Criminal - Ghost Racket Crusade

Episode Date: October 22, 2021

The story of two famous friends — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini — and the disagreement that ended their friendship: can we speak to the dead? Read Rose Mackenberg's essays in Tony Wolf's book, Houdini's Girl Detective: The Real-Life Ghost-Busting Adventures of Rose Mackenberg. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums,

and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, FDA approved for over 20 years. So, talk to your specialist to see if Botox Cosmetic is right for you. For full prescribing information, including boxed warning, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. Remember to ask for Botox Cosmetic by name. To see for yourself and learn more, visit BotoxCosmetic.com. That's BotoxCosmetic.com. In the summer of 1922, two of the most famous men in the world went on a vacation together

with their families in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini. Harry Houdini taught Arthur Conan Doyle's sons how to dive and float in the hotel pool. Conan Doyle was visiting America from England. He later wrote that he didn't know how to describe Atlantic City because we have nothing in England at all like it. He wrote about swimming in the ocean like it was an out-of-body experience, saying it was the nearest detachment from Earth that normal life can give. He was 63. Houdini was 48. Arthur Conan Doyle and his wife, Jean, everyone called her Lady Doyle,

invited Houdini to a private seance in their hotel room. Just the three of them, sitting at a round table in a dark room. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's wife was an amateur psychographer, and that is someone who believes that they can channel the messages of spirits through automatic writing. So a psychographer would enter a trance state and then begin to write a sort of a free association writing, which they would attribute to spiritual influence.

Author, Tony Wolfe. Houdini later wrote that Lady Doyle took a pencil and with spasmodic jerks of her right hand started to strike the table, explaining that the force had taken hold of her. And then Lady Doyle began to write. And ostensibly she was channeling a message from Houdini's beloved mother. And so she wrote and wrote pages and pages of messages.

They were then presented to Houdini at the end of the seance. Fifteen handwritten pages, with lines like, It's so different over here, so much larger and bigger and more beautiful, all sweetness all around, now I can rest in peace. Conan Doyle later wrote that his friend Houdini looked grimmer and paler at every moment. Houdini didn't say much. He liked the Doyles. He enjoyed their company. He didn't want to disrespect them. So he was just kind of politely noncommittal. He took the pieces of paper and left the room. And the first thing that Houdini noticed was that the pages were headed with the drawn symbol of a cross. He thought that was unlikely to have been issued by his mother, who was a devout Jew and the widow of a rabbi.

He noted that all of the pages were written in English, and his mother barely spoke a word of English. He also noted that they were effectively a series of generic platitudes, and his mother simply hadn't spoken like that. As channeled by Lady Doyle, Houdini's mother called her son Harry, which he knew was wrong. His mother didn't call him that. But Houdini didn't bring any of this up. The two families continued their vacation. Houdini told Conan Doyle a few days later that he'd been profoundly moved by the experience.

I've been walking on air ever since, he said. What seems to have happened then is that Arthur Conan Doyle, in his great enthusiasm, seems to have genuinely believed that Houdini was converted to the cause by the events of this seance. When it was time for the Conan Doyles to sail back to England, Houdini saw them off at the dock. There were lots of fans and reporters. It was reported that one of Conan Doyle's children was given a parting gift from the Bronx Zoo, a five-foot kingsnake. Houdini told reporters his friendship with Conan Doyle was one of admiration, fondness, and respect. But privately, Houdini was uncomfortable.

He'd been very, very close with his mother, and he wrote that the possibility of being able to somehow communicate with her meant to me an easing of all pain that I had in my heart. He wanted to be open-minded, but he knew the séance wasn't real. Houdini knew that Conan Doyle was deeply invested in spiritualism, the belief in and practice of communication with the dead. At this point, Arthur Conan Doyle, most famous for writing the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, had almost stopped writing fiction

entirely. He poured all of his energy into writing about spiritualism. He believed that it would be effectively the religion of the future. He believed sincerely and was protective of his beliefs, which included the idea that spirits could manifest in our world through sounds or tilting tables or ectoplasm, a sort of liquid goo that comes out of a medium when they're channeling the dead. In a letter to the New York Times in August of 1922, Conan Doyle wrote, Every new thing faces the opposition of ignorant and prejudiced people, and ectoplasm is no exception.

