Selects: How Spiritualism Works

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 https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota Fordability, and it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com/bankguy. Capital One, N A, Member FDIC.

• 1:03Josh Clark?

  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 of 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 you listen to this episode about the spiritualism movement and see what you think about the whole thing. Enjoy.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 2:03Josh Clark?

  Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there somewhere in the heart of darkness.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  I'm in the office, dude.

• 2:14Josh Clark?

  Where? I hear your voice Chuck, but I can't see you.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  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 gonna go to the studio.

• 2:31Josh Clark?

  Yep.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Because I know it'll sound great in here.

• 2:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  In the building.

• 2:44Josh Clark?

  Didn't a security guard, didn't a security guard try to run you off the road when you were parking?

• 2:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:57Josh Clark?

  He said, stay home, save lives.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  But before we left, I mean, apparently since I left, they have these, there's a bottle of microphone sanitizer.

• 3:10Josh Clark?

  Whoa.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  There are headphone sanitized, or not sanitized, but just disposable headphone covers.

• 3:17Josh Clark?

  Sweet.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  And I feel more safe here than I do at my house.

• 3:22Josh Clark?

  What? A microphone sanitizer? That sounds really made up.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, I'll go ahead and buzz market. No, I won't because it smells bad. Not I'd wanna buzz market and then say it smells bad. It's apple flavor.

• 3:36Josh Clark?

  Whoa.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Which would make Emily just like turn over in her bed.

• 3:40Josh Clark?

  It's a, it's a good Jolly Rancher flavor, not the best scent, though.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  I hate it when they add scent to stuff that doesn't need scent.

• 3:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah, agreed.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  Try finding an unscented garbage bag these days.

• 3:52Josh Clark?

  Uh, is it tough to?

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, man, every single one of them. I even got some that said unscented and it still smells like something.

• 4:02Josh Clark?

  You've missed that. In parentheses underneath it says mostly.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, 99% unscented.

• 4:08Josh Clark?

  We can't help ourselves.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  1% rosemary.

• 4:11Josh Clark?

  Well, I don't have my over the ear headphones right now. I just have earbuds.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. I saw that look.

• 4:21Josh Clark?

  So I'm wearing one of Yumi's long scarves wrapped around my head twice to keep from your audio bleeding on to the track through my microphone.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  You either look like Lawrence of Arabia or like you just wandered in with a head injury.

• 4:38Josh Clark?

  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.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Send me another picture.

• 4:50Josh Clark?

  It's not, it's not very comfortable. My Adam's apple is being pressed toward the back of my throat right now.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. What was the deal with that whole toothache thing? Like, was there ice in there or something? Or was it just like, I just tie their chin shut and it'll help?

• 5:05Josh Clark?

  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.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Dr. Payne's new chin wrap, now with more leeches.

• 5:24Josh Clark?

  Right. From the makers of microphone sanitizer.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  All right, let's get into this. We've already been goofing around for too long. Let's just finish.

• 5:35Josh Clark?

  Fine.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Let's get this over with.

• 5:36Josh Clark?

  Let's get serious and talk about spiritualism, shall we?

• 5:40Speaker 02

  This is a great, great job by Grabster, great idea by you, and it'll be a great episode.

• 5:46Josh Clark?

  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. Should be simple.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Right. So he just forwarded us that?

• 6:02Josh Clark?

  It did. He didn't even like erase his brother's first name. He just did a strike through and wrote Ed after it.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Easy money.

• 6:11Josh Clark?

  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.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Movies.

• 6:30Josh Clark?

  All of this stuff. Movies, yeah. As a matter of fact, I ran across, so you know Dan Aykroyd's huge into UFOs, right?

• 6:37Speaker 02

  I did know that, actually.

• 6:38Josh Clark?

  He's also enormous into spirits and ghosts. It's actually one of the impetuses, yeah, I think so, of him writing Ghostbusters. 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 well into the 20th

• 7:18Josh Clark?

  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 in the spirit world and we're going to start doing that. And that was spiritualism, the spiritualist movement.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  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 and that it became a...

• 8:13Speaker 02

  A big scam and way to get money out of people who are in pain from a friend's or loved one's death.

• 8:20Josh Clark?

  Sadly, yeah, yeah, for sure. But there is like a through, a thread through there where this same era, this same period and 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 a, the real version of it actually does exist. And we're going to apply this new fangled thing called science to investigate it.

• 9:01Josh Clark?

  And that produced that, that era of people like Charles Fort or Harry Price, who visited the Borley Rectory, the most haunted place in England. Or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Conan?

