Chasing Ghosts, page 8
This witness, it appeared, had not actually witnessed anything. The entire illusion worked through the power of suggestion, aided by effects to enhance the experience. But a few doubters hardly slowed Home or other mediums. Business was in fact booming through the Civil War and the years immediately following. The frighteningly high number of wartime casualties left many clinging to hope that they could still communicate with their lost loved ones. With opportunity knocking, more and more mediums happily obliged grieving families.
Mary Todd Lincoln Reaches across the Veil
By the mid-nineteenth century, séances were being held in houses all across the country—even the White House. Mary Todd Lincoln worked with mediums to reach her son Willie, who died of typhoid fever in 1862 when he was just eleven. She believed her bond with him was so strong that his presence could be felt without the aid of a medium.
“Willie lives,” she told her half sister. “He comes to me every night and stands at the foot of the bed with the same sweet, adorable smile he always had. He does not always come alone. Little Eddie is sometimes with him.”
One of Mrs. Lincoln’s mediums, Mrs. Nettie Colburn Maynard, claimed President Abraham Lincoln joined one of the séances, during which a spirit warned him not to delay his Emancipation Proclamation. She claimed the event left a powerful impression and noted that the proclamation was issued shortly after. Maybe she was right and took a pivotal role in the abolition of slavery, although it’s more likely that the president was supporting his wife’s interest and may have simply been awed by the theatrics Maynard conjured up. Regardless, if ghosts had any influence whatsoever on the proclamation’s timing, it’s nice to know they were being put to good use.
Another medium known to have regularly graced the Lincoln White House was Charles Colchester. Bell ringing, table rapping, reading sealed letters, and producing messages in blood-red writing on his forearm were among his specialties. But of all the messages he may have delivered to the Lincolns, the one of most interest likely came from a human source rather than a dead one. It just so happened that Colchester had also been spending time in Washington, DC, with John Wilkes Booth. The actor and would-be assassin took up Spiritualism in 1863 after the passing of his sister-in-law. He and his widowed brother began attending séances, hoping to find comfort from communication with her. Booth didn’t stop at grieving, though; he continued attending séances, including those performed by the Davenport brothers. And Colchester.
John Wilkes Booth’s biographer, Terry Alford, contends that the two were more than just medium and client. They spent a lot of time getting drunk together and talking about who knows what. Could Colchester have been privy to Booth’s planning?
“In the weeks before the assassination, Booth roomed at the National Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, just six blocks from the Capitol and even closer to Ford’s Theatre,” Alford wrote. “Colchester visited him there often. Besides his ability to contact the dead, Colchester could also tell the future—a useful ability to Booth, who was beginning to think the unthinkable.”
The president acknowledged Colchester’s warnings, but others had cautioned him of danger as well. There were no definite threats, but given the national climate he knew his well-being was at risk. If Colchester was aware of Booth’s plot, did he treat the information as coming from the spirits, or did he offer the president specific details? And if the latter, was his information disregarded because the president didn’t share his wife’s faith in his honesty?
After the assassination, Mrs. Lincoln continued practicing Spiritualism in hopes of finding her husband, just as she’d seen her children. In 1872, she even had her picture taken with his spirit standing behind her, resting his hands lovingly on her shoulders. Neither Eddie nor Willie made an appearance, though it’s believed her youngest son, Thomas, who passed away in 1871 at age eighteen, can be seen behind her as well.
The First Lady wasn’t the only one who wanted to hear from the assassinated president. Mediums knew a president beloved by so many would be a good draw at séances. Lincoln’s spirit could talk about the wonders of Summerland or offer political advice in times of turmoil and have an audience ready to trust his message.
Those who wanted to know what happened after Lincoln’s fateful night at Ford’s Theater found out through a process called psychography, or automatic writing. Mediums achieved this by supposedly falling into a trance with a pen in hand and paper before them, allowing a spirit to take control and write a message. Lincoln’s description of passing into the spirit world came through the mediumship of Mrs. S. G. Horn and included the following passage:
On that fatal night which ended with my life’s tragedy, when I fell mortally wounded in the theatre, and after a few moments of anguish—a brief time of mental despair followed by unconsciousness—I awakened to find myself a spirit among spirits, and to realise that I was being actually crowned with a wreath of laurels by the hand of Washington, and that I was surrounded by an innumerable company of spirits “which no man could number,”—when I heard the grand vibrations of heavenly music surging through the air, filling my soul with an ecstatic bliss beyond mortal comprehension; then a weight was removed from my heart, and I experienced a happiness that I had not felt for ten long years!
Lincoln and other former presidents remained popular figures to channel well into the next century. In 1917, for example, Lincoln’s ghost delivered a message that was part politician, part cheerleader for America as the Great War waged: “The struggle looks like an extended one as to time, but victory comes at the price of vigilance. We can win.”
