Imaginary Worlds - Talking to the Dead

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

Jason Suran wants you to know he can’t talk to the dead. Then he will convince you that he can. In Suran’s show, The Other Side, he recreates a theatrical type of séance that departed American culture almost a century ago. And he believes that experiencing the way people tried to contact the departed can reveal a lot about our deepest desires and fears. Plus David Jaher, author of The Witch of Lime Street, discusses how séances became all the rage in America until Harry Houdini made it his life’s mission to debunk them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. I recently went to a seance. I had never been to a seance before. Actually, I hadn't even been interested in going to a seance until I heard about Jason Saran and his show, The Other Side. Jason is a mentalist by trade, which means that he does mind reading tricks. And I had seen him do a few of these tricks online. Like I saw a video where he put an audience member into a trance, told a man to close his eyes, and then Jason asked him to tap every part of his body that Jason had just touched, except Jason wasn't touching him.

He was touching somebody else in the audience five feet away. But the guy in the trance reacted as if it was his shoulder or his nose being touched. Now, I knew that his show, The Other Side, was going to be full of mentalist tricks. But it would also be a recreation of an early 20th century seance. And I found that really intriguing. Because I think seances go right to the question of why we suspend our disbelief. Now, I wasn't allowed to record the show, so I will describe what happened without giving too much away. The show takes place at the Norwood

Club in Manhattan, which is a stately home from the mid-19th century that's been turned into a membership club with dining and events. There was about 14 of us, and we were led down into the basement, into a room covered with black curtains, candles, and black and white photographs on a fireplace. There was even an antique gramophone playing wax records. Jason's a young guy, and he's very dapper and friendly. He knows how to charm a crowd. And he set the mood by talking about the history of seances. He did mentalist tricks, which were astounding to me, that apparently mediums used to do back in the 1920s. He even stopped his pulse down to nothing so he could open up channels to talk to the dead, in theory. And at one point,

he asked us to write down the name of a loved one, a departed loved one, that we wanted to contact and put those cards into envelopes. I did not have to think twice about who to write down. It was my grandmother. We were very close. She was an artist who worked in a modernist, abstract style, and I have her paintings all over my apartment. We gathered the envelopes into a basket, and Jason picked them at random. Without opening them, he guessed who the cards were about, and the details were well beyond anything that anyone had written down about their loved ones. I was really disappointed that he didn't pick my card, even though I knew he couldn't talk to the dead. He made it clear that these were nothing but tricks,

but they were really convincing tricks. At the end, the candles went out and the show got scary. Things literally went bump in the night, and someone in our group screamed. A few days later, I met up with Jason at the Norwood Club, and I asked him why he wanted to be so clear about the fact that he can't talk to the dead before making us believe that he could. For me, it's twofold. The first part is that's actually kind of exactly what I wanted you to take away, that anybody could be susceptible to this, that you don't have to be a believer.

You don't have to be gullible. These seances worked for a reason. These tricks worked for a reason because they prey on something that is fundamental to the human condition. because they prey on something that is fundamental to the human condition. We're all vulnerable to this, and we are all capable of buying what these folks were selling. Yeah, I mean, it made me think a lot about the loved one that I wanted you. Like I told you, I was a little bummed that you didn't pick my,

I don't know how purposeful that was or how random that was in terms of picking the envelopes. But it was like I wanted you to say this person's name. I wanted these details to come out. I was almost like to get the illusion that I could talk to them even though I knew it wasn't real. Right, because we want to share. And because deep down, especially if we don't believe in the afterlife, I think we know that sharing our memories of those people may be our only way of connecting with them and may be our only way of keeping them alive. And so I think, yeah, there's this huge desire when you walk into the room to have me get

it right. And that's a huge part of my advantage is that whether or not you're a skeptic, on some level, you're on my side. On some level, you want me to win. If I don't, you're alone. You're alone with that memory. You're alone with those thoughts. And I think there's a desire to connect. Well, in today's episode, we're going to look at an art form that is largely forgotten. But there was a time when the biggest craze in America was talking to spirits, at least until the most famous magician of the time