He loved ectoplasm. He called it miraculous stuff. In September of 1922, a few months after Conan Doyle's vacation with Houdini, Conan Doyle published a detailed description of the seance that had taken place in Atlantic City. Houdini began to receive letters from people wanting to know if the story was true and if he had communicated with his mother. Houdini began to receive letters from people wanting to know if the story was true,

and if he had communicated with his mother. That put Houdini in a very difficult position because he had to directly contradict his friend. And so he did. He said, no, I was not convinced. Doyle appears to have taken that as sort of an impugning of his wife's honor. And unfortunately, that ended the friendship, and then the two men became rather bitter rivals. Harry Houdini, the most famous magician in the world, became obsessed with the tricks and illusions of seances. There are three kinds of mediums, he said.

Those who are honestly deluded, those who are psychotics, and those who are criminals. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Can you, I just want to go back to Arthur Conan Doyle's initial interest in spiritualism. And will you talk a little bit about the fairies and the fairy photos? Yeah, the Cottingley fairy incident. I could start by saying what actually happened, which was that a couple of rather mischievous and very clever English schoolgirls decided to play a prank on their family. And they cut out pictures of fairies from one of their children's books. They affixed the pictures to hat pins, long pins, stuck them in the ground in various picturesque locations at the bottom of their garden, and took photographs of them. And they then showed them to their parents as ostensible proof that there were fairies at the bottom of their garden and took photographs of them. And they

then showed them to their parents as ostensible proof that there were fairies at the bottom of their garden. And the fame of the Cottingley fairy incident spread far and wide and eventually came to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was initially skeptical, but eventually was persuaded that this was a demonstration of a genuine phenomenon. And he wrote a book defending the photographs, defending their authenticity, and he did attempt as much of a scientific investigation of the sort of thing as one could at the time. He had the photographs analyzed by, I think it was the Kodak company. Their expert was basically able to say, I don't think it was the Kodak company, their expert was basically

able to say, I don't think that these are superimpositions, which was true, they weren't. They were photographs of physical objects. It's just that the physical objects were paper dolls rather than fairies. He was very widely lampooned in the media and by much of society at that time. He really took a lot of heat for his defense of the Cottingley Fairies because most people looked at the pictures and said, okay, this is a clever schoolgirl prank. But a significant subset, including Arthur Conan Doyle, took them as read and said, okay, this is a real thing.

Fairies are real. It's so surprising. I've read a lot of Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes in the past year, and I'm so surprised that he was so faithful in this way. It feels like a different person than the person who created the wry humor of Sherlock Holmes. It does, doesn't it? Yeah. There are two possible psychological influences, maybe. One is that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's father, unfortunately, suffered very badly from alcoholism and from depression and spent much of the latter part of his life in what were called then asylums, painting whimsical pictures of fairies. So it is conceivable that Arthur Conan Doyle saw in the Cottingley fairy photograph a kind of a vindication of his father's character. That's purely speculative on my behalf. The other, I think it's at least worth noting, that he had lost numerous members of his family around the period of the First World War to illness and accidents and so forth.

I believe his beloved eldest son, a brother, a brother-in-law, nephews and so forth. He experienced a lot of bereavement during the period immediately before he really took up the spiritualist crusade. It's important to note that he himself denied that that had any influence. It's so interesting is that for the people who did believe, they weren't believing, it seems to me, because they were just trying to be different or trying to go with a trend that was new and fashionable. But a lot of these people were really just in pain, in deep grief, and they saw some hope in this spiritualism. Yes. Oh, yes. People were desperate. That's the strange thing. That was what fueled Doyle's passionate belief in the subject and defense of the subject was the emotion,

was the stunning pain of loss. And that was also what fueled Houdini's anger at the phenomenon when it came to people employing magic tricks to create these illusions to rip people off as part of a criminal enterprise. For profit? Yeah. Within the overtly criminal aspect of the ghost tracker, the con artist aspect, there

