“He told me there was no suffering where he was, and that he was extremely happy and that his father also was happy,” she said. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported on a local woman who said she’d used a Ouija board to communicate with her late son, a sailor in the Navy whose ship had gone down. Still, many Ouija board users claimed success in reaching dead loved ones. Houdini, too, weighed in, calling the Ouija board “the first step towards insanity.” (Not showing a great deal of empathy, the Philadelphia Evening Ledger headlined one article “Ouija Board Is Blamed for Increase in ‘Nut Crop.’”) The medical director of the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane warned of potential overcrowding, adding that, “it would be difficult to imagine conditions more favorable for the development of psychosis than those furnished by the Ouija board and other mediums.” reported on obsessive users being committed to mental hospitals. ![]() While many people considered the Ouija board a harmless toy, others saw something more menacing. In 1919 alone he claimed to have attended more than 100 séances, not one of which had made a believer of him. While Doyle toured the world promoting spiritualism, Houdini spent his time exposing fraudulent mediums and reconstructing how their trickery worked. Though a friend of Doyle, Houdini, with his deep knowledge of magic tricks, was a natural skeptic of spiritualism, which he had studied for years. This proved too much for Harry Houdini, the famous escape artist, who had successfully eluded both World War I service and the influenza pandemic. “Since the war,” the New York Sun wrote in 1920, “pretended mediums, long since exposed, have revived their ugly trade and are again in this and every large city fattening on the offerings of the distressed in heart.” While Lodge and Doyle appear to have been sincere in their beliefs, they inadvertently gave a boost to scam artists who saw money to be made from grieving families and the simply curious. Harry Houdini and Senator Capper, of the Senate District Committee, on February 26, 1926 during hearings on the fortune telling bill. He reported that soldiers who’d lost an arm in battle found it magically restored, although those who were “blown to pieces” took a bit longer to become whole. He told them he’d reconnected with his late grandfather plus a brother and sister who died in infancy, and made many new friends. He repeatedly assured his parents that he was happy. In his messages, Raymond offered a comforting version of the great beyond, complete with flowers, trees, dogs, cats and birds. Still other mediums went into trances and allowed the dead to speak directly through them. ![]() When the medium arrived at the letter the spirit had in mind, the table would tilt, turn, levitate or make some other inexplicable move. In table tilting, participants typically sat around a séance table while the medium recited the alphabet. ![]() In automatic writing, the spirit supposedly guided the medium’s hand to write out messages. Lodge and his wife met with a variety of mediums, who practiced such techniques as automatic writing and table tilting to communicate with the dead. Lodge’s 1916 book, Raymond, or Life and Death, describes numerous purported contacts with his late son. and also wrote books describing their psychic experiences. Doyle also lost his younger brother to the flu in 1919, while his wife’s brother had been killed in Belgium in 1914.Īfter the war, both men lectured widely in the U.S. Doyle’s son Kingsley had been wounded in France in 1916 and died of pneumonia in 1918, likely brought on by the influenza pandemic. Lodge’s son Raymond had been struck down by a shell fragment while fighting in Belgium in 1915. Both men had a longtime interest in the supernatural, and both had lost sons in the war.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |