MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

Some mediums, when in a trance or in financial distress, generate a viscous substance in the form of gray cloud. This is called ectoplasm. The word comes from the Greek "polikeras" which means “roam the bush”. An ectoplasm takes shape as one looks at it. It can represent a loved one or someone to whom money is owed. It may also represent a woodpecker, or perhaps Mexico City, or perhaps smoked sausage. This is to say that it can represent anything one can imagine, except a grand piano. The medium spontaneously secretes said substance in the course of the séance. Not all mediums are capable of secreting ectoplasm but only those who have belonged to the guild for more than thirty years. Young mediums secrete a different substance called ‘soap bubbles’. Ectoplasm is the reason why many people avoid attending séances, as it sticks to clothes and leaves stains.

Don’t get the wrong idea that communication with the dead is an easy thing. Communication with the living ones is already quite complicated, so imagine with the dead! Because we don’t talk about the dead who have followed the advise of any self-respecting death manual (the Tibetan Book of the Dead, for example), which warn you about the necessity of heading for the Light-at-the-End-of-the-Tunnel. No. The dead we are talking about are like the one who is invited to a party and, instead of knocking on his host's door, remains wandering the stairs without knowing whether to go up or down. To put it bluntly: they are a little weird. The minutes of the séances that we find in the archives of the Society for Psychical Research, either in London or in New York, prove it. The following example corresponds to a séance that took place on the night of November 24 in a luxurious apartment on New York's Fifth Avenue. Eight months earlier, a wealthy stockbroker whom we will call Mister Smith...

The New York’s high society of the second half of 19th century, the so-called “The Four Hundred”, was very strict in everything related to etiquette. Everything had a correct way to be done. And the guru of The Four Hundred’s etiquette was a social snob called Ward McAllister. No one has managed to explain how such a dull guy (it's said that, when he told a joke, caused sobbing and even occasional suicide attempts) could had emerged as the benchmark for fashionable New York Society. Not only was he the benchmark in matters of etiquette but, since he had drafted that list, he had even the right to select who deserved to be part of “The Four Hundred”. But like any idle community, this social elite had a dangerous tendency to get bored and, therefore, to adhere to the mundane pastimes of its time, and among these pastimes featured communication with spirits. When McAllister learned that in the Astor, Vanderbilt and Goelet mansions séances were being held, he drew up a list of The Fou...

The first meeting of Sir William Barret with Madame Blavatsky, founder and undisputed head of the Theosophical Society, was most curious. Almost a paranormal phenomenon in its own right. It turns out that at that time William James had joined the Theosophical Society and was impatient for his friend to meet this extraordinary woman. The headquarters of the aforesaid Society were located in New York, where Barret was staying, so he had no problem being introduced to such a famous woman. On the contrary, he had heard wonders about her paranormal abilities, so he felt a natural curiosity. James had not warned of their visit, so when both Williams showed up at Madame Blavatsky's residence, no one was waiting for them. They found the door open and James invited his friend to go inside with the familiarity of someone who knows that he is welcome in other people's home. They walked down a long corridor without seeing a living creature. Puzzled, James began to shout (Barret had the im...

In all seance worth its salt, there were usually more pairs of hands than guests. Floating hands could arise suddenly and from anywhere. You had to be careful not to have your wallet stolen! In the archives of the Society for Psychical Research there are many examples because most of the time spirits did not show full body, and the part of the body that appeared most often used to be the hands. Sometimes they went in pairs, but not always. There were solitary hands, and not because in life the deceased was one-handed. Simply, if with one hand the effect could be produced, why make two appear? However, other spirits were not so saver and showed three, four, five and even six hands, each independent of the other. Each hand did his own thing. There were hands that limited themselves to giving you an envelope with a message or a request from the deceased. There were dancing hands. Other hands could touch you. Others made magical passes over your head. Others played the strings of a lyre or...

The amount of magic shows programmed by London theaters at the end of the 19th century is incredible. The West End was full of posters with flying hands, women split in half, heads floating apart from their bodies, legs that were ahead of their trunk. .. Walking through the Victorian West End was like being inside a dream of Jack the Ripper. Of course there were also musicals. But almost everyone swirled around magic, or a magical object, or the life and miracles of a magician, or a pig named Trudy that for a time was very popular for some reason that I do not know but that I would not be surprised if it was related to magic. People were tired of the everyday, of the natural and logical functioning of things, and longed for the implausible, the magical, the out of place. And of course, among the upper classes firstly, the mediums had a field day. There was a visceral hatred on the part of the illusionists towards the mediums. The magicians considered mediums as an unfair competition, a...

One day, during breakfast, Sir William Barret announced that he wanted to test his mediumistic gifts. Henry Sidgwick asked him what was he based on to suppose that he possessed such gifts. He replied that when he was ten years old, he once dreamed of his father and when he woke up he found his father in the family room sitting in his favorite chair reading “The Times”. Then, he suddenly lowered the newspaper and, pointing to his son with his finger, asked "Have you read the Bible?". This story had a strong emotional impact on the members of the SPR, until Barret clarified that at that time his father still lived and resided in the old house in Sussex with the rest of the family. Still, Barret was so insistent that Sidgwick ended up agreeing to the whim of his friend and organized a séance for that same evening. In the early afternoon, a wagon stopped in front of the entrance to the SPR headquarters and two large wooden boxes were moved to the living room where the séance was ...