evolved a kind of a system of slang. Within that system, a shut-eye refers to someone who is not wise to the game, an easy mark, someone who is susceptible to gaffes. Gaff was slang for the various gimmicks, the tricks that were used in seances. An open eye is someone who is wise to the game, someone who understands all the trickery, who understands that we're talking basically about theatre,

about con artistry here and so forth. It's possible, and it was possible then, to be a shut-eye medium, as in Arthur Conan Doyle's wife, who appears to have genuinely believed that she had mediumistic powers, and that from Houdini's point of view, she would have been what was called a shut-eye medium, someone who attributes to spiritual causes what a psychologist might attribute more to psychological causes. Houdini wrote, I think that in her heart of hearts, Lady Doyle is sincere,

and I am positive that Sir Arthur is just as religious in his belief as it is possible for any human being to be. But Houdini was not a believer. He knew all the tricks. He was a professional. And very early in his career, he and his wife Bess traveled along a carnival circuit, and part of his act involved communing with the spirits of people who had died. And it was a simple con game. When you arrived in town, when your troop arrived in town, you might visit the local newspaper, look in newspaper archives, visit the cemetery and get details from tombstones and so forth

to learn obscure details about the people of the town. And you would then employ also what was called cold reading. I think that's the current slang as well today, to sort of weave a web of guesses, educated guesses, which if they're presented with sufficient confidence, can very easily persuade a gullible person to believe that you are in communication with the spirits and they're revealing secrets that the medium couldn't possibly know otherwise. He did that for a while. He was disgusted with himself, basically. He felt it was immoral. He stopped doing it as soon as he could afford to. But much later in his career, when he became literally one of the most famous entertainers in

the world, well, basically what happened was he was very, very close to his mother. And when she died, he was absolutely bereft. And in desperation, he began to visit seances, even though he knew the trickery, in the desperate hope that a medium might be able to actually speak with his mother. But of course, being Harry Houdini, being a professional magician, completely au fait with all of the trickery of that business, he instantly saw through all of the tricks that were being used. And not just psychological tricks, not just cold reading and so forth, but actual magic tricks involving props and even costumes and such. And at that point in his life, in his career, it just enraged him.

He felt that it was a perversion of his art of magic. He saw that the other sitters in the seance, of course, like him, they were bereft. They might have lost recently sons during the First World War and, of course, the influenza pandemic that had killed millions upon millions of particularly young people. And the idea that these fraudulent mediums were exploiting the art of magic to con money out of these desperately bereaved people, it really got his goat. And he was in a position to do something about it, and so he established himself as a crusader, as a sort of moral crusader against the fraudulent ghost racket.

But no matter what he said, people attending Houdini's shows and watching him do truly impossible things believed that he was some kind of medium, or had powers of some sort. How else could he make an elephant disappear? Houdini was most famous for being an escape artist. He could escape from straitjackets, handcuffs, from jails, from containers full of water. He was even handcuffed inside a wooden crate that was nailed shut, wrapped with ropes and iron bands, and then lowered into New York's East River. And he escaped. Scientific American called it one of the most remarkable tricks ever performed.

People thought he was magic. That was the only explanation. Spiritualists watched his tricks and thought he dissolved himself, dematerialized, and entered the fourth plane. And when Arthur Conan Doyle saw Houdini perform, he also believed that Houdini had powers. Because Doyle, for all of his worldliness, was entirely naive as to the mechanism of how stage magic works. He would see Houdini apparently on stage pass through a brick wall. And Doyle could not fathom how such a thing could happen

except through an actual magical or spiritualistic agency. But Houdini was bound by the magician's code not to reveal the specifics of how the tricks worked. And Sarah Bernhardt, the great French actress, likewise believed, apparently, that he was capable of genuine miracles. At that point in her life, she had lost a leg, and she was fitted with a wooden leg. And apparently, in a taxi cab, she and Houdini were traveling together and she looked at him very soulfully and said something like, please, Mr. Houdini, can you use your magic to give me a new leg? And of course, Houdini was rather shattered by that and said,

I'm sorry, madam, but no, that's beyond my power. It's so interesting because Houdini loved illusions. He wanted to give a good show with his tricks and escapes, but he didn't want grieving people to be tricked. It feels like there's some moral distinctions he's trying to make between entertainer and also his own role of not causing any more suffering. Oh, absolutely, yeah. Magicians still deal with that sort of ethic today. Penn and Teller are inclined to talk about things like honest lying.

