MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

Percy Philip Pittingball is a wealthy businessman who made his fortune thanks to the “three cup trick”, and is now dedicated to the most lucrative “green goods scam”, in which people are duped into paying for worthless counterfeit money and they cannot report the crime because purchasing counterfeit money is punished by law. He is what is called a self-made man. He belongs to the select group of “The Four Hundred” and to the despicable gang of “The Old Tom Gin”. He is married to three women but they do not know each other even though they live in the same house. So huge the Fifth Avenue Pittingball Mansion is! François de La Rochefoucauld (aka Squattedman) has managed to be invited to attend a séance at Pittingball Mansion. The protagonist is one of the most famous mediums of the time, Etta Wriedt, who communicates with the dead through brass instruments that sound in the darkness of the séance room. Participants are blindfolded before entering the séance room. Each one is accompanie...

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 ...

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 ...