is F R I C K Geller has admirers within the t o by the methods he claims to use, then he is the Only person in the ranks of The Magic Circle itself. David Berglas, a former president of the w o r l d who can do it. If on the other hand he is a magician or a trickster organization, once commented If...he genuinely does what he claims o r a con-man, he is also phenomenal t h e best there has ever been.'

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P O L I L I U — L I S T ' C A S E The pictures on these pages were taken during October and November 1977 at 284 Green Street, the home of the Hodsgson family in Enfield, north London. From that

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year to 1979, two of Peggy Hodgson's daughters Janet and Margaret — reported seeing toys flying through the air, furniture moving (including chairs overturning by themselves) and hearing voices and knocks on

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I walls. The incidents drew the attention of the national press and the Society for Psychical Research. Two SPR members, Guy Lyon Playfair and Maurice Grosse, visited the house and reported witnessing

some curious disturbances, including the two daughters apparently levitating several metres off the ground. Although believing there was an 'entity' in the house, they also suspected the girls of trickery.

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E S C A P O L O G I S T Seen here peering out from a sealed coffin in a E N T O M B E D I N I C E Randi crawls out from an ice London swimming pool on 14 October 1958, the Amazing Randi was about s t r u c t u r e on Boston Common, USA, on 29 August 1974. He had to try to break his own endurance record of staying two hours under water, b e e n entombed for a record-breaking 45 minutes, 8 seconds.

Randi and a team of investigators electronically intercepted the preacher's transmissions, proving that Popoff was actually being fed information by his wife via a wireless earpiece, a trick that had previously been used by entertainers such as the magician Alexander (1880-1954). Randi officially retired in 2015, but his charity, the James Randi Foundation, continues to support causes related to critical thinking and scientific reasoning. Today, contemporary performers such as the magicians Penn (b. 1955) and Teller (b. 1948) and the mentalist Derren Brown (b. 1971) have continued to make public exposures of fraudulent pseudoscientific and paranormal claims a staple of their acts. Randi's efforts to combat psychic fraud were not limited to television personalities. He was particularly critical of the general practices of contemporary parapsychological researchers. And in 1979, he orchestrated an elaborate hoax to showcase his critiques. Randi set out to deceive investigators in this field—not because he wanted to prove the existence of paranormal abilities, but because he wanted to reveal the limitations of research methods. The hoax, titled Project Alpha, targeted the McDonnell Parapsychology Laboratory at Washington University. By the 1970s, in the wake of figures such as Uri Geller, modern paranormal concepts such as telekinesis and psychokinesis (the apparent ability to manipulate objects using the power of the mind without physical intervention) had become of great interest within parapsychology circles. The McDonnell Laboratory publicly advertised for psychics, and Randi secretly arranged for two pseudo-psychics, Steve Shaw

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(b. 1960) and Michael Edwards (b. 1961), to present themselves as volunteers. (Shaw still works as a magician, under the pseudonym ‘Banachele.) The young men purported to have genuine psychic powers and took every opportunity to use magicstyle tricks to deceive the laboratory's investigators and confound the results of their assessments. While the laboratory never actually issued any formal statement declaring that Shaw and Edwards were genuinely psychic, they continued to test the men for almost four years, beginning in 1979. In 1983, Randi held a press conference in which the two men demonstrated their 'powers' in front of reporters — then he publicly announced that Shaw and Edwards were frauds. The resulting publicity contributed to the loss of funding and eventual closure of the McDonnell Laboratory. Randi's hoax is a fascinating case study in how a magician can influence a scientific investigation. On one hand, critics argued that Randi's orchestrated deception was itself unethical—and indeed, if Randi had been a scientific researcher, he would surely have been subject to censure by professional and academic institutions. On the other hand, as an outside actor he was able to make a dramatic and powerful point about the potential pitfalls of attempting to conduct paranormal research with human participants. Parapsychological research is not nearly as prevalent today as it was in the 1970s and 1980s, but psi-related controversies still arise in the 21st century. In 2011, the psychologist Daryl Bern (b. 1938) published the results of a series of experiments that, he claimed, revealed significant precognitive abilities

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P R O J E C T A L P H A Above (from left) Steve Shaw, Mike Edwards and James Randi. The latter employed Shaw and Edwards to infiltrate

the McDonnell Parapsychology Laboratory's studies into psychic powers. For four years, the duo worked to convince researchers that

AS A MAGICIAN, I WAS ABLE TO SEE TWO THINGS VERY CLEARLY-2 A) HOW PEOPLE CAN BE FOOLED, AND B) HOW THEY FOOLED THEMSELVES. THE SECOND IS FAR MORE IMPORTANT° JAMES RAND!, 200'7

they were uniquely gifted, but at a 1983 press conference they admitted they had been cheating. Not long afterwards, the laboratory was closed.

in his university participants. For example, one of his studies explored the time reversed effect' of rehearsal on memory. In conventional rehearsal experiments, volunteers are shown a list of words, and then subsequently asked to recall them. Participants tend to perform better on recall tests when they are given the opportunity to rehearse the words before they are examined. The idea that practising beforehand can enhance performance is relatively uncontroversial. But in Bern's trials, he reported that participants' performance on memory tests could be enhanced if they rehearsed the words after they had been tested — a result that appears to violate conventional scientific understanding not just of human memory, but of causality itself. In another experiment, he reported that participants were able to guess the location of hidden erotic pictures at levels greater than chance, which he suggested was evidence that people are able to precognitively detect images of explicit sexual acts. His article was published in the American Psychological Association's peer-reviewed Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and, unsurprisingly, has generated heated criticism. Subsequent attempts to replicate Bern's results have met with consistent failure, leading to suggestions that his striking findings are attributable to the way he collected and reported his data, rather than psi. So far, Daryl Bern's experiments have not made many researchers rethink the fundamental nature of causality, although they have made many psychologists reconsider their publication ( i ) standards for statistical analyses.

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ABOVE L AY I N G ON OF HANDS Achristianrituai

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invoking the Holy Spirit, this practice is also commonly linked with healing. These photos were taken in Kentucky in 1946.

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OPPOSITE A F T E R M AT H OF A H E A L I N G Watched by a curious child, a woman lies in repose on the floor of a church at the end of a faith-healing service.

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F O O L I N G T H E E Y E Above left in this d i m e n s i o n a l shape - either as a set of steps that can simple example of an optical illusion the staircase b e ascended from right to left, or as overhanging figure can be interpreted as an ambiguous three- s t e p s viewed from beneath. Above right: this pile

I n 1879, American neurologist George M. Beard (1839-83) predicted that methodical scrutiny of spiritualist claims could lead society to a radical new scientific revolution. This new breakthrough would not offer us insight into the world of the dead, but rather the living human nervous system. Once we fully understood our cognition and perception, Beard prophesized, 'all the world would know that spirits dwell in the cerebral cells' and that 'it was not our houses but our brains that are haunted'. Today, experimental psychology is an established scientific discipline, and researchers have a much richer understanding of the psychological explanations that can underpin seemingly miraculous phenomena. While these explanations can never truly rule out the supernatural, they can offer more parsimonious solutions — plausible alternatives that build upon our current understanding of the natural world. In promoting his ideas about fourth-dimensional spirits, Johann Milner maintained that attempts to analyze his studies with mediums by means of natural explanations were 'scarcely less wonderful than are the facts themselves'. One might adapt his words to argue that the explanations related to tricks of our minds can be even more wonderful than supernatural explanations. There is even a sub-discipline of modem experimental psychology associated with questions relating to individuals' bizarre and extraordinary experiences: 'anomalistic psychology'. Dr Christopher French (b. 1956), who founded the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths University in London, has written that this discipline 'attempts to explain paranormal and related beliefs and

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of boxes can be viewed as consisting of either six or seven blocks. The two left-hand figures demonstrate two ways of viewing the groups.

ostensibly paranormal experiences in terms of known (or knowable) psychological and physical factors'. Anomalistic psychologists seek to apply knowledge from other areas of psychology and neuroscience to events that may seem to be paranormal. For example, one classic spooky experience that many people report is that of seeing ghostly figures appear in their bedrooms at night. They report waking up to witness shadowy figures with glowing eyes, or to find their deceased loved one sitting at the foot of their bed. More alarmingly, sometimes individuals report being physically assaulted by these late-night visitors, and even being held down or smothered. Such encounters feel very real, and are often attributed to supernatural phenomena, including ghosts, demons, witches and, more recently, aliens. To anyone who has experienced these apparitions first hand, it can feel like there is no rational explanation. However, it turns out that even normal healthy adult brains do not always transition smoothly between sleep and wakefulness. As a result, it is actually perfectly natural that, in some instances, content from our dreams can intrude on our consciousness when we are on the edges of sleep. Such hallucinations are classified based on when they occur in relationship to sleep cycles. Those that happen as you are drifting off are 'hypnogogic', while those that happen as you are waking up are referred to as 'h3rpnopompic'. Even stranger, and potentially more frightening, is 'sleep paralysis'. Think of this as the opposite of sleepwalking. Sleep paralysis occurs when a person wakes up and is unable to move. Again, this is a perfectly normal neurological phenomenon. It is not even particularly uncommon. Experts

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T W O I N O N E Above left: both figures can be viewed either as white figures on a black background or as black figures on a white

background. Only when the second figure is seen t o shift from foreground to background, showing as white on black do the four vertical lines appear t h a t we can perceive visual images differently parallel. Above right: aspects of this design seem e v e n when they do not physically change.

