Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Spiritualism Works

Episode Date: March 7, 2026

Something spooky was born on the American frontier in the mid-19th century: the idea that people’s personalities survive death and that some gifted individuals can communicate with them. It developed into a religion that some still practice today.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's me, your old pal Josh. And for this week's select, I've chosen our 2020 episode on spiritualism, which, as you might be able to tell from the first couple minutes, was recorded during the height of the COVID pandemic. But that's not why I chose this one. I chose it because it's been coming up a lot lately for some reason in episode after episode, which I've taken as a sign to choose this as a select. But it's also kind of made me think about all of the back and forth I've gone through in my life. Is there an afterlife?

Is there not an afterlife? Who knows? That's where I'm at right now. Who knows? So maybe listen to this episode about the spiritualism movement and see what you think about the whole thing. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there somewhere in the heart of darkness. I'm in the office, dude. I hear your voice, Chuck, but I can't see you. Yeah. I mean, I don't know why people need to know the behind-the-scenes things, but home recording provides some challenges.

and I was getting pretty frustrated, so I was like, you know what, I'm going to go to the studio. Yep. Because I know it'll sound great in here. Yeah, it does. And I know there won't be dogs and children. And everyone should feel good about it

because I have not seen another human being. Yeah. In the building. Didn't a security guard try to run you off the road when you were parking? He didn't try, he stopped me literally in the parking lot. I was like, what are you doing here? I was like, I'm going to my job.

And he said, Okay. He said, stay home, save lives. But before we left, I mean, apparently since I left, they have these, there's a bottle of microphone sanitizer. Whoa. There are headphone sanitized, or not sanitized, but just disposable headphone covers. Sweet. And I feel more safe here than I do at my house.

What? Microphone sanitizer? That sounds really made up. Yeah, it's, um, oh, go ahead and buzz market. No, I won't because it smells bad. And I didn't want to buzz market and then say it smells bad. It's apple flavor. Whoa.

Which would make Emily just, like, turn over in her bed. It's a good, um, Jolly Rancher flavor. Not the best scent, though. I hate it when they add scent to stuff that doesn't need scent. Yeah, agreed. Try finding an unsinted garbage bag these days. Is it tough to? Yeah, man.

Every single one of them, I even got some that said unsinted, and it still smells like something. You've missed that in parentheses underneath it says mostly. 99% unscited. Right. We can't help ourselves. 1% rosemary.

Well, I don't have my over-the-ear headphones right now. I just have earbuds. I saw that look. one of Yumi's long scarves wrapped around my head twice to keep from your audio bleeding onto the track through my microphone.

You either look like Lawrence of Arabia or like you just wandered in with a head injury. Yeah, I had to, it kept slipping off with the Lawrence of Arabia look, so I had to do it the other way around so now it looks like I have a 19th century

toothache. Oh man. Yeah. Give me another picture. It's not very comfortable. My Adam's apple is being pressed toward the back of my throat right now. Yeah, what was the deal with that whole toothache thing? Like, was there ice in there or something?

Or was it just like, just tie their chin shut and it'll help? Knowing that era, there were probably some sort of like razor blade and a heroin concoction that would just scrape the area where the tooth was and inject you with dope to keep you from complaining. Dr. Payne's new chin wrap, now with more leeches. Right. From the makers of microphone sanitizer. All right, let's get into this.

We've already been goofing around for too long. Fine. Let's just finish. Let's get this over with. Let's get serious and talk about spiritualism, shall we? This is a great, great job by Grabster. Great idea by you. Yeah, and it'll be a great episode.

Yeah, Grabster. we asked him to help us out with this. So he put together a world-class article for us. And when we asked him, we said, hey, how about spiritualism? He goes, my brother wrote his dissertation on that. It should be simple. Right.

So he just forwarded us that. Right. It didn't even erase his brother's first name. He just did a strike-through and wrote Ed after it. Easy money. So it is like a really, really interesting phenomenon. And something I think we kind of take for granted. because it pops up everywhere in our world, in pop culture.

I mean, it's just a part of everything from crystal balls to seances, to Ouija boards, to tarot cards, all of this stuff. Movies, yeah. As a matter of fact, I ran across, so you know Dan Aykroyd's huge into UFOs, right? I did know that, actually. He's also enormous into spirits and ghosts. It's actually one of the impetus's, yeah, I think so, of him writing ghost books. Busters. He's actually a fourth generation spiritualist with a capital S like the church

spiritualism. He was raised that way. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all spiritualists, and that's how he was raised as well. So it does just kind of, it's so permeated our culture. It's weird to think of a time when it wasn't there, but there actually was this period starting in right about in the middle of the 19th century, going one. well into the 20th century, where there was a movement that basically said the spirit world is there. It exists. When you die, your personality survives. And some people actually have a talent for communicating with the spirits and the spirit world.

And we're going to start doing that. And that was spiritualism, the spiritualist movement. Yeah. Yeah, and Ed pointed out, which we should as well, that ghosts and things like that and ghost stories, they had been around since people have been around. Everyone since the dawn of humankind has tried to figure out, like, what happens after you die? Do people visit? Do they take on, you know, other forms or whatever? So that's different than what we're talking about.

What we're talking about is spiritualism in that it became a, a. big scam and way to get money out of people who are in pain for most friends or loved one's death sadly yeah yeah for sure um but there is like a through a thread through there where um this same era this same period in this belief in communicating with the spirits and the idea that you could go to a seance and talk to your dead loved one or whatever it produced this other group of people who said yes there are tons of fraudsters and hucksters out there who are taking advantage of this. But there's also this real, there's the real version of it actually does exist. And we're going to apply this newfangled thing called science to investigate it.