decided to make it his mission to break up the party. That is all after the break. To understand how Jason Sarand developed his show, we have to look at the history of seances in America. It all started as a prank. In 1848, Maggie and Leah Fox were 11 and 15 years old, living in upstate New York. They came up with a system of pulleys and strings to make it look like ghosts were moving things around their bedroom. Now, we don't know if their mother really thought that the girls could communicate with the dead, or if she just thought she could make money off of them. Either way, she took the Fox sisters on the road, and their seances became a sensation. They actually teamed up with P.T. Barnum for a while. And this was the start of a very American brand of spiritualism that was indistinguishable from show business. Mediums like the Fox sisters were full-fledged celebrities. But when they became adults,

the Fox sisters had a very public falling out. Maggie did a newspaper interview where she came clean about all of their tricks. But the fans of her sister Leah refused to believe Maggie. And the backlash was so swift, not to mention the loss of income for Maggie, she denounced herself, claiming that evil spirits had forced her to do the interview. And she went back to the seance business. But Jason does not see the Fox sisters or other mediums as just charlatans or con artists. As a fellow performer, he kind of gets what they were doing. You have to wonder if you were in some of these people's circumstances and all of a sudden a career path presented itself

that was going to give you money, security, adulation, notoriety, what would you do? They put food on the table for a lot of people who came from backgrounds where there weren't a whole lot of other options career-wise. For a lot of the women who did it, it was an opportunity to perform in a capacity that they never would have been allowed to otherwise. You know, there weren't a tremendous amount of female magicians, but an overwhelming portion of the mediums were females. And they were getting away with saying things and doing things and subverting cultural mores in, you know, the Victorian era. doing things and subverting cultural mores in, you know, the Victorian era.

The public's fascination with seances came in waves that corresponded with traumatic events in history. The first big wave came after the Civil War, and the second wave came after World War I and the Spanish Influenza, which left millions of people grieving and vulnerable to wishing that somebody had a way to contact their departed loved ones. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a strong advocate for seances, and not so coincidentally, his son had been killed in World War I. David Jare wrote a book called The Witch of Lime Street about the history of seances. And he says you cannot underestimate how much Conan Doyle legitimized what mediums were doing at the time. You know, Conan Doyle is known as being this detective author, but he was also one of the great public speakers of his day. And he was incredibly popular in America. He was beloved,

he was trusted, people imb He was beloved. He was trusted. People imbued him with the same credibility they would Sherlock Holmes. So when he became interested in spiritualism, when he became interested in seance phenomena, people really began to take it seriously. You know who else took it seriously? The magazine Scientific American, which is still around today and very well regarded. In the 1920s, they published a lot of articles about seances, but they did not denounce them. They tried to keep an open mind. Jason says we have to remember. It's this moment in human advancement where science is just well understood enough that anything seems possible, but not so well

understood that we know what's not possible. Photography. So many people at the beginning thought you could see spirits in photography when it was just sort of like, you know, photographic tricks or errors. And the telephone and radio. I mean, imagine being one of the first people to hear from a neighbor that there's this new technology that lets your voice travel thousands of miles instantaneously. I don't think it was such a big jump from even a scientific point of view to think, sure, maybe there is some other force or energy that persists after death. But words like maybe were not good enough for Arthur Conan Doyle. When he was touring America, he walked into the offices of Scientific American

in New York City and demanded that they stop reporting on seances as if there were two sides of this debate, because he was certain that mediums could talk to the dead. Although David Jair says, the Scientific American responded in a way that horrified Conan Doyle. They told him, okay, we're going to conduct our own investigation, but we're going to do it in the guise of a contest. And the 1920s, you know, contests are an incredible rage. So what they did was they sponsored this prize contest. They were offering more money than was offered for the Nobel Prize in science to any psychic medium who could manifest genuine psychic phenomena before a committee of some of the top scientists in the United States.