Magician Penn Jillette has said, saying you're doing tricks is beautiful and wonderful, and saying that this is a phenomena that we don't know about and we'd better study more is repulsive. And Houdini had no problem with trickery presented as trickery, because it's a vast cognitive, presentational, moral difference between going along to a theatre, paying money to be tricked by a clever illusionist, and going along to a theatre, paying money to be tricked by a clever illusionist,

and going along to a seance parlour, paying money and expecting to be put in contact with your dead daughter. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. To be continued... part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately

watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. Harry Houdini assembled a team of people to help him take down anyone, trying to profit off of people's willingness to believe that they might somehow communicate with people they'd lost. He called his team of debunkers, my own secret service. And his best agent, his top spy, was a young woman named Rose Mackenberg. She was smart. She once said, I smell a rat before I smell the incense. Houdini was impressed. She shared Houdini's disgust for frauds exploiting people who, as Rose put it,

were reaching out in the literal dark for any solace, and who, wracked with grief, had what she called responsive hearts. Houdini at this time was regularly touring his magic show throughout the U.S. Rose and the other members of the so-called Secret Service would travel ahead of him. So perhaps they were based in New York City, but if Houdini was doing a magic show in Chicago, Rose and some other members of the Secret Service would travel ahead. Her first stop was usually at a local department store because she wanted to look at how local women dressed, how various, as she put it, types of local women dressed, so that she could disguise herself, so she could plausibly pass muster as a bereaved widow or a

grieving mother or a naive schoolteacher. She had a whole variety of personas and disguises that she regularly used. She also often used pseudonyms, particularly those that had kind of puns built into them. One of her favorite pseudonyms was Alicia Bunk, which if you pass it out, refers to the expression all as a bunk, as in all of it's fake. Another one was Frances Roard, which if you write down F. Roard spells fraud. So she would go disguised in this persona with one of these assumed names. She would attend as many seances in, let's say, Chicago as she could fit in about 10 days prior to Houdini showing up.

And she would take very careful note of all of the various tricks that the local mediums would employ. She'd write out extremely detailed reports on this. And then when Houdini rolled into town, he would actually expose the local spiritualists, call them out by name on stage. And again, it's important to remember that he is the most popular entertainer in the world. We're very close to it at this time. And so to have the great Houdini literally calling out individual mediums on stage, and not only that, but demonstrating their tricks, because he could perform them by and large better than they could.

When you say call them out, would they sometimes be in the audience? How would that process work? Let's say, for example, there is a trick of creating the effect of a bell ringing mysteriously in the room. And a seance table, for example, would typically be a large round table. The medium and all of the sitters would place their hands on the table. Sometimes the medium would even be physically restrained by being bound and so forth. But more typically, the spiritualist's hands would be pressed to the table by the hands of a sitter on either side, ostensibly to make sure that they didn't surreptitiously use their hands to create any of the so-called spiritual effects that were happening, the manifestations. But Houdini would demonstrate a method whereby he could remove one foot from his shoe, pick up with his toes, which are very, very nimble. He spent time training the very dramatic circumstance of sitting in a pitch black medium's chamber

and anticipating, expecting that mysterious events would happen, even as a very simple effect like that could be very powerful psychologically, could be very convincing. And so he would demonstrate that sort of effect, but the difference was that Houdini, of course, was sitting on a stage. All of the participants, the volunteers from the audience, would be blindfolded, simulating the pitch blackness of the seance room. But, of course, he's performing it in full view of an audience.