“If we grant a continued existence after death, a survival of memory and affection, and that there is a possibility of intercommunion between the two worlds, it seems but natural that such men as Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson should seek to impress and guide those who are directing our public affairs or molding public opinion. Unless these patriotic men have lost their interest in our republic’s welfare or their power to manifest it, we cannot conceive of their being mere idle spectators when this nation is passing through political or moral crisis.”
—Dr. B. F. Austin in an address at Plymouth Spiritual Church in Rochester, New York, on October 22, 1906
NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF SPIRITUALIST INVENTION: THE CREATION OF THE OUIJA BOARD
Receiving messages from the dead by calling out the alphabet and waiting for table raps to stop at certain letters proved tedious and laborious. By 1853, inventive mediums were hastening the process by attaching a pencil to a small basket and resting their fingers on its edge. As Allan Kardec, a French Spiritualist, described it, the basket would be placed on a piece of paper and “set in motion by the same occult power that moved the tables,” in order to “trace letters that formed words, sentences, and entire discourses, filling many pages, treating of the deepest questions of philosophy, morality, metaphysics, psychology, &c., and as rapidly as though written by the hand.”
The world had its first planchette. The basket soon evolved into a teardrop-shaped board with two small wheels at the back and a pencil at the tip. Though it was an improvement, the spirits proved to have poor penmanship since the boards blocked the messages as they were being written.
“The words are usually created in a difficult cursive in an unbroken line, often under the influence of two practitioners at the boards whose subconscious minds might have different ideas of what the writing should produce,” says Brandon Hodge, occult historian and founder of the website MysteriousPlanchette.com.
Some mediums substituted their hand for the planchette and let the spirits guide the pencil as they held it. This allowed for neater handwriting, but as Hodge notes, “in doing so robbed participants of the cooperative and collaborative nature of the planchette that made their writing so mysterious to begin with.”
When the Ouija board arrived in stores in 1890, it supported collaboration with clear results and swift responses to yes/no questions. Plus, after forty years of planchettes, it had the advantage of being the shiny new object. As Hodge describes it, “Talking boards certainly represented a ‘next step’ or the latest and greatest do-it-yourself spirit communicator in the public eye.”
As for the curious name of Ouija, the Kennard Novelty Company, which made the parlor game, claimed it came from an ancient Egyptian word for “good luck.” Today’s manufacturer, Hasbro, might agree that’s what every Ouija user needs to make it work.
Dead Celebrities Sell
The idea of channeling spirits like Lincoln’s was part of an entire brand of mediumship: celebrity ghosts. Working with cultural icons allowed mediums to go beyond personal messages from lost loved ones and provide dispatches from the Other Side that everyone would want to hear. This either generated greater profits or created new ways to preach religious beliefs—or sometimes both. Either way, psychics knew celebrity sells.
Anyone who was anyone before death had a lot to say. Among the chattier spirits was Edgar Allan Poe, who died on October 7, 1849—just a year and a half after the Fox sisters opened the floodgates. In one message, Poe condemned his darkness on earth and reveled in the light of the afterlife. “I now am a spirit given, through God’s kind grace, to good works,” he wrote through a medium’s hand. His added notes indicated a little irritation about the way he lived: “No kind spirit offered to write through my hand. But, I think, many a dark spirit had my brain in his power—yea, the power of the demons of HELL.”
Poe’s prolific nature remained unchanged. Mediums cranked out stacks of new poems from the discarnate master of the macabre, including a revised version of The Raven. One in particular, named Lizzie Doten, published an entire collection of poetry she claimed to have channeled through Poe’s spirit in 1863.
Other famous dead writers couldn’t put their pens (or quills) down either. Mark Twain wrote two short stories and a novel, one letter at a time, on a Ouija board through a St. Louis medium and novelist named Emily Grant Hutchings and her medium cowriter Lola V. Hays. These posthumous new works were penned between 1915 and 1917 and titled Up the Furrow to Fortune, A Daughter of Mars, and Jap Herron.
Emily Hutchings claimed the ghost of Mark Twain was writing novels through her between 1915 and 1917. Unfortunately, they didn’t receive the accolades of Twain’s credited works.
“That the story of Jap Herron and the two short stories which preceded it are the actual post-mortem work of Samuel L. Clemens, known to the world as Mark Twain, we do not for one moment doubt,” Hutchings wrote in her introduction to the novel. “His individuality has been revealed to us in ways which could leave no question in our minds.”
Twain’s ghost allegedly emphasized that his individuality not be messed with, except in trivial instances. “There will be minor errors that you will be able to take care of. I don’t object,” he told the two mediums. “Only—don’t try to correct my grammar. I know what I want to say. And, dear ladies, when I say d-a-m-n, please don’t write d-a-r-n. Don’t try to smooth it out. This is not a smooth story.”
In life, Twain frequented séances for their entertainment value. If his ghost really was out there making two women painstakingly write stories one letter at a time through a planchette, he was surely enjoying the same brand of amusement from the beyond.