[SPIRITISM'S] WORST E V I L . HAS B E E N . T H E FOSTERING OF THE UNSCIENTIFIC SPIRIT7 THE ATTEMPTING TO SEEK TRUTH THROUGH THE EMOTIONS RATHER THAN THROUGH THE INTELLECT° GEORGE BEARD 1879

estimate that as many as 50 per cent of us will experience sleep paralysis at least once in our lifetime, and around 75 per cent of these sleep paralysis episodes will be accompanied by vivid hallucinations. Sleep-related hallucinations are just one of many ways that healthy adults can experience vivid hallucinatory phenomena. One fairly recent line of research illustrates how you can potentially simulate your very own apparitional experience, using a simple mirror. In 2010, Giovanni Battista Caputo, a cognitive psychologist, reported a phenomenon that he dubbed 'The Strange Face in the Mirror Illusion'. Caputo described a simple new method of inducing a strong visual hallucination in healthy, sober participants — and, conveniently, it's a method that anyone can easily try for themselves at home. To experience the effect, you simply need a dark room, a mirror and a light source. For most, a bathroom and a flashlight app on a cell phone should do the trick. Either wait until dark or black out the bathroom windows, then turn on your flashlight. You need to be able to see your own face in the mirror, but the light should be dim, about at the level that you can only perceive black and white. You can probably accomplish this by setting your phone on the floor behind you. Your face should be faintly illuminated, but the light source itself should not be visible in the mirror, i.e. you should not actually be able to see the reflection of the phone when you are looking at your face. Once you have set the stage, pick a spot on your face y o u r forehead or your nose. The precise location is not important, but it's crucial that while you stare at this spot, you try your best to avoid moving your eyes or blinking.

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I T H E T R O X L E R E F F E C T This phenomenon is named after the Swiss physician Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler. If you fix your eyes on the cross in the centre of this image, and keep them

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there with minimal blinking or motion, the colours of the image should gradually fade from your awareness. Today, this is recognized as a form of neural adaptation.

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ANAMALOUS M O T I O N I L L U S I O N Akiyoshi Kitaoka, a professor in the Department of Psychology at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan, creates extraordinary

artworks that appear to have moving elements within them. In this piece. title Rotating Snakes. the circular serpents seem to turn spontaneously and independently of each other.

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OPTICAL I L L U S I O N S OF MOTION These images were included in an essay by H. P. Bowditch and G. Stanley Hall that appeared in the Journal orPhysiology,

vol. 3, no. 5 (1892). The two scientists described a series of experiments in which they successfully induced subjective experiences of illusory motion in participants.

\OXFORD IN THE

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V I S U A L E C C E N T R I C I T E S The top- t h e ' in the sentence. They will also perceive two overlapping most image represents both an illusion of omission and of t r i a n g l e s in the background to the text, when in reality the commission. Many viewers will initially fail to notice the extra f i g u r e consists of three V-shapes and three 'Pac-Man' figures.

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E N T E RTA I N I N G AND EDUCATING For some forty

A C O N J U R E R A T W O R K The (now-retired) magician and debunking scourge of fraudulent psychics, lames Randi, performs a magic trick.

years now, the magicians Penn and Teller have been internationally renowned for their comedy magic show and their efforts as debunkers of fraud.

too faintly, nor is it presented too quickly. Rather, it seems to be hidden—or rendered invisible—by a lack of expectation. Illusions of omission demonstrate that simply looking, or directing one's gaze at something, does not necessarily result in noticing. The second type of illusion demonstrated here is an illusion of commission—the experience of 'seeing' something that does not really exist. The bottom image on the previous page illustrates that the two triangles apparently presented in the top image are, in fact, illusory. This part of the image is an example of a Kanizsa Triangle, named for the Italian artist and psychologist Gaetano Kanizsa (1913-93), who first presented the illusion in 1955. Even though the image is actually constructed of three 'V' shapes and three 'Pac-Man' shapes, their alignment produces the robust illusory experience of contours or 'phantom edges'. This impression is so powerful that such imaginary contours have been shown to activate the same brain regions as real contours. Illusions of commission demonstrate that our perceptual experiences are not simply constructed using information from the world around us; these experiences are also influenced by other cognitive factors. To put it another way, what you 'see' is not only derived from your direct sensory experiences but is also composed of memories and guesswork. Another term researchers use to describe these illusory images is amodal perception', which refers to perceptual experiences that are not directly derived from environmental information. Both the illusion of omission and the illusion of commission represent something that researchers refer to as 'top-down processing', perceptions that

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are derived from internal mental sources, like memories and expectations. By contrast, 'bottomup processing' is derived from information that we have picked up from our environment. Although it feels as though our perceptions are faithfully reproduced bottom-up processes, in fact much of what we experience as external reality is the product of a combination of both top-down and bottom-up processes operating simultaneously. The third effect produced by the image is the fact that we find the first two illusions to be unexpected and surprising. For those that experience them, the processes of missing the 'the' or 'seeing' the triangle edges can feel alarming. People who fail to experience the illusion might be surprised that others are prone to it. The discrepancies between our expectations about our own perceptions can be categorized as metacognitive illusions. Metacognition simply refers to our beliefs and knowledge of our own cognitive processes, or 'thinking about thinking'. Thus, metacognitive illusions are false beliefs that people hold about their own thought processes. The concept of metacognitive illusions is particularly relevant to any consideration of extraordinary or apparently supernatural experiences. The processes of perceiving and remembering the world around us comes so easily and naturally that they can be mistakenly dismissed as basic and uncomplicated. In reality, these processes involve highly complex biological and computational mechanisms. Before you can perceive the figure in the previous example, you must first direct your gaze towards the image on the page; light must bounce off

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A FACE I N T H E CLOUDS This image is a demonstration of pareidolia - the phenomenon of perceiving patterns (in this case, a human face) among random stimuli.

THE VISUAL BRAIN DOES NOT RECEIVE OBJECTS, BUT ONLY BITS AND PIECES OF EVIDENCE FOR INFERRING OR GUESSING WHAT MIGHT BE OUT THERE, RICHARD CRECORY, 2009

H E A D O N A P L A T T E R A modem decapitation illusion. This effect utilizes deliberately positioned mirrors to cause the lower portion of the subject to apparently vanish from sight.

the page and enter your retina. From there, the light is transduced into chemical and electrical energy. This energy is wired through your optic nerve, travelling from your eyeballs to the back of your head, where your brain can begin to process it. This processing involves a variety of brain structures composed of millions of nerve cells. Not only is incoming visual information synthesized with information from your other senses, it is also compared with internally generated information — your existing knowledge and your future predictions. Taken together, these elements construct what is, for you, a conscious experience. All of this feels effortless. This itself is a metacognitive illusion that is sometimes referred to as the Grand Illusion. One of the most interesting problems that has emerged from empirical research into such experiences is the question of how much artificial illusions created under laboratory conditions relate to people's day-to-day, real-life experiences. To what extent can we generalize conclusions drawn from examples such as the Oxford in the the Spring' image, which features two-dimensional representations of simple text and geometric shapes? Increasingly, scientific researchers are turning to magic tricks to help answer these questions. Until recently, very few psychologists had conducted experiments involving magic tricks. And the experiments that were conducted tended to focus on using magic tricks as models for anomalous experiences. For example, in 1944, two psychologists, Fredric Marcuse and Morton Bitterman (1921-2011), introduced their university psychology students to a

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IT TURNS OUT THAT PRETTY MUCH ALL OF OUR PERCEPTION IS AN ILLUSION, WHETHER WE'RE WALKING DOWN THE STREET OR ATTEMPTING TO SUSS THE LATEST CARD TRICK° GUSTAV KUHN, 2O16 •

pair of special guest lecturers—pioneers of psychical research. The lecturers proceeded to demonstrate 'genuine' psychic phenomena, including mind reading and the apparent manifestation of an apparition during a dark seance. At the end of the lecture, more than half the students indicated that they 'were convinced of the reality of the psychical phenomenon' they had just witnessed. The experimenters then revealed that the demonstration was a hoax, magic tricks designed to demonstrate how convincing fraudulent spiritualists could be. Almost forty years later, in 1980, Victor Benassi and Barry Singer conducted a similar pseudo-psychic demonstration for their university psychology class. In this case, instead of a spiritualist demonstration they presented the students with a psychic, Craig Reynolds, who proceeded to demonstrate his powers by psychokinetically bending a metal rod. Once again, a significant majority of students were led to believe that they had witnessed a genuine show of paranormal ability. More recently, throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the magician and psychologist Richard Wiseman (b. 1966) has shown that modern audiences can still be duped into confusing magic tricks with genuine events. Researchers continue to use magicians' routines to investigate anomalous experiences, but also to provide insight into everyday perceptions. Experimental psychology is currently in the midst of a science-of-magic renaissance. Since the year 2000, the body of experimental scientific literature on the topic of performance magic has more than quadrupled, in comparison to all of the experimental work published prior to the turn of the 21st century. Despite a strong interest in magic among early psychologists, performance magic was largely overlooked by most of their 20th-century equivalents. Some historians of science have suggested that psychologists avoided the concept of magic in order to help distance their academic field from what they felt were the unscientific endeavours of psychical research or parapsychology. But today, researchers are