• 9:17Josh Clark?

  Like these guys. I know. I'm trying out a new version.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  I like it.

• 9:21Josh Clark?

  These guys, though, they, they were, they, they believed in this stuff and the possibility of it. And 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 as like pure skeptics, like the James Randys of the day, who all 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.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:05Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  It was more religious, like prophets and shamans and stuff like that. Spiritualism was the birth of the Madame Cleos of the world.

• 10:13Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Ed refers to it as a democratization. And that's one way to look at it, but it was 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.

• 10:30Josh Clark?

  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 imagination of this pocket of America and 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

• 11:14Josh Clark?

  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 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.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  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, there was no big religious authorities in the area. They were out on the frontier. They had no structured hierarchy of religion.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  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 religions 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.

• 13:02Josh Clark?

  And I couldn't quite put where Millerism, why it seemed so familiar. And then I remembered that that was the woman who gave birth eventually to Seventh Day Adventists. And that popped up in the Kellogg episode, remember?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:16Josh Clark?

  Millerism was where it all started. But that was, and that really kind of indicates, and I love it when things just, things we've talked about before, like have even more context from something else. But that, 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...

• 13:49Speaker 02

  And chew your food 20 times so you'll poopies here.

• 13:52Josh Clark?

  Exactly. Or, you know, "Women have 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, just whatever you wanted to, to do, you kind of could, because the frontier threw 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.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. And the third big factor 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 out there we can't quite explain, but trust me, it's real, then why shouldn't I believe this stuff too?"

• 15:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah, or, well, this electromagnetism, maybe that actually explains how spirits survive after death. It was a really wide-open time as far as, you know, 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 jibe." 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."

• 15:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, the birth of science and medicine was a really crazy time.

• 15:45Josh Clark?

  It really was. It really was.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  So should we take a break?

• 15:51Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Come on, man.

• 15:52Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  I think your beard holster is on too tight.

• 15:58Josh Clark?

  It is. I haven't been able to feel my nose for about 15 minutes.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  All right, well, go rub your nose and bring some feeling back, and we'll talk about some of the first-

• 16:06Josh Clark?

  Spiritualists.

• 16:22Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal on a truck from your local Toyota dealer.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  That's right. Make a smart buy on the off-road Ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's most capable and longest-lasting trucks, built with the strength for the tough jobs, the tech to power your next big adventure, and the rugged style for everything in between.

• 16:45Josh Clark?

  Or discover Toyota's off-road lineup, including the iconic 4Runner and Land Cruiser, designed to go beyond the everyday. And with Toyota's proven reputation for quality and reliability, plus hybrid power on many models, you can get more for every mile and drive for less along the way.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  That's right. And long after you leave the lot, your Toyota keeps delivering with great resale value. So you could trade in for more when you're ready for your next Toyota. From a great deal today to a great value tomorrow, a Toyota is right for you. Shop toyota.com for deals and details or stop by your local Toyota dealer today. Toyota, let's go places.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  You know, you're never done decorating your home. You know what I mean?

• 17:28Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, because it's a process. There's always something you could do or buy or update. The only question is, what's next? For us, our animals just wear out our rugs so quickly. It's usually a new rug.

• 17:39Josh Clark?

  Well, Chuck, whether you need a rug or whatever is next for you, you can go to Wayfair. It's the smart place to get it.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  That's right. Whatever your style, whatever your budget, whatever you're looking for, Wayfair makes it easy to find it. And you can feel good about your purchases too, because Wayfair verified products go through a thorough 10-point quality inspection.

• 17:57Josh Clark?

  And with over 20 million 5-star reviews, Wayfair must be doing something right. You can find pieces made for real life and get even more value with Wayfair Rewards. Join Wayfair Rewards today to get 5% back on every purchase. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  So you're considering getting a home security system, but you want something that fits your space. Well, with ADT Blue, it's easy to customize a system that's right for you and set it up yourself. Just pick the kit and monitoring plan that makes sense for your home.

• 18:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah, say you're worried about package theft. Well, the ADT Plus app can walk you through setting up a new doorbell camera kit. Once it's installed, ADT Pros can help you keep tabs on it 24/7, or you can manage it yourself from the ADT Plus app.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  And here's the best thing, there are no long-term contracts, so you can change your monitoring plan whenever you want. The flexibility doesn't end there either. You can add to your system as you need to with things like extra cameras or motion sensors.

• 18:59Josh Clark?