And that produced that era of people like Charles Fort or Harry Price who visited the Borely Rectory, the most haunted place in England. or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Like these guys, I know, I'm trying out a new version. I like it. These guys, though, they were, they believed in this stuff and the possibility of it. They also believed in the possibility of applying science to it. And even if science couldn't explain it, it didn't mean that it didn't exist.

And then there was another group who were, what we would recognize today is like pure skeptics, like the James Randys of the day, who all fought. followed in the footsteps of Harry Houdini, as we'll see, who kind of created this. So you had hucksters, believers who were skeptical, and genuine pure skeptics who believed none of it was correct. Yeah, and what I mentioned before, like all the previous attempts to do stuff like this, pre-mid-1800s and largely the Northeast United States, it was more religious like prophets and shaman and stuff like that. Spiritualism was the birth of the Madame Cleos of the world. Ed refers to it as a democratization.

And that's one way to look at it, but it was the idea that, hey, if you are chosen and you are special, you know, it's not like you have to be some religious leader. You can just be a regular person with the gift. Exactly, yeah, which was a huge sea change. And there are basically a few things that kind of came together for this mentality, this fertile kind of a matter. this fertile kind of imagination of this pocket of America in western New York where all of this began to kind of take shape. And one of those things was the frontier, this frontier mentality. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner called it the significance of the frontier in American history. And he basically said, man, the people who are living out there on the frontier,

they're living on the edge of civilization, the leading edge, right? Right beyond that, what they're coming up against, and this is highly debatable because part of what they were coming up against was Native America. It just wasn't a civilization in the form that any European had ever encountered before. But the idea was that the people who were living on the frontier and expanding westward were basically being forced just by virtue of having to survive under these weird conditions outside of culture and civilization in the European sense, that they were having to abandon that culture

and basically make it up as they went along and recreate a new culture from the frontier, and that that just kind of threw the rules out the window. Yeah, this is one of my favorite things when we do topics that when you can look back at a movement and point to factors that at any other time in history, if just one of these might not have taken, you know, might not have influenced it, that it might not have happened at all. There's something about that that I've always really loved, and this is a perfect example.

The frontier life is one. Religious fervor is another, and specifically in New York, in the 1800s, people were really caught up on this religious fervor, and it kind of went from town to town, and there was no big religious authorities in the area. They were out on the frontier. They had no structured hierarchy of religion. And so, again, they could just make up stuff. And I'm not saying that's not tied to this next sentence because I don't want to turn anyone off. But a lot of religion sprang out from this region during that time like Millerism and Mormonism.

And Quakers and Shakers kind of had a resurgence, basically, a shot in the arm just because of this fervor going on at the time. And I couldn't quite put where Millerism, why it seemed so familiar. And then I remember that that was the woman who gave birth eventually to the Seventh-day Adventists. And that popped up in the Kellogg episode, remember? Yeah, yeah. Millerism was where it all started. But that was, and that really kind of indicates. And I love it when things we talked about before, like, have even more context from something else.

But that just kind of goes to show you. Like, this is the kind of place where somebody could be like, I'm in contact with the spirits or Jesus came and hung out with me or whatever and this is what I what I know and what I've been told so let's start a religion based on it and not even necessarily just religions too but also like social movements like utopian societies where and chew your food 20 times so you'll poopies here exactly or you know women have equal equal rights as men which is just completely radical or how about 50 of us live together and just by the fact that we all live together

we're married according to this utopian society just whatever you wanted to do you kind of could because the frontier through the rules out the window or at the very least cultural traditions that most people are raised into when that's not there people make up their own yeah for sure

and the third big factor that that you mentioned was, or we haven't talked about yet, was science. And you talked a little bit about science at the beginning, but the idea that in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, when we're really learning a lot more than we ever have about science and things like electromagnetism and things that you can't see, but science is saying, oh, it's there, this kind of fed the spiritualist movement because, you know, that's something else that you can't see that other people are saying is there. So they're like, well, hey, if science is saying there are things other.

out there we can't quite explain but trust me it's real then why shouldn't i believe this stuff too yeah or well this electric like electromagnetism maybe that actually explains how spirits survive after death it was a really wide open time as far as you know um acceptance of possibilities rather than no science has said this is not possible or it can't explain this or you can't see it with your own eyes so it won't it doesn't it doesn't jive like there was a lot more willingness among people who were scientifically minded to say well maybe this is a good explanation of that let's investigate yeah the birth of science and medicine was a really crazy time it really was it really was so should we take a break yes come on man yes i think your uh your beard holster is on too tight

It is. I haven't been able to feel my nose for about 15 minutes. All right. Well, go rub your nose and bring some feeling back, and we'll talk about some of the first spiritualists. You know Roll Doll, the writer who thought up Willie Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roll Doll,

is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you. I was a spy.

Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's? Played poker with Harry Truman and had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his... covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids.

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In each episode, a different guest and I will go deeper into the wacky mishaps, scandals and sagas, both on the track and far away from it that have made F1 a delightful, decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years. Listen to No Grip on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, I'm going to say it, spiritualists. Nice. And there was actually, so there was a bunch of factors that led to the beginning of all of this, including there was one that I also came across that we need to mention, a guy named Andrew Jackson Davis,

who combined the ideas of the German hypnotist Franz Mesmer with the Swedish philosopher of the soul, Emmanuel Swedenborg. They were both 18th century. He kind of brought them together. And he was a bit of a nobody, but he emerged very, very, very, very soon after the Fox Sisters became celebrities as a founder of the spiritualist movement, almost like he was doing it off in isolation

at the same time that all of this began. Yeah, so the Fox Sisters figure into this really quite largely, and you can even pinpoint a date to what you might consider the birth of the modern American spiritualist movement. It is March 31, 1848 in Hydesville, New York, near Rochester. at a farm, this Fox family lived there. Real people, not a family of cute little red fuzzy creatures. Voiced by George Clooney.