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increasingly turning to magic tricks to develop new ways of investigating the ways people see, reason and remember. Around the world, these illusory feats are being used in classrooms, laboratories, academic conferences and increasingly featuring in peerreviewed scientific publications. In 2007, the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, a professional academic organization consisting of psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers, hosted a conference in Las Vegas that featured talks by magicians including the Amazing Randi and Raymond Teller (of Penn and Teller). In London in 2017, a new organization, the Science of Magic Association, held its first annual conference in London. The conference featured the legendary magician Juan Tamariz (b. 1942), along with an international mix of magicians, academics and academic magicians, all interested in exploring and sharing new research designed enhance our understanding of the nature, function and underlying mechanisms of magic. Our scientific understanding of the psychological procedures underpinning illusions has come a long way since the rise of spiritualism and the investigations of early psychical researchers, but there is still much be learned. In many cases, the techniques that have been developed by magicians have arguably anticipated scientific discoveries related to human perception and cognition. The 'Princess Card Trick' is an excellent illustration of this idea. Conveniently for us, it can be readily adapted to the printed page. (Be sure to try the trick before reading on to see how it is achieved!) First, take a moment to look at the opposite page and select one of the cards. Hold it in your mind. Now, actually close your eyes, and try to visualize the card. Then, turn to the next page. You can see that there are now only three cards. Your card is gone. The effect of this trick is that magician is somehow able to divine one of an array of items that the spectator merely thinks of. The method behind this trick involves the substitution of all the cards, between the first

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THE P R I N C E S S C A R D T R I C K CPART 1.) Magicians have long understood a n d played on t h e foibles and fallibilities of human cognition. By way of illustration: pick a card!

First, select one of the four cards that are pictured on this page. Take a moment to properly fix the image of that card firmly in your mind. When you have done so. turn to the next page.

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THE P R I N C E S S C A R D T R I C K , PA R T Only three cards remain: your card is gone! Magicians have been performing this trick for hundreds of years, but psychologists are

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only recently coming to appreciate what it reveals about human attention and the concept of 'change blindness'. For further explanation, see pages 208-11.

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THIS IDEA OF THE HAND BEING FASTER THAN THE EYE IS COMPLETELY WRONG. SPEED HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ITO IT'S ALL ATTENTION CONTROL°

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and second displays. Page 209 depicts the Jack of Diamonds, King of Spades, ()peen of Hearts and the Queen of Clubs, while page 210 depicts the Jack of Hearts, King of Clubs and Queen of Diamonds. This trick was first described in print in 1909 by Thomas Nelson Downs, who credits its invention to his fellow magician, Henry Hardin. The original version involved showing spectators physical cards, but the fundamental principle of swapping the entire array of cards, while apparently only taking one, is the same as the trick you have just experienced. Considering the illusion from the perspective of experimental psychology, one might describe this as another example of an illusion of omission. More specifically, it is an illustration of something called 'change blindness'. This refers to a phenomenon wherein viewers will fail to detect changes across scenes, when these changes are accompanied by a visual disruption. The term 'change blindness' was first introduced by Professor Ronald Rensink and his colleagues who, in 1997, developed a simple visual task called the flicker paradigm. The flicker paradigm involves showing participants a series of images in a loop. The viewer sees one photograph for a fraction of second, and is then flashed with an image of a blank screen, before being presented with a second (modified) photograph. The modified photograph is followed by another blank screen, then this sequence repeats itself until the participant is able to identify the difference between the first and second photographs. Of note here is the fact that the 'Princess Card Trick' pre-dates formal introduction of the concept of change blindness by eighty-eight years. In other words, magicians developed a method of producing a robust, reproducible illusion based on principles that would not be formally recognized by scientists for nearly a century. This is not to suggest that magicians necessarily have a complete understanding of the underlying cognitive mechanisms that underpin change blindness; such comprehension is entirely unnecessary to perform the trick. But it does

support the argument that literature concerning magic performances represents a rich and relatively untapped resource for researchers interested in human cognition and perception. Another interesting aspect of change blindness as exemplified by this routine is the fact that when it works, the trick appears inconceivable—because the spectators do not believe that it is possible for all the cards to change without their having noticed. This apparent impossibility is another example of a metacognitive illusion. There is even an established scientific label for this specific instance: change blindness blindness. That is not a typo. Change blindness blindness describes the idea that most people (including psychologists) tend to overestimate their own ability to detect changes. And this line of research gets stranger. In 2013, a team of psychologists at Lund University in Sweden created a new kind of change blindness paradigm by incorporating a magic trick into the design of their experiment. In the study, participants were presented with two different playing-card-sized photographs of faces and asked which face they considered to be the more attractive. Next, the researcher apparently passed the participant the photo they had selected, and the participant was asked to explain why they had made their choice. Crucially, during some trials the researcher actually used sleight of hand to pass the participant the card they did not select as being the most attractive. Not only did the majority of their participants fail to detect the switch, but they would proceed to explain to the researcher the reasons that they had made the choice they did not actually make! This phenomenon has been described as 'choice blindness' and, in the years since that first study, has been extended well beyond subjective assessments of attractiveness. Choice blindness has been shown to encompass aesthetic decisions, moral evaluations and consumer choices. Recently, it has been shown that a similar task could be used to manipulate political attitudes

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THE M I S D I R E C T I O N PARADIGM- A N ILLUSION O F O M I S S I O N Originally developed by

cognitive psychologist Gustav Kuhn of Goldsmiths inattentional blindness (looking but failing to see) University, London, this trick represents one of a n d misdirection. The viewer's eye is distracted the first psychology experiments to explicitly link a n d fails to see the lighter drop from the hand.

—getting conservative participants to explain liberal viewpoints, and liberal participants to explain conservative viewpoints. The development of choice blindness experiments is just one example of how magic tricks can be used to advance scientific research. Sleight of hand and other deceptive feats have been adapted to a variety of paradigms that scientists have used to investigate many aspects of human behaviour. Magicians have effectively spent millennia experimenting with methods for reliably inducing convincing, immersive illusions that are designed to be indistinguishable from real events. Many of them have written extensively about the theory and practice of their craft, and adapting this vast, often somewhat informal literature, is not always a straightforward task. One conceptual framework that has proved useful for researchers is the idea that any magic trick can be conceptualized as consisting of both an 'effect' and a 'method'. The 'effect' is the subjective experience of the spectators, while the 'method' refers to the actual mechanisms that are used to accomplish the trick. For a trick to be effective, the magician must present the effect, while at the same time concealing the true method. The manipulations used to accomplish this concealment can be generally referred to as 'misdirection'. When a magic trick is performed well, and the misdirection successfully conceals the method, the spectators should have experienced something that is seemingly inexplicable, a moment that some magicians refer to as an 'illusion of impossibility'. For instance, one of the first tricks that many magicians learn to perform is the 'vanish'

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of a small object, such as a coin. The effect is that the coin appears to inexplicably pass out of existence. One method for accomplishing this is a technique that is referred to as a false transfer t h e performer appears to move the coin from one hand to the other, while secretly retaining it in the first hand. When misdirection is used effectively, the spectators will believe that they saw the magician simply close a hand around the coin, then open it to reveal the coin had disappeared. They would have failed to notice, or remember, that the performer even brought the hands together, and for them, the coin appears to have inexplicably winked out of existence—an event that they know to be physically impossible. Dr Gustav Kuhn, a magician turned cognitive psychologist, has developed a variety of experiments using misdirection and sleight-of-hand techniques to explore how we perceive the world around us h o w misdirection can cause someone to fail to see what is right in front of them, or to even to see an object that is not really there. Several of his experiments implement a technology known as eye-tracking, which allows scientists to monitor the gaze of participants as they watch a magician perform magic tricks. In one study, an audience watched a performer apparently 'vanish' a cigarette and lighter. The method used to accomplish the trick was simple: the magician simply dropped the cigarette so that it fell beneath the table, where it was hidden from the viewer. Remarkably, the eye-tracking data revealed that some in the audience would actually look directly at the falling cigarette and still fail to perceive it. The experiment provided a new example of a complex illusion of omission,

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Kuhn, based on a method first described by Norman Triplett in 1909, this trick shows how misdirection techniques can cause spectators to

extending previous work on inattentional blindness. Another of Kuhn's experiments utilized a trick called the 'Vanishing Ball Illusion' to demonstrate the same concept. Participants watched a video of a magician tossing a small red ball into the air and catching it. After two tosses, the magician appeared to throw the ball into the air once more—only this time, rather than dropping back into his hand, the ball appeared to vanish. In reality, instead of tossing the ball on the third throw, he pantomimed the action of throwing while concealing the ball in his hand. Participants who experienced the illusion mistakenly believed that they had seen the ball leave the magician's hand before vanishing in the air. The eye-tracking data revealed that the illusion was enhanced when the magician pretended to follow the imaginary ball into the air with own eyes, and that people were more likely to be deceived if they watched the magician's face while he pretended to watch the ball. Kuhn and his co-authors have argued that people perceive the 'phantom' ball because their minds are inaccurately attempting to predict visual information—their expectation that the ball will leave the hand and rise into the air is so strong that people can actually confuse this expectation with a real image. Of course, there's more to magic than simply manipulating others' visual awareness. Jay Olson and his colleagues at the McGill University used magic tricks to develop a paradigm designed to study the concept of mind control, or at least the illusion of it. These experiments involved an elaborate hoax in which participants were told that the researchers had developed a machine that could insert thoughts

perceive illusory objects. The viewer's eye follows the magician's upward gaze (figure 6A), leading to the assumption that the ball has disappeared.