  Some life decisions are hard, but thanks to ADT Blue, you can DIY trusted ADT home security in a snap. Head to ADT.com/BLU to build your system today. And to hear more about home protection and other grown-up topics, check out new episodes of Grown Up Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 19:39Josh Clark?

  Okay, I'm gonna say it's spiritualists.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 19:44Josh Clark?

  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 soon after the Fox sisters became celebrities as a founder of the spiritualist movement, almost like he was doing it all in isolation at the same time that all of this began.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 20:47Josh Clark?

  Voiced by George Clooney.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Exactly. Mr. and 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?

• 21:00Josh Clark?

  Because I saw a picture of her and she's like the spitting image of Jeffrey Ross. You gotta look her up. Jeffrey Ross wearing a bonnet. It's what Leia Fox looked like.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah, anybody, really.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  And I think he would admit that, too.

• 21:21Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  He's doing all right, though.

• 21:23Josh Clark?

  What if he had really thin skin? The roast master? He like couldn't take a joke against himself. Have you seen that bumpin' Mike show? It's pretty good.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Uh, no. Is that the roast competition thing?

• 21:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he and Dave Attell just sit there and roast people. It's really good.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Man, I used to love Dave Attell back in the day.

• 21:42Josh Clark?

  He has just turned into like the weird, like comedy genius friend that Jeffrey Ross has. And it shines through in this.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Awesome. I'll check it out. So the Fox family, older daughter Leia 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 31, 1848, they heard these rapping knocking sounds and they didn't know where it was coming from. And that kind of kickstarted 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.

• 22:30Josh Clark?

  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, 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, from what I read.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just, sorry. I was thinking of a rapping ghost and

• 23:13Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Got sidetracked in my own brain.

• 23:16Josh Clark?

  I'm the ghost of George Washington, and I'm here to say, I love fruity pebbles in a major way.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  You know what's funny? Is I was gonna do that exact same thing, but for the Fox family. That's like, the go-to rapper guys like us.

• 23:28Josh Clark?

  Oh, it totally is. Guys who can't rap?

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm here to say, something, something, something, in a something way.

• 23:35Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm. The Zack Morris method, I think, is what that is.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  I wonder if that's based on an actual rap. I guess there was one at some point that really did that, right?

• 23:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I think Blondie was the one who popularized that.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Um, my name is Blondie. I'm here to say, I'm gonna try rap, because it's popular today.

• 23:56Josh Clark?

  Exactly.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  So, uh, what were you saying? I was laughing. I didn't even notice. I'm sorry.

• 24:03Josh Clark?

  Oh, oh, just that. It was basically, I was laying at Leah's feet for corrupting the younger sisters.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, she kind of, 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, you know, 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.

• 24:51Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  So you guys, my daughters are talented and gifted. They're not just talking to the, what we think is a murder victim from our previous house.

• 25:02Josh Clark?

  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.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so what do they do? They start having these private sessions where people would pay money. And they would wear these big, long dresses that were in fashion at the time. And they would, no one's exactly sure of 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.

• 25:52Josh Clark?

  So it was, it's really, 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.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  That's creepy in and of itself.

• 26:19Josh Clark?

  It was, yeah, they should have just been like, forget all this spirit stuff, watch this weird thing.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:25Josh Clark?

  But that was, that was the phantom knocking. And we know that because Maggie later on confessed to the New York Tribune, maybe, or the Post, one of them. And, 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 Forty, forty years, they made a living around the world doing that and created a new religion from it.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, and the, 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, could try.

• 27:17Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  But the two younger sisters, and Maggie especially, were in pretty bad shape with alcoholism, and they died, sort of in a call your brothers-esque way, very quietly and fairly destitute in New York City in the 1890s.

• 27:33Josh Clark?

  Trapped under newspapers.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 27:36Josh Clark?

  But no, they, they had very interesting, but also very sad lives, like, I think Maggie married a skeptic, and he died.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Not a good move.

• 27:48Josh Clark?

  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 spiritualist, made a lot of money, but, but apparently lost it all. And Leah, again, was just kind of, I guess, a bit of a villain in this story.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Where's that movie, man?

• 28:11Josh Clark?

  I was wondering the exact same thing. It's crazy, it hasn't been made 50 times already, you know?

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that would be, that would be pretty cool. I couldn't even find a good documentary on it.

• 28:21Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  On them, at least. I'm sure there are plenty on, that they're featured in, but, give me those Fox sisters.

• 28:29Josh Clark?