And so every member of that audience instantly apprehended how that particular trick would be performed. And some of them had probably themselves maybe been to a seance where they had been partied to the same performance and thought that this was some sort of real spiritual experience. And now they're in the audience seeing it was all a fraud. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, and Houdini was particularly aggressive in doing this because as Houdini was performing these exposés on, really as Arthur Conan Doyle's nemesis in what was sometimes called by the newspapers, at least, the war of the spirits. Rose Mackenberg wrote about her experiences, which Tony Wolfe compiled into a book called Houdini's Girl Detective,

the real-life ghost-busting Adventures of Rose Mackenberg. She wrote a series of expose articles, each one basically devoted to a different escapade, a different theme, a different type of fraud and so forth. She was often called in as a consultant, particularly by insurance companies when they were trying to settle insurance claims that involved some aspect of spiritualistic fraud.

One thing that she noted was that whenever the United States entered a period of crisis, there was a massive uptick in fraudulent spiritualism. So from her point of view, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and so forth, whenever there was a national crisis, people began pouring money towards spiritual fakery. Because they were desperate for clarity. Yes. During one show in Worcester, Massachusetts,

Houdini told his audience, no one should suffer the torture of seeing their departed loved ones faked up like a puppet show. A man in the audience stood up and shouted, You don't know what you're talking about. The man was the husband of a local medium. Houdini invited him on stage, and the man told the audience that his wife was a psychic endowed by God.

He said, I protect my wife. Houdini replied, and I protect the public. The man said, history repeats itself. Christ was persecuted, and now spiritualists are being persecuted, to which Houdini replied, but Christ never robbed people of two dollars, did he? Thank you. You just need a different approach. According to Noom, losing weight has less to do with discipline and more to do with psychology. Noom is the weight loss management program that focuses on the science behind food cravings and building sustainable eating habits. Noom wants to help you stay focused on what's important to you with their psychology and biology-based approach. Noom takes into account your unique biological factors, which also affect weight loss success. The program can also help you understand the science behind your eating choices and why you have those specific cravings, and it can help you build new habits for a healthier lifestyle. And since everyone's journey is different, so are your daily lessons. They're

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Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature, Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. In February of 1926, a congressman from New York named Saul Bloom introduced a new piece of legislation, H.R. 8989, attempting to criminalize the work of fortune tellers and mediums in the District of Columbia with fines of $250 or six months in prison. That was very controversial. Opponents argued that the legislation not only interfered with freedom of religion, but also put restrictions on something entertaining, comparing it to trying to pass a law against believing in Santa Claus.

Two very well-known mediums named Jane Coates and Madame Marcia testified. Madame Marcia was especially famous because in 1909 she had predicted that one of her clients would eventually become First Lady. Six years later, that client married Woodrow Wilson. Her horoscopes were picked up by papers all over the country. Rose Mackenberg testified, too, in support of the bill. But she didn't think the legislation had much of a chance. She knew from her undercover investigations that many important people in Washington, including some senators who were in the room,

attended seances. She quoted the medium Jane Coates as saying, I know for a fact that there have been seances held at the White House with President Coolidge and his family. The Chicago Tribune reported that as Rose spoke, Jane Coates and Madame Marcia aimed deadly glances at her. Jane Coates suggested that Houdini had somehow hypnotized Rose McIntyre.

And then Houdini testified. He said, Nobody is supernatural. We are all born alike. At one point, he reportedly put a telegram on a table and offered $10,000, more than $150,000 today, to anyone in the room who could tell him what the paper said. When nobody spoke up, Houdini said he'd proven that the mediums in the room

were lying about having powers and belonged in jail. At one point, Houdini was punched in the face. The police were called several times. Saul Bloom, the congressman who'd introduced the legislation in the first place, fainted. The bill did not pass. Houdini announced a standing offer of $10,000 to any spiritualist who could, quote, present a so-called physical manifestation that I cannot reproduce or explain as being accomplished by natural means.

He traveled with trunks of papers, documents debunking spiritualism, so he could have everything he could possibly need if someone argued with him. It's been reported that he spent between $30,000 and $40,000 a year paying his secret service and lawyers to defend him when spiritualists sued him. And in the summer of 1926, he announced that he was going to stop performing for several months and dedicate himself entirely to investigating fraudulent mediums, sometimes working for 14 hours a day. But that fall, he was back on stage.