into their minds. The participants were asked to freely select any number while they sat inside a brain scanner; they then told the experimenter what number they had been thinking of. When they emerged from the scanner, the experimenter 'revealed' that the number they had been thinking of was the same number that the machine had been programmed to insert. In reality, the brain scanner was fake and the revelation of the inserted number was accomplished by a variation on a slate-writing trick that S. J. Davey had used in the 19th century. Nonetheless, before the hoax was revealed to them, many participants reported having the strong impression that the machine was controlling their mind. Ironically, these powerful feelings were entirely generated by the participants' own minds. Olson and his colleagues believe that this type of research may help uncover new ways of harnessing placebo-style effects to provide real help to patients. There is also a small but fascinating body of research that involves pairing magic tricks with neuroimaging technology. A team of researchers led by Ben A. Parris showed test volunteers silent videos of magic tricks, while they recorded their brain activity using a functional magnetic resonance imaging IfMRD machine. While the research is still somewhat preliminary, results indicated that witnessing a magic trick seems to activate regions of the human prefrontal cortex that are generally associated with detecting violations of expectations. Such experiments have the potential to help reveal how the human brain generates feelings of belief and disbelief in ( i ) response to anomalous perceptual experiences.

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I n my work as an experimental psychologist, much of my research has involved exposing volunteer participants to vivid illusionary experiences. In some ways, this has been reminiscent of my experience of performing as a professional magician—a feeling that is strengthened by the fact that the designs of my experiments have often been directly inspired by first-hand knowledge of sleight of hand. Like a magic performance, a psychology experiment involves a carefully scripted procedure; the participant, like an audience member at a magic show, is often unaware of the real work that goes into the set-up. Unlike most magic performances, all psychology experiments ultimately involve an explicit 'debriefing'. In many cases, experimenters do not initially reveal the precise nature and goals of the research to those CODA

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taking part. Such information can potentially bias the volunteers' responses and distort the results of the test. But, at the same time, experimental psychologists have an ethical obligation to present their work truthfully. The solution is not to reveal the full nature of the test until those involved have completed it. In the case of illusion research, this can involve confronting participants with the fact that what they think just happened is very different from what actually happened. The test volunteers often express disbelief, and are sometimes outright dismayed, when the debrief first begins. They wonder how they could possibly have made what now seem to them obvious errors. How, if they are in good health and reasonably intelligent, could they have failed to detect that

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image on the screen, or thought they had perceived an object where none actually existed? Part of my job as an experimenter is to reassure people that their illusory experiences are perfectly normal and, if anything, the fact that they experienced illusions was indicative of the fact that they are healthy and well functioning. Rather than thinking of illusions as failures of our cognitive systems, we should think of them as evidence that our minds are highly specialized and adaptive. Inability to detect stimuli often occurs because our minds are adept at tuning out irrelevant information; seeing things that are not really there can be an indication of how our minds anticipate patterns and movements in ways that can facilitate our ability to interact with the world around us. Illusions are possible because, like any complex system, our minds exhibit certain structural eccentricities, which, in our day-to-day lives, are often adaptive or negligible.

dangerous and predatory attempts to take advantage of people who are emotionally vulnerable. Equally, just because an extraordinary, seemingly paranormal event such as the tilting of a table at a séance, ghostly apparitions at the foot of your bed, or the glimpse of a monster's face in the mirror c a n be potentially explained (or duplicated) by known tricks or psychological phenomena, it does not naturally follow that all seemingly paranormal experiences are 'disproven'. Science certainly does not have all the answers, and there are still many aspects of human experience that we do not fully understand and cannot fully explain. No psychologist can claim that science has been able to fully describe how a human mind can construct conscious experience. But just because something remains unexplained today, that does not mean it is unexplainable. And careful, deliberate investigations into the mechanisms

Magic tricks and misdirection techniques exploit such eccentricities, and can be interpreted as benevolent entertainments, malevolent frauds and everything in between. Magic reminds us that everyone can be deceived, and that, in general, when something appears to fundamentally violate wellestablished laws of physics, you are probably experiencing it from a very particular angle. Paranormal experiences can feel profoundly meaningful, causing emotions ranging from terror to solace. These feelings themselves are unquestionably genuine, but it is important to remember that the mechanisms behind the experiences are often not what they seem. In the context of a magic show, illusions can be entertainingly harmless, but in the context of a mediumistic demonstration, the same illusions can represent

of anomalous experiences and magic illusions have led to useful insights into the nature of the mind. Such research is ongoing and will continue to help enrich our understanding not just of illusions, but of consciousness in general. Finally: just because something is a trick or an illusion, does not mean it cannot be wonderful. A sense of wonder and a satisfying mechanistic explanation do not need to be mutually exclusive. Tricks can—and do—evoke extraordinary experiences, and clearer, truer comprehension of the natural mechanisms underpinning these can be beautiful, even when they are relatively simple. To paraphrase the writer Terry Pratchett: it doesn't stop being magic just because you've found out how it was done.

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AFTERWORD A.R. HOPWOOD & HONOR BEDDARD EXHIBITION CURATORS, SMOKE & MIRRORS AT WELLCOME COLLECTION The Spectacle of Illusion was first published to coincide with the exhibition Smoke & Mirrors: The psychology of magic at Wellcome Collection. Drawing a thread from the colourful heyday of 19thcentury vaudeville through to mind-bending acts of mentalism performed by today's celebrity magicians, the exhibition examines what magic can tell us about the human mind. Watching a magician perform a trick feels like the impossible is happening before our eyes. Coins disappear into thin air, objects pass through solid surfaces, escape artists free themselves from unbreakable bonds. But what precisely is it about 'the trick' that is so compelling? Why are our senses so easily fooled? How do our pre-existing beliefs influence our encounters with the magical? And, most puzzlingly, why, even in the face of a logical explanation, do many of us still believe that something more mysterious is going on? Throughout history, magicians have demonstrated an intuitive understanding of how the human mind works, exploiting overconfidence in our senses and the gap between what we think we perceive (everything) and what we actually perceive (by necessity, very little), to achieve astonishing feats of magic and trickery. In contrast, it is only in the last few decades that scientists have begun to appreciate the potential of magic as a powerful tool for the study of cognitive development. As the exhibition demonstrates, this relatively new area of study is the latest development in a history that stretches back to a 19th-century fascination in the paranormal that coincided with the birth of science as a profession and the flourishing of the entertainment industry. The ravages of war and epidemic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw widespread loss that gave rise to popular interest in Modern Spiritualism. Many attended seances in the hope of communicating with the dead and new photographic technologies attempted to capture ghostly visitations invisible to the human eye. Simultaneously, this insatiable curiosity for the unknown saw visitors flock to theatres where Victorian magicians replicated such 'supernatural' phenomena in hugely successful, profitable and popular stage shows. But what happens when the line becomes blurred and 'non-magicians' use trickery, as several mediums of this period were accused of doing? If the framing shifts from being one of an entertainer who enables a 'suspension of disbelief', to a medium who creates an 'affirmation of belief', then what are the consequences and how have magicians historically challenged such a move? Magicians and early psychical researchers joined forces around the turn of the 20th century to design experimental methodologies to test the 'evidence' generated from the seance room. Their investigations did much to enrich early psychological knowledge, exploring how we process our own individual experiences, while asking why we might be prone to misattribute unusual phenomena. Their ambition to uncover deception in the séance room was not necessarily a dismissal of belief in the supernatural, but rather a moral mission that they hoped would educate and inform the public. The experiments and challenges captured the public imagination, with clashes between celebrity mediums, bookish psychical researchers and popular magicians often making the front pages.