  No matter how you look at it, too, whether you look at it from the, 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 a spirit came to him and said, "The work has begun. We just started something over here." And then later found out about the foxes. There's like, there's all sorts of stuff you can believe. And so it's interesting

• 29:10Josh Clark?

  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?

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 29:30Josh Clark?

  I just love it. I love this whole story.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:46Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  The first one is channeling. And these would be trance 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, a lot of showy things to kind of get people, you know, pretty pumped up, feel like they're spending their money well.

• 30:08Josh Clark?

  You're getting me pumped up, I'll tell you that.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  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...

• 30:19Josh Clark?

  Sammy Davis Jr.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Hey, Brad, I just came back to say that, "Don't worry about me. This cat is doing just fine."

• 30:29Josh Clark?

  I came back to say, "I love pretty pebbles in a major way."

• 30:32Speaker 02

  He invented rap.

• 30:35Josh Clark?

  That's right.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  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 Cora Scott, who, I know we've talked about her before...

• 30:51Josh Clark?

  Her name sounds familiar, but I have no recollection of talking about her.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, she sounds super familiar, but she was one of the top mediums, trance 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.

• 31:21Josh Clark?

  Well, also, yeah, she was like a little 12-year-old girl when she started, and supposedly she would take the stage and confidently discuss like physics and philosophy and all that stuff, because there was some authoritative spirit who had basically taken possession of her.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:46Josh Clark?

  Okay, okay.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:57Josh Clark?

  So that's, so channeling is what you kind of think of where somebody becomes possessed, the medium becomes possessed, right?

• 32:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:05Josh Clark?

  There's also ones where, like, 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.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:15Josh Clark?

  Okay, that reminds me of John Edwards, remember him, Crossing Over with John Edwards?

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can't picture him. I think if I saw a picture of it, I would totally remember, though.

• 32:25Josh Clark?

  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.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that can sort of coincided with Reverend Bob Dobbs and the televangelism and all that good stuff.

• 32:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  It was a crazy time.

• 32:42Josh Clark?

  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 in the pop culture, it's crazy. But automatic writing is instead of the the medium's voice being taken over, the medium being possessed and speaking as the spirit, the 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.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm trying to decide if I could do that.

• 33:27Josh Clark?

  Well, sometimes they would use their non-dominant hand. So if you want to change your handwriting, just do that to start.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can't. There's no way.

• 33:35Josh Clark?

  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.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 33:53Josh Clark?

  That's prolific.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  That's a lot of words.

• 33:57Josh Clark?

  And then what about direct voice?

• 33:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 34:11Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  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 they're it's dark enough where you can't really see their lips moving, throwing their voice. There was a woman named Leslie Flint.

• 34:32Josh Clark?

  That's a man.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Who's a medium. Oh, really?

• 34:34Josh Clark?

  Mm hmm. He looked like the old man from Up.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  Oh. Did it make you cry when you looked at him?

• 34:42Josh Clark?

  It did.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  My daughter dislikes that.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  Here, have these balloons. So, yeah, Leslie Finn, I actually love that name for a man, so.

• 34:52Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  I don't know why I assumed, 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 this all a little bit more ridiculous and fun.

• 35:07Josh Clark?

  Well, I was reading an obituary about him that was written by somebody who attended one of his, or a couple, I think, of his seances. And they said things like, you know, a lot of times you could tell 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, there's always an explanation for it.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:41Josh Clark?

  And, you know, maybe there's another person who, 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, a 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, oh, no, there really was a spirit that was talking in the room, thanks to him.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  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, you 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. You would, 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.

• 36:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah, or, you know, the idea that in your Moving the table yourself, like a Ouija board. 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 to table turning and a lot of other stuff. But if you're saying like, if you're the, the medium at a séance and you said the table is rising, it's rising. People who are willing to believe, a lot of people who went to séances wanted to believe or 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.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, my favorite, and I bet your favorite too, is ectoplasmic manifestations.

• 37:40Josh Clark?

  That's a good one.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pretty good. This is when you would actually, as a spiritualist, produce something physical. Something would manifest itself, an actual substance, and it was, they called it ectoplasm. And they could pull it from their body, and it was just basically something that they would make beforehand.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  Out of whatever, I mean, they would make it out of all kinds of things. There was one story about someone who was actually gluing cut out faces from a magazine onto dolls.

• 38:12Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  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 online, if you look up ectoplasm, 1800s séance is just, the pictures themselves are hysterical and frightening all at the same time.

