Chasing Ghosts, page 7
After the cabinet portion of the show, the Davenports held a dark séance in which they were once again tied up, and the instruments ran amok for another gig. This second act wasn’t far from their original New York City performance, but they were now more skilled and even added phosphorescent oil to the instruments, creating a glowing effect as they appeared to float around the stage.
The Davenport brothers’ most famous illusion involved binding themselves in a “spirit cabinet” with musical instruments, which would play while the brothers appeared to still be bound.
Throughout the shows, Ira and William remained quiet, dressed in all black and sporting matching mustaches and goatees. They simply performed their feats and let people think what they wished. Were they magicians or mediums? Lecturers introducing them often spoke of Spiritualism, but it was up to the audience to decide. Many believed, but the brothers had their share of naysayers who claimed they were frauds. It didn’t hurt business, though. Fortunately for them, there was no social media or TV so they were a fresh act from town to town.
By the mid-1860s the Davenports looked to expand their market and brought their talents abroad to Europe. There, the media and audiences began challenging their authenticity. One such example came after playwright Dion Boucicault (who had plenty of experience with theater trickery) hosted the brothers for a group of friends and, after a two-hour performance, detected no deception. The press thought he’d been fooled, but Boucicault defended himself in the Spiritual Magazine by stating, “Some persons think that the requirement of darkness seems to infer trickery. Is not a dark chamber essential in the process of photography? And what would we reply to him who should say, ‘I believe photography to be humbug; do it all in the light, and I will believe; otherwise, not till then?’”
The Davenports survived the media skepticism, but then they ran into bigger troubles. Some audience members decided to tie knots with a bit more skill than the average volunteer had. Knots tight enough to draw blood frustrated the brothers, who complained and had the ropes cut. End of show. But they took their biggest hit in 1865 when a budding young magician named John Nevil Maskelyne happened to catch a peek through the window at a moment when the drapery fell. Ira could be seen loosened from his ropes and manipulating the instruments.
“There sat Ira with one hand behind him and the other in the act of throwing,” Maskelyne later recounted. “In an instant both hands were behind him. He gave a smart wriggle of his shoulders, and when his hands were examined he was found to be thoroughly secured—the ropes, in fact, were cutting into his wrists.”
Maskelyne, along with a partner and cabinet builder, George Cooke, soon replicated the apparatus, learned the Davenports’ technique, and began doing their own show. Other imitators would soon follow.
The Davenports’ mastery of escape was helped by the knowledge that volunteers wouldn’t be experts at tying knots, especially if they selected high-profile businessmen or celebrities in attendance—the kind of people who aren’t typically skilled in the art of rope tying. If they felt too much pressure, a simple grunt or tensing of the muscles would signal to the volunteer, who’d naturally ease up.
Audience members who joined them in the cabinet were simply shills. And as for the flour in the hand, well, they deposited it in their pockets, then grabbed another handful before revealing themselves at the end.
Still, despite being exposed and imitated, business continued even after William’s death in 1877. Ira carried on the act with longtime promoter William Fay into the 1890s.
The Davenports’ secrets were revealed to Harry Houdini just before Ira’s death in 1911. The magician had paid him a visit out of respect and curiosity. Ira shared his secrets and explained the methods of their rope escapes. Afterward, he smiled and said, “Houdini, we started it, you finish it.”
NOW PLAYING OHIO: KING SPIRIT AND HIS BAND OF GHOSTS
The Davenport brothers may have been innovators in the world of musical ghosts, but around the same time a farmer and his eight children were helping spirits host full concerts in a remote dilapidated log cabin in the middle of Nowheresville, Ohio.
Jonathan Koons’s interest in Spiritualism began in 1852 after he attended a séance and was informed that he and his entire brood had the gift of mediumship. The spirits told the family to build a one-room cabin, sixteen by twelve feet, to be used exclusively for spirit manifestations. To maximize those manifestations, the room was furnished with a table and racks to hold a suite of instruments, including drums, tambourines, violins, and triangles. This was all done as directed, right next to their house.
A New Yorker named Charles Partridge paid Koons a visit and described his bizarre experience in a letter to the New York Tribune. It began by intermingling with a crowd of thirty to fifty people who “looked respectable” outside the cabin, each awaiting their turn to go inside the spirit room to talk to their spirit friends and witness manifestations.
The chitchat was, of course, complemented by the concert. One by one, groups squeezed into the small cabin and sat around the table as the doors and windows were shut to block out the light. The festivities began with the beating of drums that could be heard a mile away. After about five minutes, the “King Spirit” graced Koons and company with his presence and the toots of his trumpet, and then invited requests from the audience. “Really this was obliging,” Partridge noted, though he didn’t mention what, if any, requests were made. Regardless, the spirits soon began to sing. This band of spirits was said to be composed of more than 160 ancient ghosts.
“I think I never heard such perfect harmony; each part was performed with strict attention to its relative degree of sound or force,” Partridge wrote. “There was none of that flopping, floundering, and ranting which constitutes the staple of what is latterly called music; harmony rather than noise seem to constitute the spirits’ song.”
