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Séance Fiction: Vintage ‘ghostly’ photos of ‘con artist’ spiritualist medium at work

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There are at least two unacknowledged prerequisites for a successful career as a spiritualist medium. Firstly, the ability to “deep throat”—essential for hiding the yards of cheesecloth, newspapers and other materials the medium will regurgitate during a séance as “ectoplasm.”  And the iron discipline not to laugh—no matter how ridiculous the situation.

Eva Carrière was adept at both and had a successful though highly controversial career as a spiritualist medium at the turn of the 1900s. Carrière was so convincing she managed to expunge any reference from her biography to her previous attempt at a career as a medium—which led her to be exposed in the press as a fraud.

This was in 1905 when Carrière first exhibited her psychic powers in Algiers. She gained considerable attention for her ability to apparently make the spirit of a 300-year-old Brahmin Hindu called Bien Boa appear at her séances. Bien Boa was exposed by a local newspaper to be no more than a cardboard cutout and an Arab coachman named Areski. To avoid the ensuing bad publicity, Carrière merely changed her name to “Eva C” which (somehow) worked and she was able to re-established herself as a highly respected medium whose believers included Sherlock Holmes author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the renowned psychic researcher Baron Albert von Schrenck-Notzing. Of course, not everyone was so easily fooled. Harry Houdini described Carrière as a con artist—claiming her whole act was no more than cheap theatrical magic tricks.

In a bid to prove the authenticity of Carrière’s psychic powers, Baron von Schrenck-Notzing documented a series of test séances between 1909-1913. The results were eventually published in his book Phenomena of Materialisation in 1923. The Baron’s photographs of these sessions purported to show Carrière expelling ectoplasm and causing spirits to “materialise.”

Carrière’s séances were said to verge on the pornographic. She often stripped naked and demanded the participants insert their fingers into her vagina to ensure no ectoplasm or other materials had been hidden there. A similar examination was offered after each séance, but as the Public Domain Review notes:

Whether the audience members were obliging is up for debate, but reports that Carrière would run around the séance room naked indulging in sexual activities with her audience suggests perhaps so. One can imagine that this deliberate eroticisation of the male audience might go some way to explaining the ease with which these “investigators” believed the psychic reality of the seances. A decision of fraud on their part would distance their involvement somewhat from the special and heightened context of the séances and so cast their complicity in, or at the least witnessing of, sexual activities in the sober (and more judgemental) cold light of day.

When “spiritualist debunker” Harry Price examined Schrenk-Notzing’s photographs of Carrière’s alleged psychic powers, he dismissed them as tawdry fakes and denounced Carrière as a fraud. He also suggested the images of spirit faces were photographs clipped from newspapers. This was to prove a moot point.

In 1920 Eric Dingwall with V. J. Woolley of the Society for Psychical Research in London, investigated Carrière’s claims. An analysis of her “ectoplasm” was shown to be nothing more than “chewed paper.” The ghostly apparitions were photographs from the magazine Le Miroir—whose masthead was often visible in Schrenk-Notzing’s photographs.

Back issues of the magazine matched some of Carrière’s ectoplasm faces, including Woodrow Wilson, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria and the French president Raymond Poincaré. This is something Schrenk-Notzing tries to address in his book, but with not much success. A 1913 newspaper article explained how “Miss Eva prepared the heads before every séance, and endeavoured to make them unrecognizable. A clean-shaven face was decorated with a beard. Grey hairs became black curls, a broad forehead was made into a narrow one. But, in spite of all her endeavours, she could not obliterate certain characteristic lines.”

The Society for Psychical Research’s report proved Carrière was a fraud. However, it was covered up thus allowing Eva Carrière and her supporters like Baron Schrenk-Notzing to claim her psychic powers were genuine.
 
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March 13th, 1911.
 
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June 7th, 1911.

Many more of the Baron’s photos of ‘ectoplasm’ and ‘ghosts’ from Eva Carrière’s séances, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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04.14.2016
10:06 am
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Houdini exposed: Vintage article reveals his secrets
12.26.2013
10:52 am
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Harry Houdini is one of my heroes, I’ve admired the Great Mystifier from early age watching him on old flickering, hand-cranked black and white film clips, as he escaped from chains and tightly-bound ropes in prison cells, and from deep-sunk, wooden boxes and padlocked milk churns. He was an inspiration to try my own imagined skills escaping wound clothes lines and knotted school ties, while my mischievous older brother timed me, remorselessly pummeled or tickled me, depending on his mood. The plan was to master handcuffs and I started collecting keys and quickly learned how to pick padlocks and door locks.

Unlike today, where information is merely a click away, I honed-up on my heroes from books that came via a mobile library every Friday, and learned to memorize favorite programs and films when screened on TV—this was much easier when there were only two channels on British television, and nothing other than the one children’s show Watch With Mother during the day, which explains why watching television was a major event, and its impressions have lasted longer than some of the shows viewed since. When the Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh movie of the great Houdini was screened one Christmas, it only convinced me further that the man born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874 was the world’s greatest performer, illusionist and escapologist. That Houdini often dared his life to entertain, and in later years was the scourge of fraudulent clairvoyants and mediums, only adds to his reputation.