One entity that was not amused was Twain’s publisher, Harper and Bros. The company held the rights to all of the writer’s works and contended that it maintained those rights despite Twain’s passing seven years earlier. Hutchings had given Harper first crack at acquiring the Jap Herron manuscript, but they rejected it for two reasons: first, they didn’t believe it was dictated by Twain’s ghost through a Ouija board, and second, they felt it “lacked literary merit.” The case went to the US Supreme Court and though Hutchings never retracted her claims, Harper dropped the lawsuit after the psychic agreed to destroy whatever copies had been produced. Fortunately, at least one copy of the novel remained. It’s since been digitized and granted Jap Herron immortality.
MARK TWAIN’S GHOST WRITES A STINKER
(AND SO DO OTHER OUIJA BOARD WRITERS)
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are classic characters ingrained in American literature and culture. Jap Herron, not so much.
Twain’s ghost told the story of a young boy in a small Missouri town who begins life in poverty but gets work at the local newspaper, grows into a productive man, and helps reinvigorate the village. Emily Grant Hutchings said Jap’s character was “reminiscent of young Sam Clemens.” Critics didn’t find Jap Herron reminiscent of Clemens or Twain at any age, as indicated in the book’s less-than-stellar reviews:
“If this is the best that ‘Mark Twain’ can do by reaching across the barrier, the army of admirers that his works have won for him will all hope that he will hereafter respect that boundary.” —New York Times, September 9, 1917
“The Ouija board has had a demoralizing effect upon the alleged author’s style and humor.”—Detroit Free Press, August 26, 1917
“It is a feeble piece of work, and, if one were to accept the assertion of its authorship, it would be with profound regret that the conditions of the spirit life had effected so great deterioration in a style once so charming.”—Living Age, October 20, 1917
“If anything disturbs his spirit, it would be the linking of his name to ‘Jap Herron.’”—Agnes Repplier, essayist, October 1917
Hutchings and Hays were backed by Twain’s celebrity, but another St. Louis medium and friend of Hutchings, Pearl Curran, had been successfully writing poems, prose, plays, and novels through the ghost of a complete unknown. Her name was Patience Worth, and she was believed to have lived a few hundred years earlier during the colonial period. Like Twain’s work, Worth’s was dictated through a Ouija board. Each revealed letter formed words in a distinct archaic English dialect. Psychic investigator James Hyslop believed it was influenced by local speech in the nearby Ozarks, where Curran had spent time in her youth, and the works of one of her husband’s favorite writers, Geoffrey Chaucer.
One of Worth’s books, a telling of the story of Jesus Christ called The Sorry Tale, weighed in at over six hundred pages. Published just before Jap Herron, it fared slightly better and earned mixed reviews. A local and perhaps sympathetic writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat wasn’t concerned with the source of the tale, because “simply as a story it is truly remarkable” and it painted a “moving picture, a vivid panorama of the time.”
Agnes Repplier, whose review above showed she wasn’t a fan of Twain’s ghost, wasn’t a fan of Worth or any other ghost writer either. “We are told that once, when Patience Worth was spelling out the endless pages of The Sorry Tale, she came to a sudden stop, then wrote, ‘This be nuff,’ and knocked off for the night. A blessed phrase, and, of a certainty, her finest inspiration. Would that all dead authors would adopt it as their motto; and with Ouija-boards, and table-legs, and automatic pencils, write as their farewell message to the world those three short, comely words, ‘This be nuff.’”
Twain’s ghost listened. Worth, however, directed a few million more words until a month before Curran’s death in 1937.
Shakespeare: Not Even Death Could Stop Him
Prolific as Twain’s ghost was, he was outdone by the spirit of history’s most prolific writer: the Bard himself, William Shakespeare. Of note was 1916’s Hamlet in Heaven, written through the mediumship of Charles Lincoln Phifer. The psychic said he’d been receiving messages “purportedly” from the Bard for twenty years, but this Hamlet sequel was channeled just in time for the tricentennial milestone of Shakespeare’s passing. Phifer claimed the timing of the event “did not enter my head” and the play’s theme of death “seemed to be Shakespeare’s contribution to the forthcoming world celebration of the event.”
The five-act play reunited Hamlet with his father, who had appeared as a ghost in the original Hamlet. But before Hamlet can find his dad, he has to find out that he, too, is dead. Thus, the play begins with that revelation through a conversation with a physician spirit guide:
PHYS. But art thou brave enough to learn the truth,
That thou art dead?
HAM. —Dead? I am not dead.
PHYS. Yet thy disgusted soul hath exit made
From gates of flesh.
HAM. —Give me my sword.
If I can swing it as I one time did,
I am not dead; if I can push its point
Into thy thigh, I live; if I can sheathe—.
But give me not the venomed instrument.
PHYS. It is not needful that thou take a sword.
Strike at me—so.
[He squares his breast. Hamlet
strikes at him, and his arm
goes through physician’s body.
HAM. —Merciful Heavens!