Within the darkened spirit room luminous hands could be seen swiftly moving the instruments in front of people’s faces. Partridge was especially impressed with the tambourine player, mentioning that he’d seen the “best performers in the country” but “they cannot perform equal to these spirits.” Sometimes, however, instruments accidentally smacked sitters on the head. But hey, even in the afterlife no one’s perfect.
Others, too, had reported the wonders of Koons’s spirit room and rejoiced in their abilities to shake hands and converse with spirits. One group of visitors wrote to their local paper raving about the marvels they witnessed, including spirit writing, “which is performed about three times as fast as human penmanship is exhibited—crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s, and punctuating at the same time.” The impeccable writing compelled “mankind to seek after truth” about its mortal and immortal existence.
“People think nothing more of having a chat with a ghost than with one of their friends in the body,” said another reporter. “Some of the goblins are at times quite jocular,” he added, urging readers to visit and experience it for themselves. Being dead never sounded so joyous.
D. D. Home: The Great Levitator
Music and table rappings were impressive, but while the Fox sisters and the Davenport brothers were doing their thing, Daniel Dunglas (D. D.) Home was taking the art of séances to another level by elongating and shrinking his body, levitating, and performing other astonishing acts.
Home was born in Scotland in 1833 to a family that allegedly had a history of “second sight” abilities. Daniel, for unknown reasons, was adopted by his aunt and uncle, who immigrated to Connecticut when he was nine. One day young Daniel and a friend, Edwin, were playing in the woods and began telling stories. Edwin shared the tale of Lady Beresford (which you can read about in the first section of this book). This idea of being able to return from the dead stuck with him, and the boys decided to make the same pact that Nichola and John had. Not long after this event Home had his first vision. He had stayed at a friend’s house late one evening and feared getting in trouble when he got back to his aunt’s place. Luckily for him, she was already asleep. He said his prayer and was about to pull his sheet over him when a sudden darkness interrupted the moonlight. The darkness grew more and more dense until a gleam of light illuminated a spiritual presence. “This light increased,” Home later wrote of the event, “and my attention was drawn to the foot of my bed, where stood my friend Edwin.”
When he told his family of the vision, he claimed Edwin had died three days earlier. A day or two later a letter arrived announcing the boy’s death after an illness, just as Home had said.
These visions continued, including one of his mother’s death, as Daniel’s powers developed. By 1850 rappings filled the house with strange noises and his aunt with fear. She’d heard about the Fox sisters and blamed their phenomena on the devil. As far as she could tell, her nephew was possessed and she wasn’t going to stand for demons in her house. It was time to call in the local priests for help.
“Don’t be frightened,” one of the pastors told Daniel, “if this is the work of Satan, it is your misfortune and not your fault.” The holy men started praying in hopes that God would enter the fray and silence Satan, but instead their words only elicited more rappings. Home said they sounded as if they were “joining in our heartfelt prayers.” The priests were disappointed by the continued sounds, but Home took them as a sign from God and claimed the moment was a turning point in his life, resolving to “place myself entirely at God’s disposal.”
The sounds continued and were soon joined by moving furniture. One instance recorded in a biography of Home recounts a table moving across a room with no one near it. His aunt ran for the family Bible and slammed it on the table. “There! That will drive the devils away!” she cried. But it didn’t. The vivacious table only grew more animated.
D. D. Home was able to levitate to great heights during séances, capturing the attention of Spiritualists and befuddling scientists.
As far as his aunt was concerned, if Satan wasn’t going to leave Daniel, Daniel would have to leave and take the devil with him. Kicked out of the house, Home set off on his own to share his emerging gifts with the world. Curious clients frequently took him in as a guest as he moved from town to town, performing séances and stirring wonder and amazement.
By this time, he had grown into a tall, thin man with long blond hair draped over his broad shoulders. Large, sharp teeth, pale gray eyes, thin bloodless lips, and long, bony hands adorned with rings added to his mystique. “You knew, without touching them, that they were icy cold,” one nineteenth-century writer remarked.
Despite increasing fame and demand, he rarely accepted money for his work, as he was convinced that such a mysterious gift was not something to profit from. Room and board and the occasional diamond (who could resist?) were payment enough.
As Home’s legend grew, so apparently did his abilities, enabling him to travel the world and schmooze with European royalty and the wealthiest curiosity seekers. Séances produced a variety of wondrous phenomena—all without the need for total darkness. In addition to chats with the dearly departed, attendees would witness floating tables and sofas that slid across floors in fully lit rooms, and sitters occasionally had flowers, books and other objects delivered to them by mysterious hands. Oh, and accordion music would play. Yes, Home’s séances frequently featured the sounds of the accordion allegedly played by spirits. Those attending would bring their own instrument for Home to use. There, in front of all gathered and with no fingers touching it, the accordion, according to one witness, “executed a charming air, which voices were distinctly heard accompanying.”
If he wasn’t busy moving furniture or producing music without a musician, he was creating physical effects with his own body. In 1868, a journalist witnessed Home contort himself: “We sat in a room well lighted with gas…. Mr. Home was seen by all of us to increase in height to the extent of some eight or ten inches, and then sank to some six or eight inches below his normal stature.”
