Cornering the Market on Fraud: Stage Magicians versus Spirit Mediums

ABSTRACT

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, stage magicians and spirit mediums were in competition for the same corner of the entertainment market; they sought not only to engage the same clientele, but also to maneuver around the legal and social impediments to the practice of their art. But magicians and mediums were a family, even when they fought. Even today, some stage magicians and mentalists may endanger their collegial relationship with their professional fellows by performing as if they possessed real psychic powers, while their colleagues continue to dedicate their time and resources to debunking such acts. This article traces how this competition functioned among prominent magicians and mediums around the turn of the twentieth century.

It is well known that the first public demonstrations of physical manifestations of spiritualist phenomena were rapidly followed by demonstrations purporting to debunk them: The Fox sisters produced spirit raps at Corinthian Hall in Rochester in November 1849.¹ The following year, the one-time Universalist minister Chauncey Burr put on debunking shows, in which he made cracking sounds with his toe joints.² What is less often observed is the competitive nature of the magicians and mediums: in the latter half of the nineteenth century and beyond, the two were in fact in an ongoing competition for the same corner of the entertainment market; they sought not only to engage the same clientele, but also to pointedly maneuver around the legal and social impediments to the practice of their art.

The English magician John Nevil Maskelyne wrote in 1876 that, “Medium and conjuror means the same thing,” but “a bad conjuror will make a good medium any day. The spirit juggler,” he said, “shall keep you singing hymns for two hours in a darkened room (his own room, too!) and then pronounce the circumstances unfavourable. . . . [But the magician] must produce the effects whether the audience be ‘sympathetic’ ...or not.”³

As spirit mediums developed into public performers, producing phenomena to convince their audience that spirits acted on the material world, stage magicians complained that the mediums were using tricks that were part of their repertoire, such as reading messages inside sealed envelopes, making blood-red writing appear on the arm, making objects appear seemingly out of thin air, opening locks, making musical instruments play themselves, levitating, and escaping from rope ties. The Scottish magician John Henry Anderson, known as “The Wizard of the North,” toured the United States in 1853 and wrote letters to the editors of the Baltimore Sun, suggesting various mechanical ways that rapping sounds could be made.⁴ Anderson made the debunking of mediums’ tricks a mainstay of his own performances both in America and in Britain, and in doing so, paradoxically kept spiritualism before the eyes of the public—at least in Britain—for almost a decade before it actually took root there.⁵

Magicians often conducted exposures of mediums’ fraud by reproducing the effects in ways of their own devising, sometimes not knowing for certain how the mediums did it. Each magician had his own way of bringing about any given effect—some relied on extensive machinery, for example, some relied on nothing but misdirection and legerdemain. Mediums too used a variety of ways to accomplish their effects, depending on the conditions in which they worked.

Magicians also testified against mediums in court. But this testimony might only amount to “The effect can be done in a number of ways. Here is one way. Here is another.” This does not necessarily show how the medium did it, which was what the prosecution wanted to show, but the magician might also testify that he attended a medium’s séance and discovered the precise nature of the fraud. Or he might testify that the medium admitted to him that he was only a conjurer and was presenting himself as a medium to make more money. This was the gist of...