Yeah, exactly. Mr. Mrs. Fox had three daughters, actually. One was much older. Her name was Leia. She was 19 and 23 years older. Why was that funny? Because I saw a picture of her, and she's like the spitting image of Jeffrey Ross.

You got to look her up. I saw a picture. It's what Leah Fox looked like. I didn't see, I saw the picture of the three of them and I didn't get a good close-up. That's an unfortunate look for him and her. Yeah, anybody, really. And I think he would admit that too. Oh, yeah.

He's doing all right, though. What if he had really thin skin, the roast master? He, like, couldn't take a joke against himself. Have you seen that bump in mic show? It's pretty good. No. Is that the roast competition thing? Yeah, he and Dave Vettel just sit there and roast people.

It's really good. Man, I used to love Dave Attell back in the day. He has just turned into like the weird, like, comedy genius friend that Jeffrey Ross has. And it shines through in this. Awesome. I'll check it out. So the Fox family, older daughter Leah, was 19 and 23 years older than younger Kate and Maggie. Or I guess Maggie and Kate, if you're going in that order.

And on that night, on March 31st, 1848, they heard these. rapping, knocking sounds, and they didn't know where it was coming from. And that kind of kick-started this whole thing. In a weird way, this led, and we'll talk about the more specifics, but in a weird way, this led to them eventually saying, wait a minute, we can make some money if we convince people that young Kate and Maggie are a conduit to the other side. Yeah, the thing is, is like when it went from, you know, like,

oh, there's a ghost rapping or knocking, like a poltergeist kind of thing, to this ghost will respond to questions from the sisters through rapping and knocking, like, how old is Maggie? And it would rap like 15 times or something like that. And that really caught a lot of people's attention. And Maggie and Kate moved in with Leah. And apparently, from what I read, it was Leah whose idea it was to take the show on the road, try to scam people out of money.

It was not a super great person from what I read. Yeah, I just, sorry. I was thinking of a rapping ghost and... Right. I'm the ghost of George Washington, and I'm here to say, I love fruity pebbles in a major way. You know what's funny?

I was going to do that exact same thing, but for the Fox family. That's like the go-to rap for guys like us. Oh, it totally is. Guys who can't rap? Yeah, I'm here to say something, something, something in a something way. The Zach Morris method. I think is what that is.

I wonder if that's based on an actual rap. I guess there was one at some point that really did that, right? Yeah, I think Blondie was the one to popularize that. My name is Blondie. I'm here to say, I'm going to try rap because it's popular today. Exactly. So what were you saying? I was laughing.

I didn't even notice. I'm sorry. Oh, oh, just that. It was basically I was laying at Leah's feet. for corrupting the younger sisters. Yeah, she ended up managing them as a unit, I think, later on, if I'm not mistaken. But there aren't great records of everything going on at the time. But the idea was that Kate and Maggie were the ones.

It wasn't really her parents, but they're the ones who could actually communicate with this barn spirit. And so they said, you know what? They not only can talk to this spirit, media starts getting a hold of these stories. And obviously back then it was a very big deal with something like this coming out in the media with not a lot else going on. But they moved and would go away to other places and said wherever they go, ghosts are talking to them. So you guys, my daughters are talented and gifted. They're not just talking to what we think is a murder victim from our previous house. Right, right, which just changed everything.

And also rather suspiciously, Leah, suddenly. realized that she was able to communicate with spirits too so all three of the sisters were able to but yeah not just that one murder victim in their house that had been the original ghost but just about any ghost and this was the beginning of the spiritualist movement basically a prank by a couple of teenage girls that got way out of hand really fast yeah and so what do they do they start having these private sessions where people would pay money and they would wear a these big long dresses that were in fashion at the time and they would no one's exactly sure the exact mechanism but they would do some sort of toe knocking or something where they couldn't be

seen and that was the Morse code that they said was the ghost speaking to them so it's really um they had like a little wooden stool under the table with them and they would take off their shoes surreptitiously. And from what I can gather, they could pop their knuckle of their toe up and down with enough force that it would make

a thud on that wooden stool. That's creepy in and of itself. It was. Yeah, they should have just been like, forget all this spirit stuff. Watch this weird thing. But that was the phantom knocking. And we know that because Maggie,

later on confess to the New York Tribune maybe or the post one of them and said like this is how this is how we did it actually in an effort to take her sister Leah down but it ended up taking the spiritualist movement down in large part but that was it like thumping your knuckle on a wooden stool they did this for 40 40 years they made a living around the world doing that and created a new religion from it. Yeah, and by the time the spiritualism fad sort of died away, the two younger sisters were, and she recanted that confession, by the way, but everyone's like, yeah, you already said it. You could try.

But the two younger sisters and Maggie especially were in pretty bad shape with alcoholism, and they died sort of in a call your brother's-esque way very quietly. fairly destitute in New York City in the 1890s. And trapped under newspapers. Maybe. But no, they had very interesting but also very sad lives. Like I think Maggie married a skeptic and he died. Not a good move.