He reached even greater heights not by growing, but by lifting himself right off the ground. More than a hundred accounts of such feats have been recorded. One claimed Home floated around a room and moved pictures on a wall, each beyond the reach of anyone standing on the ground. On another occasion a witness said, “I once saw Home in full light standing in the air seventeen inches from the ground.”
But Home’s masterpiece, his Spiritualist magnum opus if you will, was the levitation most frequently mentioned by those sharing his story. During a séance, Home had been in a trance for some time and then walked uneasily into an adjoining room. In the words of one of the three witnesses who all swore the event was genuine: “We heard the window in the next room lifted up, and almost immediately afterwards we saw Home floating in the air outside our window. The moon was shining full into the room. My back was to the light; and I saw the shadow on the wall of the windowsill, and Home’s feet about six inches above it. He remained in this position for a few seconds, then raised the window and glided into the room feet foremost, and sat down.”
The windows were seventy feet off the ground and about seven and a half feet apart.
Home’s showmanship was undoubtedly extraordinary, but was it truly powered by spirits? Sir William Crookes devised a series of experiments to find out. Crookes was a British chemist and physicist and, as evidenced by his title, a well-respected one. The study would pit the power of scientific apparatuses against the power of psychic abilities. Happy to play along, Home submitted himself to any and all of Crookes’s elaborate contraptions and still managed to mystify him. The medium had passed the tests to Crookes’s satisfaction; however, he determined it wasn’t due to contact with spirits, but rather to a new type of force “in some unknown manner connected with the human organization.” He called it the “psychic force.”
Others were less impressed. Home’s accordion feat, for example, was typically done under a table—a place where spirits seemed to find comfort, and perhaps mediums tended to find secrecy.
In 1922, a student of magic, Rev. Carlos María de Heredia, explained a simple way of replicating Home’s “spirit” music:
“I offer the same demonstration in my lectures. After a few minutes of expectation I give a signal to a friend behind the partition who plays a tune on another accordion. As he is invisible and as the source of the sound is not discoverable, especially when attention is riveted on the visible instrument, the effect is as convincing as the humbug is simple.”
Granted, Heredia wasn’t there in person, but in 1865 investigators from Fraser’s Monthly were. Their report cast doubt on Home’s legitimacy, noting “the manifestations at these exhibitions were invariably of the same character, and became strong or weak in exact proportion to the abundance or lack of faith in the company. The greater wonders were never attempted, at all events they never succeeded, with an unbeliever in the room.”
The magazine went on to compare him to Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, who asked his followers if they believed he could walk across water. When they responded “yes,” he said that was as good as him actually doing it. His supporters gladly agreed.
“Mr. Home beats Joe Smith hollow,” Fraser’s remarked, “for he persuades people that they hear what they do not hear, that they see what they do not see, that an accordion, which makes an irregular noise, is playing a popular tune, and that he is floating near the ceiling when he is simply standing on his chair with one foot touching a disciple’s shoulder.”
During a séance, the Fraser’s investigators said they were most struck by the “mental condition” of the other five people seated with them. They were there, ready to believe, yet Home “did nothing but what might obviously and easily be done by hand and foot, for the whole of the so-called manifestations took place under a table of limited dimensions, with a green cloth lapped over the edge, which we were warned on no account to lift. After two hours spent in shaking and slightly raising the table, ringing the bell, sounding the accordion, twitching ladies’ petticoats, pinching their knees, &c., &c., there was a pause of twenty minutes to rest Mr. Home or the spirits.”
An attempt to levitate failed since the “spiritual ladder was broken.” Fraser’s, however, shared an account from 1860 in which Home was seated against a window before rising off the ground. “Through the semi-darkness his head was dimly visible against the curtains, and his hands might be seen in a faint white heap before him. Presently he said, in a quiet voice, ‘My chair is moving; I am off the ground: don’t notice me; talk of something else,’ or words to that effect.”
Not noticing Home certainly helped create the illusion. This strange retelling continued:
In a moment or two more he spoke again. This time his voice was in the air, above our heads. He had risen from his chair to a height of four or five feet from the ground. As he ascended higher he described his position, which at first was perpendicular, and afterwards became horizontal. He said he felt as if he had been turned in the gentlest manner, as a child is turned in the arms of a nurse. In a moment or two more, he told us he was going to pass across the window, against the gray silvery light of which he would be visible. We watched in profound stillness, and saw his figure pass from one side of the window to the other, feet foremost, lying horizontally in the air. He spoke to us as he passed, and told us he would turn the reverse way and recross the window, which he did…. He hovered round the circle for several minutes, and passed this time perpendicularly over our heads. I heard his voice behind me in the air, and felt something lightly brush my chair. It was his foot, which he gave me leave to touch. Turning to the spot where it was, on the top of the chair, I placed my hand gently upon it, when he uttered a cry of pain, and the foot was withdrawn quickly, with a palpable shudder. It was evidently not resting on the chair, but floating; and it sprang from the touch as a bird would. He now passed over to the farthest extremity of the room, and we could judge by his voice of the attitude and distance he had attained. He had reached the ceiling, upon which he made a slight move, and soon afterwards descended, and resumed his place at the table.