Finding these pages “Exposing Houdini’s Tricks of Magic,” from Modern Mechanix November 1929, brought me back to that delight and child-like wonder that Houdini’s magic inspires. Here you’ll find how a sliding panel helped Houdini escape from a submerged wooden trunk, how he used a jack to escape from a buried coffin, and his use of false arms to trick an audience of his whereabouts.

The article was penned by R. D. ADAMS, the mechanic who helped Houdini construct some of his illusions:

Houdini’s famed “disappearance through a brick wall” was one of his most widely applauded stunts. That it mystified the public is putting it mildly. Just a short time ago a leading scientific journal announced that the magician made his disappearance by means of a trapdoor on one side of the wall and came up through a similar channel on the other. That was wholly impossible. A trapdoor, regardless of how cleverly it had been constructed, would have been detected by the investigating committee. And besides to mystify his audience still further and demonstrate that a trapdoor was not used, a large sheet of paper and sometimes a sheet of plate glass was placed upon the floor of the stage and the brick wall built upon it. Passing through glass into trapdoors and vice versa was not possible even for the great man of mystery.

Here is how Houdini operated: A dozen or more bricklayers in overalls appeared before the audience and built a bona fide brick wall seven or eight feet high extending from the footlights to almost the rear of the stage. When it was completed, Houdini was ready to “disappear”. After a few appropriate remarks, he stepped behind a small screen, something like a prompter’s box, which the bricklayers pushed slowly to the center of the wall. The bricklayers moved over to the other side and adjusted a similar screen there opposite the first one. “Here I am, here I am,” Houdini would shout and waving arms thrust through holes in the screen gave evidence of the fact.

Then the arms would disappear and Houdini would step forth from the screen on the other side of the wall.

Houdini disappeared through the wall only in the minds of the exceedingly gullible. As a matter of fact while the first screen, behind which he had stepped, was being pushed back against the wall, he leaped into a pair of blue jumpers and pulled a workman’s cap down far over his face. When the screen touched the wall, he was one of the bricklayers as far as the audience was concerned. He got behind the second screen disguised as a bricklayer. From this point he did his calling to the audience. Mechanical arms and hands, operated by a hidden rope leading to the wings, furnished the gestures which convinces Houdini was behind screen No. 1 instead of No. 2 completing the illusion.

Read the entire article at Modern Mechanix.
 
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This is an interesting documentary on Houdini, though I must point out that the Great Mystifier was not the first man to fly an airplane in Australia, that was Colin Defries; and although J. Gordon Whitehead delivered several blows to Houdini’s abdomen, a later blow, delivered by an unknown assailant at the Prince of Wales hotel in Detroit was the blow that probably killed the great man—he was sitting reading a newspaper when he was punched, and Houdini reportedly said, “You shouldn’t have done that.”. This has led to the suggestion Houdini was murdered by supporters of the (fraudulent) clairvoyants he had successfully debunked.
 

 
Via Modern Mechanix

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.26.2013
10:52 am
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Happy Halloween (and death day), Harry Houdini: A recording of his widow’s final séance
10.31.2013
12:44 pm
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Magician Harry Houdini (Erich Weiss) died of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix on October 31, 1926 in a Detroit hospital. He was buried in the family plot in Machpelah Cemetery in Queens, New York in a bronze coffin he had purchased for one of his escape acts.

Throughout his career Houdini considered spiritualists to be frauds who conned gullible grieving people. But he didn’t exactly rule out the possibility of ghostly contact either. Shortly before his death he and his wife Bess agreed that, if spirit communication was indeed possible and she outlived him, he would contact her via séance on the anniversary of his death. They established a secret code (“Goodnight Harry”) so that she would recognize his spirit’s authenticity if a medium claimed to have a message from him. Every Halloween for a decade after his death, she held a séance. She also sat in seclusion with his photograph every Sunday to await a sign from the afterlife. None ever arrived.

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Santa Muerte candle, stones, and playing cards left at Houdini’s grave. Photo by Allison Meier.

Séances continue to be held all over the world every Halloween in an attempt to reach Houdini’s spirit.

Houdini’s widow’s final séance, Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel, October 31, 1936:

 

Via Atlas Obscura

Posted by Kimberly J. Bright
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10.31.2013
12:44 pm
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Houdini: Art and Magic
04.27.2011
01:00 pm
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I was really hoping that amazing looking Houdini show from The Jewish Museum in NYC, Houdini: Art and Magic would make it out to Los Angeles and before I could even say “Abracadabra,” poof it shows up at the Skirball Cultural Center, opening tomorrow, April 28th. Featuring Houdini memorabilia galore, the show also has a number of pieces by contemporary artsts like Joe Coleman, Raymond Pettibon and Matthew Barney that attest to the enduring cultural fascination with the legendary magician and escape artist who is still a household name nearly a century after his death.

The Skirball have actually added a second attraction, another magic-related exhibition called Masters of Illusion: Jewish Magicians of the Golden Age. They’ve done up the museum in “period” settings reminiscent of vaudeville stages and Victorian-era parlor rooms to display what remain of the almost forgotten careers of over 40 other stage magicians who were Houdini’s friends, rivals and predecessors. Stage props, photos, original posters, costumes, letters, newspaper clippings and even, I’ve read, some nearly century-old “robots.”

The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero by William Kalush & Larry Sloman is the definitive Houdini biography.
 
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Below, silent footage of the great escape artist, Harry Houdini.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.27.2011
01:00 pm
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