Right. He died. He talked her out of doing spiritualism, but she went back after he died. Kate married another spiritualist, and she had a huge career touring the world as a spiritualists, made a lot of money, but apparently lost it all. And Leah, again, was just kind of, I guess a bit of a villain in this story. Where's that movie, man? I was wondering the exact same thing. It's crazy. It hasn't been made 50 times already, you know? Yeah, that would be pretty cool. I couldn't even find a good documentary on it.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. On them, at least. I'm sure there are plenty that they're featured in, but give me those Fox sisters. No matter how you look at it too, whether you look at it from the aspect of a believer who thinks like, this is where it all started, these two sisters. And there's plenty of reasons to believe if you're a credulous person or confiding, as Mark Twain would put it, that, you know, like the Andrew Jackson Davis guy who kind of started this thing on his own supposedly wrote on March 31st, 1848, that, you know, like the Andrew Jackson Davis guy who kind of started this thing on his own, supposedly wrote on March 31st, 1848 that, A spirit came to him and said the work has begun. We just started something over here. And then later found out about the Fox Susters. There's all sorts of stuff you can believe.

And so it's interesting from that respect. But also if you're just a pure dyed in the wool skeptic who do not believe in any kind of afterlife or soul or anything like that, it's equally interesting in a totally different way that this whole, like almost century-long movement started from that. You know? Yeah, it's crazy. I just love it. I love this whole story. So it's sweeping the nation at this point by the 1850s,

and we're going to go over some of the different things that they would do, some of the methods that they would use to communicate with the other side, to fake communicate with the other side. The first one is channeling, and these would be trans mediums. So this is like when you've seen in a movie, when someone is just talking like I am in my regular voice, and I'm entering the trance and I'm doing a lot of showy things

to kind of get people pretty pumped up. I feel like they're spending their money well. You're getting me pumped up, I'll tell you that. And all of a sudden, you know, I go into this other voice and I'm like a small child, maybe the parents lost a child,

or I'm a woman or I'm... Sammy Davis Jr. Hey, babe, I just came back to say that don't worry about me. This cat is done. doing just fine. I came back to say, I love Pretty Pebbles in a major way. He invented rap.

That's right. So if you were a good, talented medium, that meant that you were probably a pretty good actor. You could probably do good voices. Sometimes in the case of Corr Scott, who, I know we've talked about her before. Her name sounds familiar, but I have no recollection of talking about her. Yeah, she sounds super familiar. but she was one of the top mediums, trans mediums, because she was this very sort of demure,

attractive young lady, and her whole demeanor was about that. And then she was apparently a great actor because she would go into these big, heavy gruff voices and the gulf between who she was and who she was imitating was so great that everyone was just like, fantastic. Cora Scott, you're a genius.

Well, also, yeah, she was like a little 12-year-old girl when she started, and supposedly she was, would take the stage and confidently discuss like physics and philosophy and all that stuff because there was some authoritative spirit who would basically take in possession of her. Yeah, and I looked up her picture, and Kate Winslet, I think, is from my casting couch, is who I would throw in that movie. Okay, okay. Not as the 12-year-old, that would be weird unless they do some sort of bad Irishman de-aging,

but she looked enough like her, and she's a great actor. so um so that's so so so channeling is what you kind of think of where somebody becomes possessed the medium becomes possessed right yeah there's also ones where like they're they're just saying like oh i can hear what they're saying but you can't because they're speaking to me through telepathy right okay that that reminds me of john edwards remember him crossing over with john edwards yeah i can't picture him i think if i saw a picture i would totally remember though you would You would. What a weird time the 90s were as far as stuff like that goes, although I think his show ran from 2000 to 2004. Yeah, but that kind of coincided with the Reverend Bob Dobbs and the televangelism and all that good stuff.

Yeah. It was a crazy time. So then there's automatic writing was another big one too, and all of this should sound familiar. Again, because the stuff just is so permeated into pop culture, it's crazy. But automatic writing is instead of the medium's voice being, taken over the medium being possessed and speaking as the spirit, the spirit took over their hand and they would start writing. And so in just the same way Cora Scott would have a completely different personality or a different voice or different accent or something like that, this, like the handwriting or the word usage or anything like that would be different than the medium's

normal handwriting. This is automatic writing. And there was... Yeah, I'm trying to decide if I could do that. Well, sometimes they would use their non-dominant hand, so if you want to change your handwriting, just do that to start. Yeah, I can't. There's no way. And then there was a woman named Pearl Curran who wrote at least 5,000 poems, novels, and plays

through automatic writing, all channeling the spirit of a 17th century woman from England named Patience Worth. Nice. That's prolific. That's a lot of words. And then what about direct voice? Yeah, direct voice is when you are a medium, you contact a spirit, and the spirit is so powerful that they just speak to you directly, like the medium is just sitting there with their mouth closed.

Yeah. And this happened usually in a dark room where they would have a business partner just behind the curtain, obviously, use talking, or maybe they were just doing a bad ventriloquist kind of deal, where it's dark enough where you can't really see their lips moving, throwing their voice. There was a woman named Leslie Flint. That's a medium. Oh, really?

Mm-hmm. He looked like the old man from up. Oh. Did it make you cry when he looked at him? It did. My daughter just watched that. There's so much. Here, have these balloons.

So, yeah, Leslie Flynn. I actually love that name for a man, so. Yeah. And I don't know why I assume. But he would recreate famous people like Sammy Davis Jr. But wasn't very good at it, apparently, which is kind of funny. That makes us all a little bit more ridiculous and fun. Well, I was reading an obituary about him that was written by somebody who attended one of his,

or a couple of, I think, of his seances. And they said things like, you know, a lot of times you could tell it, like what the trickery was or whatever. But there were other times where he would, like, be speaking over the voice, which is tough to do with ventriloquism, or one time he was tested, he was made to hold colored water in his mouth while the spirit voice was speaking. And you're like, wow, you know, that's pretty interesting.