Objects that feature in the exhibition include wax fingerprints said to have been produced by the dead during seances and photographs depicting the physical restraints imposed upon mediums by magicians during testing. They reveal the stark contrast between the rigours of the scientific controls and the visual spectacle of the séance. As mediums gained international renown, the intermingling of their captivating performances with their claims of authenticity seemed to define the very essence of the séance experience itself. That these events could be perceived as genuine, yet simultaneously understood as a piece of theatre, sheds light on our ability to rationalize seemingly incongruent beliefs. Why in the absence of compelling objective evidence or even with clear, well-publicized conflicting evidence, does belief still persist? Contemporary researchers at the Science of Magic Association at Goldsmiths, University of London, have been examining such questions, while exploring the nature of misdirection in a series of experiments that use the magician's ability to control an audience's attention. As this book explains, while many stage illusionists subtly guide our gaze to a particular object or event while enabling us to miss another, researchers using eye-tracking equipment have also found that we can fail to notice an obvious trick even when we're looking directly at it. If something so simple can be so easily missed then what happens when more complex forms of misdirection are used by magicians to exploit our perceptual limitations? Tommy Cooper's meticulous stage plans suggest his tomfoolery was in fact yet another layer of deception, while the roll call of female assistants (assumed to be playing second fiddle to male illusionists) ensured few suspected them of being the true mastermind behind the trick. A 2015 study by scientists at McGill University, Canada, entitled 'Explanations of a magic trick across the life span' explores how children and adults attribute the cause of a magic trick and how their differing expectations and assumptions about the world require different types of magic. Children, they note, often called upon a superpower to explain the effect, while adults attempted to explain the trick by using faulty 'psychological' or 'scientific' reasoning. As some contemporary mentalists go to great lengths to explain a simple trick through a pseudo-psychological explanation, are modem audiences able to resist the seduction of such a narrative? The insights into how our mind works offered by the science of magic not only furthers the study of human cognition but also raises our awareness of our own susceptibility to trickery. The figure of the magician-investigator was crucial to the ambitions of early psychical researchers and the fledgling academic discipline of psychology. As masters of deception they understood that trickery can align with belief to form potent, emotive and compelling narratives. In our current political age of weaponized 'misinformation', this insight still carries considerable weight. The magic kits in the exhibition—and in this book from the last century contain many of the same tricks, suggesting that the human response to magic is relatively consistent across time. More so, it proposes that understanding how a trick is done—that is, applying reason to a magical experience—might not be incompatible with successfully experiencing its effect. The rational and the irrational sit not in opposition but in a complex relationship to one another a relationship that is at the heart of the human experience. Magicians intuitively understand that the manner in which we receive information affects what we come to believe. It is this close and critical reading of human behaviour that enables magicians to create such powerful and enduring illusions.

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ENDNOTES & F U R T H E R R E A D I N G lastrow, J., 'The psychology of deception', Popular Science

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Davenport, R. B., The death-blow to spiritualism: Being the true story of the Fox sisters, as revealed by authority of Margaret Fox Kane

Lodge, O., Past years. An autobiography (London: Hodder

and Catherine Fox lencken (New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1888)

and Stoughton Limited, 1931) Loftus, E. F., 'Planting misinformation in the human mind:

Davis, A. J., Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice

A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory',

to Mankind (New York: S. S. Lyon & W. M. Fishbough, 1847)

Learning & Memoiy, 12 (4), (2005), 361-66

Gauld, A., A history of hypnotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) Houdini, H., A magician among the spirits (New York: Harper, 1924)

Mack, A., and I. Rock, Inattentional blindness (Cambridge, MA:

Lewis, E. E., A Report of the mysterious noises heard in the house

Massey, C. C. (trans.), Transcendental physics, an account

MIT Press, 1998)

of Mr John D. Fox, in Hydesville, Arcadia, Wayne County,

of experimental investigations from the scientific treatises

authenticated by certificates and confirmed by the citizens

of Johann Carl Friedrich Z011ner (London: W. H. Harrison, 1880)

o f that place and vicinity (Canandaigua: E. E. Lewis, 1848)

Shaw, J., and S. Porter, 'Constructing rich false memories of committing crime', Psychological Science, 26 (3), (2015), 291-301

CHAPTER 2

Thomas, C., A. Didierjean, and S. Nicolas, 'Scientific study

Christopher, M., The illustrated history of magic (New York:

of magic: Binet's pioneering approach based on observations

T. Y. Crowell, 1973)

and chronophotography', American Journal of Psychology,

Doyle, A. C., The edge of the unknown (London: J. Murray, 1930)

129, (2016), 313-26

Hearing testimony from Harry Houdini on HR 8989, a bill to impose

Wundt, W., 'Spiritualism as a scientific question' (trans. E. D. Mead),

a fine on fraudulent fortune tellers in the district of Columbia

Popular Science Monthly, 15, (1879), 577-93

(HR 69a-d7), 20 March 1926, Records of the US House of Representatives Lamont, P., Extraordinary beliefs: A historical approach to a psychological problem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Robert-Houdin, J. E., Les secrets de la prestidigitation et de la magie:

CHAPTER 4 Bern, D. J., 'Feeling the future: experimental evidence

Comment on devient sorrier !The secrets of conjuring and magic:

for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition

how to become a magician] (Paris: Michel Levy Freres, 1868)

and affect', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100 (3), (2011), 407

Scot, R., The discoverie of witchcraft (London: William Brome, 1584)

Price, H., Leaves from a Psychist's Case-Book (London: Victor

Steinmeyer, J., Hiding the elephant: How magicians invented the

Gollancz Ltd, 1933)

impossible (London: Arrow Books, 2005)

Randi, J., The faith healers (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1987) Randi, I., The magic of Uri Geller (New York: Ballantine Books,

CHAPTER 3

1975)

Andersen, M., Njelbo, K. L., Schjoedt, U., Pfeiffer, T., Roepstorlf, A.,

Randi, J., 'The project alpha experiment: Part 1: the first two

and Sorensen, J., 'Predictive minds in Ouija board sessions',

years', Skeptical Inquirer, 7 (4), (1983), 24-33

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, (2018), 1-12

Randi, J., 'The project alpha experiment: Part 2: beyond

Binet, A., 'Psychology of prestidigitation' (trans. M. Nichols),

the laboratory', Skeptical Inquirer, 8 (1), (1983), 36-45

Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian

Rhine, J. B., Extrasensory Perception (Boston: Boston Society

Institution, (1894) Carpenter, W. B., 'On the influence of suggestion in modifying and directing muscular movement, independently of volition',

for Psychic Research, 1934) Ritchie, S. J., R. Wiseman, and C. C. French, 'Failing the future: Three unsuccessful attempts to replicate Bem's

Proceedings of the Royal Institution, 1, (1852), 147-54

"Retroactive Facilitation of Recall Effect—, PloS One, 7 (3),

Crookes, W., 'Notes of an enquiry into the phenomena called spiritual, during the years 1870-73', Quarterly Journal of Science, (1874)

(2012), e33423 Truzzi, M., 'Reflections on "Project Alpha": Scientific experiment or conjuror's illusion?', Zetetic Scholar, 12 (13),

Davey, S. J., 'The possibilities of mal-observation and lapse

(1987), 73-98

of memory from a practical point of view: Experimental investigation', Proceedings of the Society

Watt, C., Parapsychology: A beginner's guide (London: Oneworld Publications, 2016)

for Psychical Research, 4, (1887), 381-495 Faraday, M., 'Experimental investigation of table moving', The Athenaeum, (1853), 801-03 Gauchou, H. L., R. A. Rensink, and S. Fels, 'Expression of nonconscious knowledge via ideomotor actions',

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Consciousness and cognition, 21 (2), (2012), 976-82 James, W., 'Address of the president before the Society

Caputo, G. B., 'Strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion', Perception, 39 (7), (2010), 1007-08

for Psychical Research', Science, 3, (1896), 881-88 lastrow, J., 'Psychological notes upon sleight-of-hand experts',

Downs, T. N. and (eds.) J. N. Hilliard, The Art of Magic (Chicago: Arthur P. Felsman, 1909)

Science, 3, (1869), 685-89

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French, C. C., and A. Stone, Anomalistic psychology:

occult and supernatural (New York St. Martin's Griffin, 1997)

Exploring paranormal belief and experience

Wiseman, It J., Deception and self-deception: Investigating

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

psychics (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1997) Wiseman, it J., Paranormality: The science of the supernatural

Johansson, P., Hall, L, Sikstrom, S., & Olsson, A., 'Failure to detect mismatches between intention and outcome

(London: Pan Macmillan, 2011)

in a simple decision task', Science, 310, (2005), 116-19

Zusne, L, and W. H. Jones, Anomalistic psychology: A study

Kuhn, G. and Land, M. F., 'There's more to magic than meets

of extraordinary phenomena of behavior and experience (Hillsdale: Erlbaum Associates, 1982)

the eye', Current Biology, 16, (2006), R950. Kuhn, G. and Tatler, B. W., 'Magic and fixation: Now you don't see it, now you do', Perception, 34, (2005), 1153-61 Olson, J. A., M. Landry, K. Appourchaux, and A. Raz, 'Simulated

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thought insertion: Influencing the sense of agency using

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(2016), 11-26

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detector-scam

Rensink, R. A., J. K. O'Regan, and J. J. Clark, 'To see or not to see: The need for attention to perceive changes in scenes', Psychological science, 8 (5), (1997), 368-73

LIBRARIES The Magic Circle Library: Stephenson Way, Euston, London, NW1 2HD, UK

CODA

Harry Price Library of Magical Literature, Senate House Library:

Pratchett, T., The Wee Free Men (London: Doubleday 2003)

University of London, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU, UK Harry Houdini Collection, Library of Congress: 101 Independence Avenue Southeast, Washington, DC 20540, USA