And one October evening, he was backstage at the Princess Theatre in Montreal with a couple of college students. Houdini had been having trouble with his ankle and was lying down on a couch. There was a knock on the door, and another student came into the room. His name was Jocelyn Whitehead. According to one of the students in the room, this is what happened next. Quote, Houdini stated that he had extraordinary muscles in his forearms, his shoulders, and in his back, and he asked all of us present to feel them, which we did.

Whitehead then asked Houdini whether it was true that punches in the stomach did not hurt him. Houdini remarked rather unenthusiastically that his stomach could resist much. Thereupon, he gave Houdini some very hammer-like blows, first securing Houdini's permission to strike him. And then the students left the room. Later, Houdini told the nurse that he was in pain. He said that the young student had started punching him, quote,

before I could get up and brace myself. But he seemed okay. He did two more shows, and then left town for Detroit. When his stomach pain got much worse, and he developed a fever, he was taken to Grace Hospital in Detroit. Harry Houdini died at 1.26 p.m. on Halloween, 1926. It's been reported over the years that Houdini told friends and his wife that he would try to contact them after his death if he could.

People claimed that he'd given them special code words so they would know for sure that it was him. His wife, Bess, told the newspaper, quote, he promised to come back to me if he could, and she said that every Sunday she sat in a dark room and waited. I mean, it's interesting because what Rose says is that Houdini really did want to believe in spiritualism. And it seems to me as though him saying, if I can communicate, I will communicate, is a signal that, you know, he wished it was true,

but he just, he couldn't see that it was. Well, that is a complicated point. I mean, both Rose and Houdini had at least some sympathy for what would be referred to as shut-eyes, people who genuinely believed in the possibility of communication after death and so forth. Neither of them really had an ethical problem with that. They may have believed that such people were to some extent delusional,

but I think they did feel a certain sympathy for them. They'd both suffered bereavements in their own lives and so forth, and they felt that no real harm was done under those circumstances. They saved their ire and they saved their crusade for the ghost racketeers, for the people who were cynically employing magic tricks to exploit the bereaved. Arthur Conan Doyle died four years after Harry Houdini in 1930. Lady Doyle reported that he came back to her a few months later, that she and their children had made contact with him during a séance.

Bess Houdini was still waiting. And on Halloween night, 1936, ten years after her husband's death, she tried to contact him one last time. When it didn't work, she said, good night, Harry. She later told Time magazine that 10 years is long enough to wait for any man. Rose McEnberg kept working. She estimated she attended nearly 300 seances. In 1949, a newspaper referred to her as perhaps the only woman ghostbuster in the world. Tony Wolfe says one of his favorite anecdotes about her

was that when she retired, she always kept lots of lights on in her house. She said she'd had enough of dark rooms. He says that while he was working on curating Rose's writing, he was interrupted because his father got sick and he had to fly back to New Zealand. And I continued working on the manuscript while I was helping to care for him. He eventually, unfortunately, died.

And in the weeks and months after his death, as we were preparing his estate, I actually came across a trunk. I opened it up, and it was full of spookology props, of fraudulent spiritualistic props. And I was absolutely flabbergasted because I'd been working on compiling the manuscript from Rose's articles for at least a year by that point. I had no idea that my dad had actually owned a collection of exactly the sorts of props and appliances that I was writing about. And he'd probably forgotten. Apparently, he had bought them many years before and just forgot about them. What types of props? What types of things are you just talking about?

Well, the first thing I pulled out was a set of what are called glowing hands or floating hands. And if you look at the prop, it's childishly simple, really. It's a pair of white opera gloves, which have been padded in the palms, painted with a phosphorescent paint, and would glow this kind of ghostly white-green color, and create the visual illusion in the pitch black of a seance room of ghostly hands trying to sort of press through from across the veil from the other side. Funnily enough, the glowing props, many of the props that I discovered in the trunk, actually still glow after probably 75 or 80 years.

But yeah, they still glow after probably 75 or 80 years. They still glow. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Susanna Roberson is our producer. Engineering by Russ Henry. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Special thanks to Lily Clark. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal.

You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter, at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A, is a prescription medicine used to temporarily make moderate to severe frown lines, crow's feet, and forehead lines look better in adults. Effects of Botox Cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions

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