And then you just think, well, there's always an explanation for it. Yeah. And, you know, maybe there was another person who was a confederate in the room. Who knows? But it just goes to show that even still, even today, and this guy's obituary

that was written in the 90s, the 1990s, that they were like, yeah, you know, he was largely considered a trickster or fraud, but they'll still hedge and say, you know, but there were a couple of things. And at the very least, it's unexplained, which is pretty interesting and neat, but that doesn't necessarily mean that. No, there really was a spirit that was talking in the room, thanks to him. Amazing. So we had table turning.

This is at a, you know, this isn't like a theatrical performance. This is in a small room, everyone. And this kind of think Ouija board. with this. It's the same sort of thing, except the Ouija board would be the actual table that you're sitting at. Everyone would put their hands on the table, and then the table would move or tilt

or something when you're asking questions. So it's inhabiting the furniture. Of course, what's going on here is either like knee movements or sometime they had these rings on the medium's finger that were slotted and could move the table around without anyone

noticing. Just another little parlor trick, basically. Yeah, or, you know the idea that in you're moving the table yourself like a Ouija board um i can't remember what it's called but basically your your body is is moving without your brain being aware of it and then there's also just the straight up power of suggestion and this applies a table turning and a lot of other stuff but if you're saying like if you're the the medium at a seance and you said the table is rising it's rising people who are willing to believe a lot of people who want to to seance is wanted to believe we're already believed in this stuff just the power of suggestion

could be like oh it is raising a little bit i can feel it i can tell kind of thing yeah my favorite and uh i bet your favorite too is ectoplasmic manifestations that's a good one yeah it's pretty good this is when you would actually as a spiritualist produce something physical uh something would manifest itself uh an actual substance and it was they called it ectoplasis and they could pull it from their body and it was just basically something that they would make beforehand out of whatever.

I mean, they would make it out of all kinds of things. It was one story about someone who was actually gluing cut out faces from a magazine onto dolls and those were ectoplasm spirits. But they would hide these things sometimes like up their butt or in their other body cavities and they would pull these things out and some of the pictures that you see,

see online, if you look up ectoplasm 1800s seance, is just the pictures themselves are hysterical and frightening all at the same time. Yeah, especially now when you look back and see them, you're like, how did anybody fall for that? And it's really important to keep in mind, one, they wanted to believe, but two, these seances would be carried out

in dark rooms to where you couldn't see much at all. Yeah. You just suddenly see some luminous, you know, cloth or something that you were led to believe was ectoplasm kind of what looked like floating in the middle of the table or something like that it's stuff that's that's really easy to explain but in a darkened room that you've been sitting in for three hours communicating with spirits you might be a lot more prone to to buy into it than under normal circumstances yeah for sure uh maybe you're a little drunk right tipsy on shenops uh levitation was another

big one, nice little party trick. I actually could sort of do this for a little while, the David Blaine method. I don't know if you ever saw his, when he made himself levitate. It's just kind of hopping up and down in air, right? No, it's, it's, you're thinking of trampolines. Oh, that's not the same thing? No, people can see those. Oh, okay. No, it's all about the angle with the David Blaine method of getting them to see you from the right angle to where what you're doing is you're rising your body up with just one, like just your first three toes on your right foot. And you're hiding that with your other foot. So it looks like you're just sort of levitating a few inches off the ground. And then you act like you're unsteady. And then you land back down and go,

oh, boy, that was a good one. That was pretty powerful. So wait a minute. David Blaine can raise his entire body weight with three toes. Well, I mean, he's on. his toes. I just, I mean, I could do it at the time, too. This is in the 90s. Man, that's impressive. I don't think I've ever had the kind of toe strength that is required to do that. You can raise yourself up with one foot. In a seated position? No, no, no, you're standing. Oh. Oh, I got you. Yeah, yeah. So what you're doing is you're standing there. I got you. And then you raise yourself off the ground with just the toes on your right foot, let's say, and you're keeping your left foot is shielding that so you can't quite see it.

No, I've got it. And it just creates, if you got someone at the right angle, and I got pretty good at it. My roommate Justin was like, you're getting better, mate. Right. Well, I'm getting drunker. Well, both of those things were happening. I thought you were talking about, like, you know,

like a fake ear or something like that, where they're sitting cross-legged and they're levitating. I was like, to do that with just three toes, that in and of itself is pretty impressive. But apparently no one does that. All right, what are the other, There's another couple of things they did too. Speer photography, pretty straightforward stuff where, you know, this is the very beginnings

of photography, so people didn't understand double exposures unless you were a photographer. But if you were, you could do all sorts of neat stuff, like double expose something and put a ghostly face in the background over someone's shoulder. That's great. I saw one. I saw a spirit photograph where it was a ghostly arm. it also could have been a genie coming out of a bottle, one of the two. It looked exactly the same.

But it was on a table, so they were like, this is a spirit arm levitating the table. So they're like tying three things together, table turning, levitating, and spirit photography. Those are great. I think the spirit photography, just because they were taking advantage of this new technology people didn't even understand.

Right. It was like the deep fake of the time. And they were probably like, everybody, we got maybe three years. Yeah, we better get prolific. And then everyone's going to be like, oh, that's just double exposure. Right. And then people, like I said earlier, too, a lot of the new age stuff that's tied into spiritualism today, like tarot readings or, oh, I don't know, astrology.