AFTERWORD

Society for Psychical Research Archive, Cambridge University

Olson J. A., Demacheva I. & Raz A., 'Explanations of a magic trick

Library: West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DR, UK

across the life span', Frontiers in Psychology, 6, (2015), 219

FURTHER READING Alcock, J. E., Parapsychology-science or magic? A psychological perspective (Oxford: Pergamon, 1981) Chabris, C., and D. Simons, The invisible gorilla and other ways our intuitions deceive us (London: Harper Collins: New York: Crown, 2010) Christopher, M., ESP, seers and psychics (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1971) Christopher, M., Mediums, mystics and the occult (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1975) Gregory, R. L, Seeing through illusions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) Horowitz, M., Occult America: The secret history of how mysticism shaped our nation (New York: Bantam Books, 2009) Kuhn, G., Experiencing the impossible: The science of magic (Boston: MIT Press, 2019) Lamont, P. and J. Steinmeyer, The secret history of magic The true story of the deceptive art (New York: Tarcher Perigee, 2018) Lamont, P., and R. Wiseman, Magic in theory: An introduction to the theoretical and psychological elements of conjuring (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 1999) Macknik, S., S. Martinez-Conde, and S. Blakeslee, Sleights of mind: What the neuroscience of magic reveals about our everyday deceptions (New York: Henry Holt, 2010) Randi, J., An encyclopedia of claims, frauds, and hoaxes of the

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SOURCES OF I L L U S T R AT I O N S All images courtesy of Wellcome Library, London, unless stated otherwise. All objects from Senate House Library, University of London, and The Magic Circle photographed by the Wellcome Collection Digitisation team. Key: a=above, c=centre, b=below, 1left, r=right 2, 6-7, 10-11, 12 Images reproduced courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London; 8-9, 16-17, 18c Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C; 18r private collection; 191 The mortal remains of Emanuel Swedenborg, Johan Vilhelm HUltkrant2, Upsala: University Press, 1910; 19c private collection; 19r Andrew Jackson Davis; 21a Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005; 21b private collection; 22a1 Prof L.A. Harraden's complete mail course of twenty illustrated lessons in hypnotism, L.A. Harraden, 1899; 22ar, bl Practical lessons in hypnotism, Thompson & Thomas, William Wesley Cook, 1901; 22br Mesmerism, Mind Reading Hypnotism And Spiritualism, How to Hypnotize, Johnson Smith & Company, 1933; 23a1 Practical Hypnotism: A Complete Treatise On Hypnotism. What it is, what it can do and how to do it, Johnson Smith & Company; 23ar, bl Practical lessons in hypnotism, Thompson & Thomas, William Wesley Cook, 1901; 23br Practical lessons in hypnotism &magnetism, LW. DeLaurence, 1902; 24 A stellar key to the summer land, Andrew Jackson Davis, William White & Co, 1867; 261 Daguerreotype by Thomas M. Easterly, 1852; 26r National Spiritualist Association of Churches; 271 Photograph by H. Mairet, 1898; 27r private collection; 28 C Images reproduced courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London; 29 Permission courtesy of The Magic Circle, London; 30-31 Eine Geistersoiree illustriertes Prachtwerk I 0 Lichtdrucke nach OriginalAufnahme des Herrn F.A. Dahlstrom, Jacoby-Harms, Dom & Merfeld, 1886; 32-35, 37 C Images reproduced courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London; 38 Psychography: marvelous manifestations of psychic power given through the mediumship of Fred P. Evans, known as the 'independent slate-writer', J.J. Owen, Hicks-Judd co, 1893; 39, 41 C Images reproduced courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London; 42 The J. Paul Getty Museum; 44-47 C Images reproduced courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London; 48 From the collection of the Society for Psychical Research, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library SPR/54/4; 50-51 C Images reproduced courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London; 52-53 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.; 541 The discouerie of witchcraft, Reginald Scott, 1584; 54c The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin, Harry Houdini, New York: Publishers Printing Co., 1908; 54r, 55 private collection; 56 Hocus pocus junior: the anatomie of legerdemain, printed by T.H.Jarperl for R.M.labl, 1635; 57 Supplement a la Magie blanche &volt& Contenant l'explication de plusieurs tours nouveauz, Henri Decremps, 1785; 58 Die naturliche Magic aus allerhand belustigenden und niltzlichen Kunststikken bestehend, Johann Christian Wiegleb, Johann Nikolaus Martius 1789; 59 Memoires: recreatils, scientifiques et anecdotiques, Etienne Gaspard Robertson, Chez l'auteur et a la Librairie de Wurtz, 1833; 601 DEA/BIBLIOTECA AMBROSIANA/Getty Images; 60r Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo; 61 De Agostini/Biblioteca Ambmsiana; 62-63 Magic stage illusions and scientific diversions, including trick photography, Albert A Hopkins, Henry Ridgely Evans, 1897; 64-65 The Rory Feldman Collection; 67 Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK/Bridgeman Images; 68 The Davenport brothers, Ira Davenport, Boston: W. White and company, 1869; 69 Images reproduced courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London; 70-71 Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images; 72, 74 British Library, London, UK/C British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images; 75 C Museum of London; 76 Permission courtesy of The Magic Circle, London; 77 Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images; 78 Permission courtesy of The Magic Circle, London; 79 Universal Art Archive/Alamy Stock Photo; 80 British Pathe Ltd.; 81a, 81c Photo by Edward G. Malindine/Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; 81b Photo by E. Bacon/Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; 82 private collection; 83-85 C Images reproduced by courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London; 86 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.; 87 Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo; 88-89 Heritage Images/Fine Art Images/akg-images; 90 Permission courtesy of The Magic Circle, London; 91 Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; 921 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.; 92c Courtesy of The Post-Crescent 92r Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo; 931 Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images; 93c Bettmann/Getty Images; 93r McCord Museum M2014.128.703.29; 94 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC; 95 Photo by Buyenlarge/Getty Images; 96-97 Copperfield Collection, Photo: Glenn Castellano; 98-99 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.; 100 Permission courtesy of The Magic Circle, London; 101 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.; 102 International Feature Service Inc., Great Britain, 1929; 103 C Images reproduced by courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London; 104al, bl Photo courtesy Library of Congress/Getty Images; 104ar, br, 105 C Images reproduced courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London; 106 private collection; 107 McCord Museum M2014.128.898; 1081 Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo; 108r Photo by The Print Collector/Getty Images; 1091, c Phantasms of the living, Edmund Gurney, Frederick W. H. Myers, Frank Podm ore, Rooms of the Society for psychical research, TrObner and co, 1886; 110-111 Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library; 112-113 Nikola Tesla Museum/Science Photo Library; 1141 C National Portrait Gallery, London; 114c Spiritism and Psychology, Theodore Flournoy, Harper & Brothers, 1911; 114r MS Am 1092 (1185), Houghton Library, Harvard University; 116 The Principles of Psychology, William James, H. Holt, 1890; 117 The mysteries of human nature explained by a new system of nervous physiology, James Stanley Grimes, James Munroe and Company, 1860: 118-119 Twist two worlds: a narrative of the life and work of William Eglinton, John Stephen Farmer, Psychological Press, 1886; 120 Researches in the phenomena of spiritualism, William Cmokes, J. Bums, 1874; 121 Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo; 122-123 British Library, London, UK/0 British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images; 1241, c private collection; 124r Chmnicle/Alamy Stock Photo; 1251 Photo by 0 Hulton-Deutsch Collection/ CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images; 125c Moderne Wunder, Carl Willmann, Verlag und Dmck von Otto Spamer, 1897; 125r Wundt research group, c. 1880; 126-128 0 Images reproduced courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London; 133 Moderne Wunder, Carl Willmann, Verlag und Druck von Otto Spamer, 1897; 134-135 C Images reproduced courtesy of Senate House Library, University o f London; 1361 C National Portrait Gallery, London; 136c Photograph by Herbert Rose Barraud; 136r Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo; 137 Revelations of a spirit medium, Elijah Farrington, Charles Pidgeon, Harry Price, Eric Dingwall, Trench K. Paul, New York: E. P. Dutton & co., 1922: 138-140 C Images reproduced courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London; 141, 142 Mary Evans Picture Library/Harry Price; 143, 145, 146-147 0 Images reproduced courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London; 148-149 Sven Tfirck; 1501C Images reproduced courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London: 150r A discovery concenfingghosts, with a rap at the 'spirit-rappers', George Cruilcshank, 1863; 1511 Photo by Found Image Holdings/Corbis via Getty Images; 151r James Mollison; 152 Eugene Orlando, Museum of Talking Boards, museumoftalldngboards.com; 153-155 0 Images reproduced courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London; 1561 Flegende Blatter, 23 October 1892; I 56c 'Joseph Jastmw'. History of the Marine Biological Laboratory. http://hpsrepositoryasu.edu/ handle/10776/2988. 1934; 156r, 1571 Magic stage illusions and scientific diversions, including trick photography, Albert A Hopkins, Henry Ridgely Evans, 1897; 157r Courtesy o f Bibliotheque Henri Pieron, Paris Descartes University; 158a McCord Museum M2014.128.284; 158c private collection; 158b, 159 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.; 160a Le Voyage dam La Lune, Georges Melles, 1902: 160b The Eclipse, or the Courtship of the Sun and Moon, Georges Melies, 1907; 161 Bibliotheque nationale de France, ENT DN-1 (LEVY,Charles)-FT6; 162-163 Bibliotheque nationale de France, departement Estampes et photographie, EI-13 (2769); 164-165 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C; 166 Mary Evans Picture Library/Harry Price, 1671 Charles Walker Collection/Alamy Stock Photo; 167r Mary Evans Picture Library/Harry Price; 168-169 University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections, Hamilton Family fonds, Winnipeg Canada; 170-171 From the collection of the Society for Psychical Research, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library SPR/54/5; 172-173 C Images reproduced by courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London; 174-175 From the collection of the Society for Psychical Research, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library SPR/39/14; 176-177 From the collection of the Society for Psychical Research, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library SPR/Thumbprints; 1791 Photograph of 1.8 Rhine, The Records of the Parapsychology Laboratory, 1893-1984, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University; 179r Photograph by Francis Wickware; 180-181 From the collection of the Society for Psychical Research, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library SPR/62/3; 182-185 0 Images reproduced courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London; 186 New Frontiers of the Mind, J.B. Rhine, Faber & Faber, 1937; 187 Analysis And Assessment Of Gateway Process, Cia-Rdp96-00788r001700210016-5; 188 Permission courtesy of The Magic Circle, London; 189, 190 Mary Evans Picture Library/Harry Price; 191 Graham Morris/www.cricketpixcom; 1921 Photo by Ron Burton/Getty Images; 192r Bettmann/Getty Images: 1931 The Illuminated Showman; 193c 193r Robert Sheaffer, 194 U.S. National Archives and Records Administration; 195 Photo by Ed Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images; 196-197 Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C; 198-199 'The Mind's Eye', Joseph Jastrow, Popular Science Monthly, Volume 54, January 1899; 200 Bautsch; 201 0 Alciyoshi Kitaoka 2003; 202-203 Optical illusions of motion, Henry Pickering Bowditch, Cambridge University Press, 1882: 2061 Photo by Henry Gmskinsky/T he LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images; 206r Bettmann/Getty Images; 2071 Book of Research; 207r Photo by Omar Marques/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images: 209-210 private collection; 212-213 Friebertshauser, Allison; Teszka, Robert Kuhn, Gustav (2014): Eyetracking Magic Video Stimuli Summaries; 214-215 Permission courtesy of The Magic Circle London; 216-217 C Images reproduced courtesy of Senate House Library. University of London; 224 Hocus pocus junior: the anatomic o f legerdemain, printed by T.H.(arperl for R.M.labi, 1635