Conan Doyle may have thought the contest was crass, but he got on board quickly. In fact, he enlisted his favorite candidate, a woman that he was certain would win, Marjor got on board quickly. In fact, he enlisted his favorite candidate, a woman that he was certain would win, Marjorie Crandon. Crandon was a high society woman in Boston who held seances at her home in the posh neighborhood of Beacon Hill. And in her seances, ghosts would ring bells and move objects around the room. She also channeled the voice of her dead brother, which people said was super creepy and convincing. And Marjorie Crandon actually used male chauvinism to her advantage, because men would ask, how could a proper Bostonian housewife pull off magic tricks that would fool scientists and have rough language coming out of her mouth that would

normally be said by her brother. I mean, clearly the spirits must be manipulating her. I mean, the term for psychics in Victorian times, they called them sensitives and it was felt that women were more receptive and had that kind of psychic receptivity, they were more likely to have supernatural powers. Again, this is taken from medieval times and even classical times. But so it was believed that women manifested ectoplasm, which is sort of the precursor to how ghosts are formed, through the orifices of their body. By the way, if the word ectoplasm sounds like Ghostbusters,

that is not a coincidence. Dan Aykroyd's great-grandfather was a medium during this time. And in the 1920s, scientists developed methods to prove that mediums like Marjorie Crandon were emitting ectoplasm from their orifices without any trickery. They would be put in these spirit cabinets because it was believed they needed privacy to form their ectoplasm. And if you've ever seen a spirit cabinet, their arms and legs are sticking out

and people are holding their arms and legs to make sure there are no shenanigans going on, that they're not in some way cheating. A woman would have to be strip searched to make sure they weren't storing any fake ectoplasm in the orifices of their body. This went on before Marjorie's seances. She would be strip searched. She would perform seances in her kimono. Very often she wasn't wearing any underwear. So here she is sitting in these seances with these middle-aged professors and scientists. And she

was a very attractive woman and incredibly charismatic. But there was one expert who vowed that he would not fall for her charms, Harry Houdini. Now, interestingly, Houdini started out as a believer. He was very close with his mother, and after she died, he went to a lot of seances trying to contact her. In fact, that's how he became friends with Arthur Conan Doyle, who introduced Houdini to the best regarded mediums in London.

Conan Doyle believed that he was indoctrinating Houdini into the movement because he thought Houdini himself had genuine supernatural powers, and he thought Houdini was going to become this figure who wound up substantiating spiritualism, substantiating supernatural phenomena through his own demonstrations of it. But Houdini saw through all of their tricks. And he felt betrayed. I mean, he had sincerely wanted to contact his mother. So he dedicated the rest of his life to proving that mediums were fake. And he'd do it in his usual theatrics, where he'd show up at a seance in disguise, rip off a false beard and yell, I am Houdini, and you're a fraud. Arthur Conan Doyle was furious when Houdini started doing this,

which may be one of the reasons why he doubled down in trying to get scientific evidence in favor of seances. And when historians write about this period, Houdini is usually depicted as a hero, stopping con artists from exploiting people that are grieving. But Jason is not quite as sympathetic. You know, I think he was deeply committed to the pursuit of truth, but he was also a very vindictive guy. Houdini gets his name from Robert Houdin, who was this famous French magician that Houdini's life, he finds out that Robert Houdin's autobiography is all bullshit. Which, like, if you've read Robert Houdin's biography, it's so obviously bullshit. It's, you know, him being abducted as a child by, you know, a secret tribe and given his magical power.