That kind of stuff. That had nothing to do with this because spiritualists, all of it grew out of Christianity. So there was some Christian basis to all of the spiritualist practices. And even though in a lot of ways, it was extraordinarily heretical, there was no religious leader in charge of anything, there was no scripture or doctrine or anything like that, it was still very much tied into and born out of Christianity. So stuff like occult things would have been very much frowned upon by spiritualists.

Totally. Should we take another break? I think we should. All right. We'll take another break and tell you about what the Civil War had to do with all of this

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curiosity or you might just maybe even knew it was fake and it was just entertainment. there wouldn't a lot going on back then. Kind of like looking at penguins in a zoo today. Like you know they're fake, but it's still fun to look at. Right. Why not go pay a nickel to see Madam whatever do her little erotic? Because we'll get into that. He's got a little sexy at times, too.

Your little ghost shimmy? This is part of the draw, the ghost shimmy. But we need to talk about a couple of things here. The Civil War for sure. But one of the things that was going on, You know, we've been talking about a lot about the northeastern United States, and there's a very good reason it didn't take hold in the South. It's because the way Christianity was, and some might argue still is in the South,

didn't leave a lot of room. The hierarchy didn't leave a lot of room for other schools of thought. And it was basically, even though it wasn't necessarily a cult, it was just shut down kind of from the beginning in the South. They're like, we'll stick to our voodoo, thank you very much. Yeah, exactly. Keep that spiritualism stuff out. Yeah, so it was just not a big thing in the South.

The mediums at the time would move off the stage sometimes and have these private seances. Sometimes they would get in touch with a family member, but oftentimes it would just be kind of the same as the state show. They would say, like, I'm going to get in touch with Sammy Davis Jr. Or whatever the popular dead figure at the time was. Sure. But that was for like pre-Civil War.

It was an entertainment. It was an amusement. But when the Civil War came, a lot of people died in the Civil War. And that means that a lot of people who survived the Civil War lost a loved one. And these might have been people who, you know, went off to fight and just never came back, never heard from again. No, nothing. Have no idea where they died, where they were buried. And so that kind of grief, you know, that transcends any kind of time or place.

And it created a lot of people, a large population of people who were very interested in getting in touch with their dead relative. And it just so happened that at the time, there was a movement afoot that said, oh, well, this guy over here is actually really getting in touch with the dead. Why don't you have a seance with him? You just have to, you know, pay him to do this work because it does a lot of work. whether you are a believer and a skeptic, it's a lot of work to have been a medium during this time. And so they would be paid, and they would make a living like this.

And so these seances, these performances, were decreased in size, but vastly increased in frequency. Yeah, a lot more spiritualists doing smaller mediums for families or smaller seances for families. And this same thing happened after World War I as well. So it's, you know, it's kind of all fun in games until it gets to this level. If it's a big theater show, fine, whatever.

Go pay your money and get entertained for an hour. But when you are taking people's money who have lost loved ones in battle, then that's when it gets kind of really ugly, if you ask me. Right. And that's where I think a lot of the genuine skeptics who beat this kind of stuff to a pulp, that's the place that they're coming from. You know, not necessarily. like an affront of science or reason or common sense or anything like that.

But that there are a lot of people who have parted money from people who were bereaved at the time. And you just don't take advantage of people who are undergoing grief. That's a pretty shoddy thing to do. That's a life lesson right there for everybody listening, especially the youngsters. Not only that, not only taking their money, but I imagine in a lot of cases, people made real-life decisions based on things that would happen in these seances, you know? Right, it's true. Like sell the family farm, like, stuff like that.

Oh, God, I hadn't thought about that. And not only sell the family farm, sell it to me, the medium. That's what your dead brother wants you to do. For what? Something's coming through. They're saying pennies on the dollar. That's great. Oh, wait, that's the opposite of great.

Yeah, that's terrible. So by the end of the 20th century, things started to decline a bit. one was just pure greed. There were too many of them out there. They were all trying to outdo one another. They were trying to draw bigger crowds and more money and they were getting more outrageous by doing so. And that meant just like anything

when you try and do that, the bigger you try to force something to be sometimes that can lead to its kind of early death, I guess. Yeah, go big or go home, but eventually you're going to go home anyway. That's the end of that saying. I love it. Right.

So part of it was that they were making more and more audacious claims, but also there were more and more scientists, like those that open-minded scientific approach had become a lot more hardened toward spiritualism and mediums because so many had been investigated and found to just be total frauds. most of the time the outcome was the medium couldn't reproduce this ectoplasm or get in touch with this spirit when they were under controlled conditions or they went for it and they were found to be a fraud like the the the knuckle of their toe was found to be wrapping on a stool or something like that and so as these reports kept coming out more and more these scientific investigators were like I don't think any of this is real and they would be interviewed in newspapers and the papers would run these articles and so over time just the general public kind of turned away from spiritualism as Hocom and bunk

but the thing is is not everyone did and even still today go ask Dan Aykroyd there is a group of people who adhere to spiritualism as a religion no for sure and one of the big reasons that it didn't completely go away

was spiritualist were very smart in that they would use influencers of the day in their act. They would seek out these well-known people. They would tour the world sometimes, tour Europe, and do seances with, like, royal families of various countries. The newspapers write about this. They would get a quote or maybe demand a quote from someone like well-known, and they would say, all right, I'll come do a seance,

but you've got to give me a quote that I can use on my flyer. or whatever what's it called uh pull quote no no the that that fallacy the logical fallacy appeal to authority i think uh yeah yeah the appeal to authority sure okay yeah which you know makes a lot of sense if people see oh well they did a science for the prince of monaco right or or sammy davis junior then it's got to be good enough for me it's not pseudoscience at all because why would sammy davis junior believe in pseudoscience right he's just a satanist he didn't care about pseudoscience. That's right.