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INDEX Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations

A Alcock, James, 186 American Society for Psychical Research, 109, 114, 167 Andersen, March, 151 animal magnetism, 18, 109 animal tricks, 54,60 anomalistic psychology, 198 'apports', 36, 108 Argamasilla, Joaquin, 92 Amould, Gustave, 157 Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, 208 automata, 55, 73, 74-7 automatic writing, 2, 114, 152 Baldwin, S.S., 122-3 Barnum, P. T., 43 Barrett, William Fletcher, 109 basketball gorilla, 144 Beard, George M., 198,199 Bem, Daryl, 192-3 Benassi, Victor, 208 Benninghoffer, Anna Clark, 105 Berglas, David, 188 Binet, Alfred, 157 Bishop, Washington Irving, 103 Bitterman, Morton, 207-8 'Black Herman', 55 Blaine, David, 167 Blavatslcy, Helena Petrova, 136 bomb detectors, fake, 150, 15/ Bosco, Giovanni Bartolomeo, 55 Boursnell, Richard, 44-5 Bowditch, H. P., 202-3 Brown, Darren, 192 Buguet, Edouard Isidore, 43,49 bullet-catching, 54-5, 60, 158 burial tricks, 55 Caldwell, Frederick, 176-7 Caputo, Giovanni Battista, 199,204 card tricks, 15, 54, 208, 209-10 Carpenter, William, 150 Carrington, Hereward,115, 130-1 Carter, Charles Jospeh, 54 causality, 193 Chablis, Christopher, 144 change blindness, 211-2 Chiaia, Ercole, 36 'Chinese Water Torture Cell', 92,95 choice blindness, 211-12 Chung Ling Soo (Robinson, William), 55 clairvoyance, 178 clothing, 55 coin tricks, 54, 212 cold reading, 114-15 commission, 205, 206, 213 consciousness, 215 Cook, Florence, 120-1 Cook, W. Wesley, 22-3 Cooke, George Alfred, 66, 72, 73, 74, 78 Cooke, William Fothergill, 110-11 Cooper, Tommy, 218 Copperfield, David, 60 Crandon, Mina (Margery), 92-3, 102, 105, 167, 172-7 Cranshaw, Stella, 126 Crawford, William Jackson, 170-1 Crookes, William, 14, 115, 120-1, 124, 125, 132,167 Cmikshank, George, 150 crystal gazing, 154 Curie, Marie, 108

DahlstrOm, F. A., 30-1 Darwin, Charles, 108-9, 124 Davant, David, 73 Davenport, Ira and William, 66, 67-8, 92 Davey, Samuel John, 132, 136-7, 144, 213 Davis, Andrew Jackson, 19, 24, 49 Deane, Ada Emma, 48,73 The Death Blow to Spiritualism (Fox), 27 debriefing, 214 decapitation tricks, 54, 62, 78-9, 159,207 deception, 14, 60, 156, 157, 212,218 Demen9, Georges, /57 Dessoir, Max, 178 Die Naturliche Magie (Wiegleb & Rosenthal), 15, 58 Dingwall, Eric J., 12 137 Discoverie of Witchcraft (Scot), 54 A Discovery Concerning Ghosts (Cruikshank), 150 DObler, Ludwig, 54 Dodds, John Boyce, 144 Downs, Thomas Nelson, 54,211 dowsing rods, 150,151 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 37, 93, 102-3, 109, 167 dreams, 15, 198 Dudley, E. E., 177 Duncan, Helen, /66, 167 Dunninger, Joseph, /38 The Eclipse (film 1907), /60 ectoplasm, 14, 34, 43,166, 168-71, 173-4 Edwards, Michael, 192, 193 effect and method, 212, 218 Eglington, William 'Willie', 36, 136 Egyptian Hall, London, 70-2, 74, 76 electromagnetism, 108,61 escapology, 73, 92, 94-101, 134-5 'Etheric Levitation' trick, 60,61 extra-sensory perception (ESP), 167, 178-9, 180-1 Extra-sensory Perception (Rhine), 178-9 eye-tracking, 212, 213, 218 faces, 204,211 false transfers, 212 The Famous Illusionist (1937 film), 80 Tantascope% 59 Faraday, Michael, 150-1 Farmer, John S., 118 Fay, Anna Eva, /03, 106,107, 121, 124 Flammarion, Nicolas Camille, 109,27 flicker paradigm, 211 Ford, Arthur, 102 Fox, Maggie and Kate, 19, 26-7, 49, 66, 108-109, 120 Franklin, Benjamin, 18 fraud, 109, 124, 132, 166, 167 French, Christopher, 198 Gardner, Martin, 114 Gauchou, Helene L., 151 Geller, Uri, 187, 188-9 ghost hunting kit, 12 ghosts, 198,215 see also spirit photography Gilmore, Earl, 145, 182 Goldston, Will, 84-5 Goligher, Kathleen, 170-1 Grand Illusion, 207 Grimes, J. S., 117 Grosse, Maurice, 191 Guillotin, Joseph-Ignace, 18 Guppy, Samuel, 40 Haley, P. S., 145, 182-3 Hall, G. Stanley, 109, 114, 156,202-3 hallucinations, 198-9

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handcuffs, 100 Harbin, Robert, 90 Hardin, Henry, 211 Harraden, L A., 22 healing rituals, 194-5 Hermann, Alexander, 157,158 Hocus Pocus Junior, 56 Hodgson, Janet and Margaret, 190-1 Hodgson, Richard, 114, /15, 132, 136-7, 144, 167 Home, Daniel Dunglas, 36, 109, 120 Hopkins, Albert A., 62-3 hot reading, 115 Houdini, Harry, 15, 43, 73, 92-3, 94-101, 102-3, 104-5,121 library, 56,58 Hyman, Ray, 151, 186 hypnotism, 18, 22-3 see also mesmerism X ideomotor effect, 144, 150-1 illusions, 156, 157, 198-203, 204-7, 208, 211, 2/2-13, 214-15, 218 inattentional blindness, 137, 144,213 'Indian Rope' trick, 73 'Inexhaustible Bottle' trick, 61 .1 Jacoby-Harms, 30-1 James, William, 14, 109, 114, 116, 132 lastrow, Joseph, 109, 156-7, 178 Journal of Parapsychology, 179 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 193 Journal of Physiology, 202-3 Kanizsa, Gaetano, 206,207 'Katie King', 120-3 Kellar, Harry, 8-9, 12, 86-7, 132, 157, 158 Kitaoka, Akiyoshi, 201 Kuhn, Gustav, 208, 212-13 Lady Wonder, 167 Lafayette, 54 Lamont, Peter, 60 levitation, 36, 60, 61, 63, 86-7, 148-9 Lewis, Angelo, 132 'Light and Heavy Chest' trick, 60-1 Lincoln, Abraham, 43 Lodge, Oliver, 36, 43, /08, 150, 167, 178 Loftus, Elizabeth, 144 Louis XVI, 18 Lynn, Thomas, 146 Mack, Arien, 144 Mackenberg, Rose, 93, 102 Madam d'Esperance, 36 The Magic Circle, 73, 121, 188 magic lanterns, 59 Magic: Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography (Hopkins), 62-3 A Magician Among the Spirits (Houdini), 104 magicians, professional, 54-5, 60-1, 66, 207-8, 211, 212, 218 The Magnetic and Botanic Family Physician (Younger), 20 magnetism, 18, 21, 124 'Mal-Observation' report, 132, 136-7, 144 Marconi, Guglielmo, 108 Marcuse, Fredric, 207-8 Marriott, William S., 2, 32-3, 35, 150, 153 Martin, John, 29 Martius, Johann Nikolaus, 58 Mary Jane (Guppy), 40 Maskelyne, Clive, 81 Maskelyne, Jasper, 73,80 Maskelyne, John Nevil, 43, 66, 69, 72, 73, 74, 109, 124