Like, autobiographies by most people were bullshit because you couldn't fact check them, you know, back then. And magicians were just a whole other league. But Houdini gets so, you know, upset at finding out his hero's full of shit that he writes his own book on Robert Houdin. But he basically just like eviscerates his own hero because he's so wounded by this revelation. And now Houdini had his sights on Marjorie Crandon, the most supposedly authentic medium in America, and Arthur Conan Doyle's favorite candidate

to win the contest from Scientific American. And she was acing her way through the trials of that contest, winning over all the experts. There was only one judge left standing between her and the grand prize, Harry Houdini. David Jarrett says their showdown was a media sensation. When Houdini confronts Marjorie, it's almost like a modern representation of this classic kind of conflict or confrontation between a sorceress and a potent male. I mean, you have this in myth. You have a sorceress like Circe, Odysseus confronts her, and it's the test of male sort of moral rectitude and physical power versus a female's supernatural power.

And then you have it with King Arthur and Morgan Le Fay. You know, Morgan Le Fay steals his sword and essentially emasculates him. And that's exactly what Circe does to Odysseus' men. She enchants them. She turns them into swine. does to Odysseus' men. She enchants them. She turns them into swine. So what Houdini believed was that Marjorie had this mythic kind of seductive power and that she had seduced all these scientists who declared her genuine. And he declared himself, you know, the first man who was not going to be seduced by her. Marjorie Crandon welcomed the challenge. And Houdini learned he may have met his match. He kept coming up with ways to trip her. Like at one point, he put her in one of those spirit

cabinets that immobilized her limbs. And he vowed that once he put her inside this spirit cabinet, she wouldn't be able to manifest any phenomena. The seance had gone on for just a few minutes when the whole top of the cabinet just spontaneously burst apart. So Houdini, I wouldn't say that he believed that she was doing these things by supernatural means, but he had a lot of explaining to do because he had vowed that, you know, nothing was going to happen when she was in this cabinet and things did happen. Eventually, he was able to reproduce most of her tricks on his own, but he admitted that he couldn't explain all of them, which infuriated him. Still, he refused to give her the prize. Her fans, her stans,

doubled down in their support, denouncing Houdini as fake news. But in the end, what did her in was what did in a lot of mediums. They had to keep topping themselves to impress their believers. And after a while, she ran out of luck. One of her tricks became too apparent, even to her supporters, and that was the end of her career. But by the 1930s, the public had lost interest in mediums. David said that's partially because Houdini had died from a blow to the stomach from a man that hated Houdini's anti-miracle crusade. And so the mediums had lost their famous arch-nemesis. Houdini brought spiritualism such recognition and such attention

because he was so popular and because this crusade he was on to discredit it brought the movement even more attention. But in a sense, she and Houdini really destroy each other. There are still plenty of mediums today, but they usually stick to cold readings on talk shows, as if the bright lights of a TV studio are supposed to make them seem authentic. The theatrics of the early 20th century seances are now considered obviously fake. Now, my own theory has a lot to do with the fact that spiritualism was very popular in the radio age. But when you move more to a visual age, now you're moving into an era more of moving pictures.

Could spiritualist phenomena, you know, really stand the scrutiny of cameras and a visual age? And that is exactly what Jason Saran wanted to find out when he developed his show, The Other Side. Now, the basic history of seances is available for anyone to read, but the story behind those tricks are closely guarded secrets. Jason had to learn them from old pros. I asked him how mediums were able to pull off tricks like asking someone to write down on a chalkboard the name of a person who had died. And then the medium would produce another chalkboard with the same name already written on it. However the hell they can get away with it.

That's the truth, right? I think the best mentalists and the best psychics and mediums and performers of any kind of mind reading are the people who've practiced every skill in the book and sort of have all the tools at their disposal for any given moment. There's no one way to get there. moment, right? There's no one way to get there, right? There were mediums who would get to town early and, you know, research every single person in their audience. There were mediums who learned to read people's writing by the sound chalk would make on like a chalkboard slate. You know, they'd give you a chalkboard and say, write down that name, and they could tell from the chalk sounds. And there were people who were just fabulously good cold readers who just knew how to zero in on the thing you wanted to hear and tell it to you. Jason researched the history of seances for years, but he says you learn just as much through basic trial and error.