It was his interest in sleepwalking that put the father of Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud in relation with the Society for Psychical Research. One night Sir William Barrett was walking on the sidewalk after leaving a pub in Soho when he crashed into a man who walked with his eyes closed and arms outstretched. The man woke up at that moment, and a few meters behind him Barret heard a voice grumbling and complaining. It was Freud, who was following one of his patients in order to discover where he went every night after leaving home in a state of somnambulism.   At the advice of Freud, the man’s wife did not dare to stop him. And precisely that night Freud had decided to find out where his patient was going every night. (Later it was discovered that his destination was the same tavern that Barret frequented and that sleepwalking was just a stratagem of the man to escape from home at night without his wife preventing him from doing so.) Barret apologized and offered Freud his card wit...

Misinformed people tend to believe that in the Society for Psychical Research everybody was very naïve and willing to believe in anything. That you could tell them that you were a vampire about to transform into a bat and they ran to close the windows for fear that you would fly away. And well, I will not deny that there was someone who was very credulous (talking about vampires, a certain member wore several strings of garlic as necklaces). But it was the exception. As a rule, they were eminent personalities from various fields of science with a high degree of skepticism. There were even one who carried his skepticism to the point of fanaticism, which caused him to end up very badly. I will omit his name for delicacy and call him Mr. Skeptic. When they tested the mediums with whom they collaborated, the members of the Society set traps to find out if they were being cheated. But Mr. Skeptic took this tactic to the extreme. At the end of the summer season of 1879, Mr. Skeptic returned ...

Harry Houdini was not the only escapist interested in unmasking the false mediums that abounded in the Victorian era. One of his most outstanding disciples called himself Wolfang  the Wizard of the North, and he had invented a trick of escapism whose secret not even the great Houdini was able to discover. Wolfang was chained from head to toe, then pulled into a hermetically sealed box. This box was thrown into the Hudson River with a one-tonne anchor and the public was authorized to shoot him if they saw him lean out to the surface. The end was spectacular: after half an hour the box was raised up completely empty, and at the same time Wolfang reappeared in Wichita, Kansas, still chained and with a raised blue-purple color on his face. This Wolfang had resolved to unmask a fake medium named Sarah Toul, whose services were disputed by New York's high society. For this he used his celebrated trick of escapism: during one of his performances, he did not reappear in Wichita, so he was...

In our days, the word "rapping" automatically evokes the performance of rap music. But in the Victorian era, it had a very different meaning. At the end of the 19th century rappers were disembodied spirits and did not make music. They rapped in order to answer the questions a medium asked them. A medium was not a solvent either... Although there were mediums who dissolved marriages since the spirits did not always give the answer that a husband or a wife wanted to hear. In this regard, I will mention the record by Frederic W. H. Myers of a shocking seance that was the origin of a much talked-about scandal in the city of Derby. There was a seemingly happy and well-matched marriage in Derby. Out of respect for their privacy, I'll call them “The Cuckolded”. The Cuckolded were part of a select spiritualist group that met every Friday night at the home of a medium known as “The Medium”. The Medium had a privileged contact with one Phil Poile, aka “The Dead”, a dead man who, d...

Lavinia Koppelman, the heiress of the immense fortune accumulated by her father the lamplighter Dove Koppelman throughout a lifetime of lighting streetlamps in the London borough of Kensington, organized a séance one warm night of August 1901. On the select list of guests were Viscount Rothermere, Lady Claire Rothermere, Frances Rothermere and the latter's brothers Sir William and Sir Clive Rothermere, baron of Walden. Also, of course, the famous medium Anastasia Prim and her cheerful troupe of spirits. Although the Koppelman mansion had a new installation of electric light, the medium imposed as the only lighting the candles of a four-branched candelabrum. One by one the guests arrived: the five privileged people who would attend the séance convened on the occasion of the recent passing of their relative Conrad, Duke of Rothermere, died recently because of an unfortunate accident occurred in the course of a séance in that same private room. A slight restlessness could be perceiv...

One of the most famous, although not the most reputed, was Claudia Poshnik, who was said to have many well-paid spirits at her service. In a state of trance, Poshnik summoned her spirits by telephone (a recent invention) and they obeyed her without question. (One of them, a certain Josh Milgrawe, once dared to contradict her and she dismissed him ruthlessly, so the poor spirit ended in indigence). Poshnik mixed in the high society of Boston, very fond of séances and bridge games. In fact, she was often required at the famous bridge games of Huntington mansion. It was rumored that Mr. J. P. Huntington amassed a fortune at the expense of his bridge opponents, who watched with some suspicion a continuous transfer of flying cards. Because of this, some rich Bostonians were ruined and ended in indigence. The medium herself ended in indigence when the magician and professional escapist Harry Houdini attended one of these sessions disguised as scarecrow and exposed the fraud. A small don...