So one of the other authorities that they would appeal to, Chuck, was what this one, there's an expose written in 1897, and by God, if I can't, I can't find it anywhere in my tabs. But it was basically, oh, Revelations of a Spirit medium is what it was called. And it was written anonymously by a medium, a huckster, a fraud. And I'm pretty sure it was published in 1897. And it is like 400 pages exposing all the tips and all that stuff, all the tricks. But there's a glossary of like 19th century slang words among hoaxers. It's amazing.

But one of them was the top heavy. And that was a scientist who was over-credentialed. They had all these PhDs and everything like that. So they were book smart, but they were super gullible. And if you could get a top-heavy to basically say, like, I can't explain it, science can't explain it, that would go a very long way to bolstering your career, you know? Yeah, even if you talk to a hundred scientists and one of them was a top heavy who said something valuable to you, that's the only one.

You're the 10th dentist of the 9 out of 10 dentists. Right, exactly, exactly. And that's all you need, especially if the other 9 dentists just keep their traps shut because they have better things to do. But there were a bunch of people who would not keep their traps shut. I guess actually one of a legendary top heavy, even though he wasn't a scientist credential or otherwise, was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I don't know, what's wrong with me?

I'm sorry, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. By the way, before I forget, if there's not a band called the Tenth Dentist out there, then I don't know what to think anymore. That's a good one. Remember those Trident commercials? I think it was four out of five dentists. One of them...

Was it four out of five? He was bit on the testicles by a squirrel before he could pronounce how... Before he could recommend dentine or trident or something like that? Maybe it should be the fifth. It is four out of five, it's not nine out of ten. Do you remember that, though? No.

It was a great... Was that... Very shocking in it. What was the... What was the... Was it we make holes in teeth? Oh, yeah. Remember that, the cartoon?

That was crest. Oh, okay. Do you want to hear... You want to hear the pinnors? nickel of 80s marketing to kids, my third grade, maybe fourth grade class, put on a play about... Toothpaste? Yes, and cavities, sponsored by Crest.

Yeah, they had a big push back then for taking over the minds of American children. Well, it works. What's funny is I now use aqua fresh, the orange tube. Oh, man, if there is a favorite toothpaste that any boy in the... America has ever had. That is it in its mind. That was from the 80s? No, it is now. But I'm saying the crest takeover of my mind didn't work. Gotcha. I'm an aqua fish boy now. Is that the one with the tricolor? Yeah, which is another very appealing part of it. Man, you'd buy it all, don't you? I do. So gullible. Yeah, I am a little gullible. You're like an Arthur Conan Doyle.

So he, if you recognize his name, he was the author of Sherlock Holmes, of course. He was super into He joined the Society for Psychical Research, which was an early skeptical slash believer society. And he bought into this. He was just convinced. But on the other side of the equation were skeptics who were not convinced who basically didn't keep their mouth shut. They were the other four who would say like, no, everybody. Actually, this guy's wrong. My esteemed colleague has been taken.

But then the head of those guys was Harry Houdini. amazingly enough. Yeah, Houdini, which makes it super ironic that at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles, they have long had Harry Houdini seance nights. Oh, yeah. Where you can go into the Harry Houdini room

and do a seance. That's neat. Which is, you know, it's all for fun. But it is kind of funny that he was very much against this stuff. Although, supposedly, if you go to the Magic Castle, they'll tell you that he did, and he may have really done this, is told his wife before he died,

that, hey, listen, if I was wrong, I'll come back and I'll contact you and let you know. You're right. And he came back and he said, I've got good news and I've got bad news. The good news is there is a heaven. The bad news is you're scheduled to pitch there tonight. Do you remember that scary stories to tell them the dark book?

Yeah. Is that what that was from? It was like two friends who played baseball together. Yeah. They had a pact like Harry Houdini and his one. wife apparently i think that's a there's different versions of that joke though man the illustrations in that book were just bar none yeah that was great stuff and by the way we should uh give a big uh rest in peace to uh mr mort drucker who passed away oh yeah a couple of weeks ago in real time but that was that was a big one

we talk about mad magazine a lot and mort drucker was my number one with a bullet favorite artist and He passed on and he was one of the greats. He definitely shaped my childhood in a very large way. Yeah, big time. With his drawings. Never had it ever. Yeah. Nice.

We'll hear from you soon. Right. He's like, you guys are pitching tonight. Oh, no. Both of us? So Harry Houdini, he's like, yeah, Josh is going to flub it and Chuck's going to have to be brought in for the save. So Harry Houdini, Harry Houdini created this. long-standing tradition of stage magicians exposing the fraud of spiritualism, basically.

Yeah, because they're like, they're stealing our tricks. Yeah, and it's pretty cool. Like, he would incorporate into his stage shows a lot of these things that spiritualists were doing to show how they did it. And he was relentless at it. Yeah, he was very relentless. But it was very cool. And the fact that it's still going on today, Richard Wiseman, who's come up,

a few times. He was in the Sheldrake episode. He was in the Ghosts episode. And I think we somehow misconstrued his research in the Ghosts episode to suggest that he had proven ghosts exist. I don't remember exactly the details of it. But we got that one wrong. But in this case, he has recreated seances from the 19th century and has shown how willing people are to totally misreport the events that went on in the seance. To say that, yes, you know, the teardons.

table did levitate or all the stuff that he's studying under these controlled conditions and it's basically shown not just that the the medium himself or more often herself as we'll see was engaging in fraud but also that the audience was had a willing suspension of disbelief and were part of this too by saying like i fell the phantom arm tapped me on the shoulder the medium didn't have anything to do with that that was just something that kind of came out of of the environment that was produced in the seance, you know? Yeah, pretty interesting. It is pretty interesting.