The thing I found fascinating was that it was often the smallest effects that had the biggest impact. I remember in one of the very first runs that we did of this, there's a moment in the show where an object is borrowed from the audience and it sort of behaves on its own and moves of its own accord. I know it well. That was my object. Yes. And then there's a second moment in the show much later where the lights are out and all hell breaks loose. And I overheard after the show in the first year that we did it, a woman talking to her friend. She goes, when all hell broke loose, I knew that that was just a trick. But I'm pretty sure when that object moved earlier in the show, that was my dad. Wow. And, you know, I had the wind knocked

out of me. I had no idea how to even, she wasn't talking to me. So I, but, you know, the desire to like rush over to her and be like, no, it wasn't. Because I don't want someone to walk away feeling like I really communicated with their dead loved ones. I want them to walk away understanding how people could believe that. But I don't want someone to walk away believing that because then they might actually go to somebody who could take advantage of them. It was such an educational moment because it illustrated how sensitive you have to be to what people are coming in with. I have a much better understanding now of my audience's expectations than I did when I first started. Is there anyone that you wish that you could contact? Absolutely. Yeah. And I were her babies, you know, for all intents and purposes. And I wasted so much time towards the end, especially.

She was sick. And you just don't, no matter how, no matter what, I think you look back and go, I could have called more. And I was lucky enough that I got to Chicago before she passed. And she was unresponsive and she wasn't going to wake up and we knew that. And it was sort of a matter of time kind of thing. And I remember just spending all of that time telling her things I wanted her to know. that time telling her things I wanted her to know. Yeah, if somebody told me that I could still say those things now and she could hear me, I know for a fact I'd want to believe. Yeah. No, that's powerful. I could see that. Yeah. I mean, going back to do the show after that,

did it make you approach the show differently? Completely. Really? Yeah, because when I, I wrote it when I was, I mean, the first version of this show was, oh God, I was 23 maybe, 20, yeah, 23. And I'm 28 now. And I was lucky enough when I was 23 that nobody really

close to me had died. And so the show's evolved a lot as that situation has changed. And I've become a lot more acquainted with personal loss and what it means to grieve. You are touching a live nerve ending. And you are very possibly exploiting people's grief for the purposes of entertainment, which is a gross thing to do fundamentally. And to me, the show is not about spooky, spooky Halloween time. To me, the show is fundamentally about why we believe the things we do

and why this particular art form captured the public imagination and why people went to these things. And I think it was impossible, or at least I found that it was impossible, to talk about that without being willing to give people the experience of being in the real thing. Afterwards, Jason and I left the club. We were on a very busy, bright Manhattan street about to part ways. And I told him that my assistant producer, Stephanie, had gone to the show with me. And the experience inspired me to tell her about my grandmother, who I had wanted Jason

to contact. I told Stephanie about how my grandmother was an artist, and how I think of her every time I look at her paintings, although it feels like a one-sided conversation. But it was really nice to tell Stephanie about my grandmother. She was really interested in all the details of her life story. And Jason said that is exactly what he wants people to get out of the show, to realize that we don't need a medium to talk to the dead. All we need to do is talk about the dead, sharing our memories with the living. It's a simple trick, but it can make them feel alive again. Well, that's it for this week. Special thanks to David Jare and Jason Saran.

During the interview, I asked Jason if anything had ever happened in his own show that surprised him. We had someone pee all over a chair once. They got so frightened that they peed their chair. That was unexpected. Wow. That was recently, actually. Really? Wow. Did that make you actually. Really? Wow.

Did that make you feel powerful or afraid of how much power you had as an entertainer? More than anything, it made me feel nervous for what it was going to cost to get the chair fixed, cleaned. The Other Side is running through October at the Norwood Club in Manhattan. I have links to it and David Jair's book, The Witch of Lime Street, in the show notes. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emalinski and Imagine World's Pod. And the show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.