Maskelyne, Mary, 81 Maskelyne, Noel, 81 McCormick, James, 150 McDonnell Laboratory, 192 McDougall, William, 167 mediums see seances; spiritualism Wiles, Georges, 79, 157, 160, 161 Memoiresi Recreatifs, Scientifiques et Anecdotiques (Robertson), 59 memory, 144, 193 Mesmer, Franz Friedrich Anton, 18-19 mesmerism, 18-19, 20-1 metacognition, 206,211 method and effect, 212, 218 Michaelson, Borge, 148 military research, 186-7 'Milk Can' stunt, 92 mind control, 213 mind reading, 103, 109, 114-15, 178 misdirection, 14-15, 212, 215, 218 misinformation effect, 144 Moderne Wunder (Willman), 125, 133 Moses, William Stainton, 49 Mumler, William H., 42,43 Mansterberg, Hugo, 43, 156 Myers, Frederic, 36,43 The Mysteries of Human Nature Explained (Grimes), 117 mysticism, 19 Neuburger, Sigmund, 54 neural adaptation, 200, 204 O Olson, Jay, 213 omission, 204, 205, 206, 211, 212 optical illusions, 156, 198-203 Ouija boards, 150, 151 Owen, J. J., 38 Palladino, Eusapia, 27, 36, 37, 43, 108, 136 Palmer, John, 144 parapsychology, 167, 178-9, 186-7, 192 see also psychology pareidolia, 204,207 Parris, Ben A., 213 Penn & Teller, 192, 206, 208 perception, 132, 157, 198, 204, 206-7, 211-13, 218 performance magic, 54-5, 60-1, 66, 207-8, 211, 212, 218 Phantasms of the Living, 109 'Phantom Bride' trick, 54 Phillippe (Talon, Jacques-Noe11, 55 photography double exposure, 30-1, 49, 115 photographic gun, 156, 157 phrenology, 19, 117 The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism, Fraudulent and Genuine (Carrington), 115, 130-1 Pinetti, Giuseppe, 57 Piper, Leonora, 114 placebos, 18,213 planchettes, 150, /52-3 Playfair, Guy Lyon, 191 poltergeists, 190-1 Popoff, Peter, 187 Popular Science, 129 Porter, Stephen, 144 Practical Lessons in Hypnotism (Cook), 23 Pratchett, Terry, 215 precognition, 178 Price, Harry, 31, 73, 141-2, 166, 184, 216 archive, 8-9, 32-4,126-7, 146-7, 154-5 books, 137 'Princess Card Trick', 208, 209-10, 211 The Principles of Psychology (James),109, 116 Project Alpha, 192,193 prophecies, 19

props, 34 Provand, Hubert C., 47 psi investigations, 186, 192 psychography see slate writing Psychography (Owen>, 36,38 psychokinesis, 167, 186, 192, 208 psychology, 132, 156, 208, 211-12, 214-15 see also parapsychology; perception Puharich, Andrija, 187 Puthoff, Harold, 186 Q The Quarterly Journal of Science, 125 rabbits, 60 radio, 108 radioactivity, 108 Randi, James, 15, 187, 192, /92, 193, 206 rapping hands, 6-7, 27 rapport, 18 Raynaly, Edouard-Joseph, 157 recall, 144, 193 regurgitation, 166-7 religion, 19, 194-5 remote viewing, 167,186 Rensink, Ronald, 211 Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (Crookes),120 Revelations of a Spirit Medium (Price & Dingwall), 137 Reynolds, Craig, 208 Rhine, Joseph Banks, 167, 178-9,184, 186 Richet, Charles, 36,43 Robert-Houdin, Jean Eugene, 55, 60-1, 73, 161 Robertson, Etienne-Gaspard, 59 Robinson, William, 55 Rock, Irvin, 144 Rosenthal, Gottfried Erich, 15 Royal Society of London, 108, 121 Rucker, Benjamin, 55

50-1,73, 115, 145,150, 182-3 spirit rapping, 6-7, 26-7, 139 spirit trumpets, 28,105 Spiritual and Animal Magnetism, 109 spiritualism, 19, 26-7, 36, 49, 54, 66, 92-3, 102 scientific investigations, 14, 108, 109, 114, 120, 124-32, 136-7, 139-41, /45, 150, 218 see also parapsychology spoon bending, 14, 187,188-9 Stargate Project, 186-7 Starling, J. Evans, 44-5 A Stellar Key to The Summer Land (Davis>, 24 straitjackets, 96-7 'Strange Face in the Mirror Illusion', 199, 204 SupplémentO La Magie Blanche Devoilee (Decremps), 57 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 19 table tilting, 144, 150, 215 Talon, Jacques-Noel, 55 Tamariz, Juan, 208 Tanner, Amy, 114 Tarbell Course in Magic (Tarbell), 82 Tarbell, Halan, 82,83 Tarbell magic kit, 83 Targ, Russell, 186 telegraphy, 108, 109, 110-11 telekinesis, 192 telepathy, 109,178, 180-1, 184-5,187 Tesla Coils, 112-13 Theatre Robert-Houdin, 157, 161-3 Thompson, Mrs Vance, 50-1 thought reading see mind reading Thurston, Howard, 54, 63-4 Tibbles, Percy Thomas (P. T. Selbit), 54, 55, 88-9 Topsy Turvy trick, 90 trances, 18, 41, 114 Transcendental Physics (Zollner), /28, 129, 136 A Trip to the Moon (film 1902), 157,160 Troxler, Ignaz, 200, 204 Troxler's Fading, 200, 204 Iiirck, Sven, 148-9 'Twixt Two Worlds (Farmer1,118

sawing tricks, 54, 63, 88-9 Schmidt, Helmut, 186 Schneider, Rudi and Willi, 140-2 Schrenck-Notzing, Albert von, 140 Un Homme de Fetes (1898 film), 79 science and spiritualism, 14, 108, 109, 114, 120, 124-32, 136-7, 139-4/, /45, V 218 see also parapsychology Vandredi magic revue, 88-9 Science of Magic Association, 208, 218 Vanishing Ball Illusion, 213 Scientific American, 92, 102 vanishing ladies tricks, 62 Scot, Reginald, 54 Veamcombe, J., 73 Volkman, William, 121 seances, 6-7, 19, 27, 34, 36, 115, 120-1, 136-7, 218 'Second Sight' trick, 55 Walker, Val, 134-5 The Seeress of Prevorst, 25 Selbit, P. T. (Tibbles, Percy Thomas), 54, Wallace, Alfred Russel, 108-9, 137 55, 88-9 Walpole, Dorothy, 47 Shaw, Julia, 144 weaponization, 14, 186-7 Shaw, Steve, 192,193 Weiss, Ehrich see Houdini, Harry sideric pendulum, 155 Wheatstone, Charles, 110-11 Sidgwick, Eleanor, 132, 136 Wiegleb, Johann Christian, 15, 58 Will Goldston's Magical Scraps (Goldston), 84-5 Sidgwick, Henry, 136 Williams, Oswald, 81 Siemens & Halskes AG, 110 Simons, Daniel, 144 Willmann, Carl, 125, 132, /33 Singer, Barry, 208 Wiseman, Richard, 144, 157,208 Slade, Henry, 73, 120, 124-5, 128, 129, 132 WissenschaftlicheAbhandlungen (Milner), 125 slate writing, 36, 38-9, 66, 73, 92, 93, 103, 124, witchcraft, 54, 166,167 132, 133, 136, 137 Woodhull, Victoria, 49 sleep paralysis, 198-9 Wundt, Wilhelm, 125, 129, 132, 156 sleight of hand, 82,94, 130-1, 132, 212, 214 1r Society for Psychical Research (SPR), 109, 132, Yorke, Jane Rebecca, 166-7 /36, 137, 114, 167 sorcery manuals, 4-5 Younger, D., 20 sound effects, 138 Southcott, Joanna, 216-17 spirit bell and wand, 29 Zener cards, 178-9, 184-5, 186 spirit drawings, 40-1 Zener, Karl Edward, 178 spirit hands, 104, 167 'Zig-Zag Girl' trick, 91 Milner, Johann Karl Friedrich, 13, 124-5, 128, spirit lock, 29 spirit photography, 10-11, 30-1, 42, 43,44-8,49, 129,132,133,136,167,198

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