So we'll finish up here with this. I thought this is very interesting, actually. The social implications of this, most of the, not all, but a lot of these spiritualists were women in the 19th century. For some practical reasons, they could wear these long dresses that could hide talented toe knuckles. they would not, because of the time, they wouldn't get searched too closely, obviously, because you wouldn't do that if you were a scientist trying to examine

whether or not a spiritualist was real or not. And that led to, there were men for sure, but that led to this kind of interesting side note. One is that women could make their own money, and so it's easy to poo-poo something like this, but I'm sure those Fox sisters made a lot more dough than they ever could have as, you know, doing anything else offered and available to them at the time. Sure. So that's a good thing. They gave them some agency, but it was no coincidence that sometimes

the voice from the other side would champion sort of progressive views because this turned out to be a chance to sort of reshape policy in a way. If you were a woman and you were a spiritualist, it would be very easy to say, you know, they're saying that women should have more rights. And if not, they will come back and haunt you all. Right. And that kind of ended up happening in some ways. Yeah, there was a huge connection between spiritualism and spiritualist movement and abolitionism, the women's suffrage movement, the women's temperance movement.

Yeah. A lot of these progressive movements, workers' rights. And, you know, if you were an abolitionist and you didn't believe in this kind of thing, you might be like, I'm not really happy about that. But at the same time, it kind of whipped up this fervor in that some people would, like, their spirits that that was, that were being channeled by the medium were saying things like, you guys better get on the train of abolitionism, you better get rid of slavery. And it actually did, especially in these theatrical settings, have a widespread influence on getting the message out there through the spirit communication. weirdly enough. Yeah, it's almost like one could say anything at all

at something like, oh, I don't know, a campaign rally, and people would believe it if they were an ardent enough believer in the speaker. Exactly, especially if they'd attach their ego to you and your success. Very strange. So I just want to give two shouts out. One, two, the probably the greatest ghost movie

that involves seances ever. Ghost? No. Whippy Goldberg? No. All right. The others. With Nicole Kidman.

Yeah, that was good. Oh, God. It was so good. Don't spoil it. The greatest short story involving seances in the spiritualist movement, written by arguably the greatest American writer of all time, Joyce Carol Oates. It's called Nightside. It's a short story. It's the same title as a collection of her short stories from the 70s, I think, 1977.

Nightside, look at it. up and thank me later it's seriously just bone-chilling how good it is i wonder if we could uh get in touch with her and read that for our halloween episode i tweeted to her once kind of crassly um and never heard anything back even though she was on twitter i know she saw that tweet hey at joyce carroll oates you think you're so cool right um i would love to read that one there's another one too there's a she's probably not just the greatest american writer but the greatest American horror writer, too. She's great.

She's so wonderful. I would read any of her stories. So if you out there know Joyce Carol Lotes or in contact with her and or her publisher, please, we would love to read in our ad-free episode, one of her short stories for Halloween. That's right. So I think she might like that aspect.

Okay. Oh, one last thing, Chuck. There's a place called Lily Dale in New York, appropriately enough, which is basically a spiritualist community, where you can go basically be among spiritualists as a religion today. Wonderful. Since I said today, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this, we haven't gotten emails in two weeks from people because something's wrong with our email. So it's on bidet's again.

You're going to get a couple on bidet's, I think. All right. Hey guys, listening to your recent episode on bidets reminded me of a funny story I thought you might like. 2004, my family bought a new house in the suburbs of Detroit. It was designed and built by an exceptionally pragmatic, efficient, yet lacking in aesthetic appreciation engineer. To our surprise, my husband's delight, as he is from Spain, the master bathroom included a separate bidet unit. Now remember, this is 2004, and people were not as familiar in this country. Most people that visited our home had no idea what it was,

and we also made the decision to not give advance notice when they went to the bathroom. Invariably, people would emerge from the bathroom trip either a little wet or with an embarrassed look on their face as they confessed to having explored the contraption

and released a stream of water onto themselves and into our bathroom was always good for a laugh. I sure appreciate you guys when we move from Michigan to the South Carolina. What? Was she once missed South Carolina

because that was would explain that last bit. No, I thought it was, she met the South, and I didn't see on the next line. It said Carolina. So that was just me. Oh, okay. Your voices accompanied us as we made many 12-hour trips back and forth. We enjoyed the knowledge and the tangents, even the tangents.

And now you continue to sue and educate me as I go on my four to five-mile recreational walks during the pandemic quarantine and temporary, hopefully, furlough. and that is from Michelle Salcedo. Nice. Thanks a lot, Michelle. We're glad to know that you're doing okay there, hanging out, waiting for things to get back to normal. In the South Carolina. That's right, Chuck.

And as it will eventually go back to normal. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us like Michelle did to let us know some silly story about a bidet or what have you, you can get in touch with this. Send us an email to Stuff Podcast. at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio,

visit the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You know Roll Doll. He thought up Willie Wonka and the BFG. But did you know he was a spy? In the new podcast, The Secret World of Roll Doll, I'll tell you that story, and much, much more.

What? You probably won't believe it either. Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you. I was a spy. Listen to the secret world of Roll Dahl

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're trying to keep up with everything happening on and off the court, we've got you covered on the podcast, flagrant and funny. You want to start with the first pleasure for the Big Ten Coach of the Year? Oh, whatever. Would you like to? So you're a Spartan, is that what I'm getting?

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But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax. You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct? I doctored the test ones. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg, a lesbian. Michael Mancini. My mind was blown.

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