• 38:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and 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 séances would be carried out in dark rooms to where you couldn't see much at all. You'd 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, you might be a lot more prone to, to buy into it than under normal circumstances.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Uh, maybe you're a little drunk.

• 39:19Josh Clark?

  Right? Tipsy on schnapps?

• 39:22Speaker 02

  Uh, levitation was another big one. Nice little, uh, party trick. Um, I actually could sort of do this for a little while. The David Blaine method. I don't know if you ever saw his, uh, when he made himself levitate.

• 39:33Josh Clark?

  It's just kind of hopping up and down in air, right?

• 39:35Speaker 02

  No, it's, it's.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  You're thinking of trampolines.

• 39:41Josh Clark?

  Oh, that's not the same thing?

• 39:44Speaker 02

  No, people can see those.

• 39:45Josh Clark?

  Oh, okay.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  Uh, no, it's all about the angle with the David Blaine method, um, of getting them to see you from the right angle to where what you're really doing is you're rising your body up with just one, like, just your first three toes on your right foot.

• 40:02Josh Clark?

  Wow, that's impressive.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  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 in steady and then you land back down and go, oh, boy, that was a good one. That was pretty powerful.

• 40:15Josh Clark?

  So wait a minute. David Blaine can raise his entire body weight with three toes?

• 40:22Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, he's on his toes. I, I, I just, I mean, I could do it at the time, too. This is in the 90s.

• 40:27Josh Clark?

  Man, that's impressive. I don't think I've ever had the kind of toe strength that, that is required to do that.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  You can raise yourself up with one foot?

• 40:37Josh Clark?

  In a seated position?

• 40:39Speaker 02

  No, no, no. You're standing.

• 40:40Josh Clark?

  Oh, oh, oh, I got you.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So what you're doing is you're standing there.

• 40:45Josh Clark?

  I got you.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  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?

• 40:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah, no, I've got it. I got it.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 41:01Josh Clark?

  Right. Well, I'm getting drunker.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Well, both of those things were happening.

• 41:06Josh Clark?

  I thought you were talking about like, you know, like a fake here 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.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  All right. What are the other, there's another couple of things they did too. What are those?

• 41:25Josh Clark?

  Spirit photography, pretty, 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.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:35Josh Clark?

  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.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 41:45Josh Clark?

  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 like, it was on a table. So they were like, this is a spirit arm levitating on a table. So they're like tying three things together, table turning, levitating, and spirit photography.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Those are great. I think the spirit photography, just because they were taking advantage of this new technology people didn't even understand.

• 42:13Josh Clark?

  Right. It was like the deep fake of the time.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  And they were probably like, everybody, we got maybe three years.

• 42:19Josh Clark?

  Yeah. We better get prolific.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  And then everyone's gonna be like, oh, that's just double exposure.

• 42:25Josh Clark?

  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

• 43:10Josh Clark?

  occult things would have, would have been very much frowned upon by spiritualists.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  Totally. Should we take another break?

• 43:17Josh Clark?

  I think we should.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  All right. We'll take another break and tell you about what the Civil War had to do with all of this, right after this.

• 43:39Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal on a truck from your local Toyota dealer.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  That's right. Make a smart buy on the off-road ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's most capable and longest-lasting trucks, built with the strength for the tough jobs, the tech to power your next big adventure, and the rugged style for everything in between.

• 44:01Josh Clark?

  Or discover Toyota's off-road lineup, including the iconic 4Runner and Land Cruiser, designed to go beyond the everyday. And with Toyota's proven reputation for quality and reliability, plus hybrid power on many models, you can get more for every mile and drive for less along the way.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  That's right. And long after you leave the lot, your Toyota keeps delivering with great resale value. So you could trade in for more when you're ready for your next Toyota. From a great deal today to a great value tomorrow, a Toyota is right for you. Shop toyota.com for deals and details or stop by your local Toyota dealer today. Toyota, let's go places.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Hey, everybody. Cozy season is upon us. And that means crisp mornings. That means soft layers. And that means Bombas.

• 44:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Bombas makes your comfiest fall staples so you can make the most out of one of the best seasons of the year. Bombas has new suede moccasins that are perfect for fall because they have cushy soles, a sheerling lining, and they're made of water-resistant suede.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  That's right. And their slippers are everything you'd want for a cozy night in, made with the softest, squishiest materials.

• 45:07Josh Clark?

  And of course, Bombas has socks. Not just any socks. Socks for every type of weather, every type of occasion, because fall can be fickle. And Bombas makes socks that can handle it all. And the best part about Bombas, for every item you purchase, they donate an essential clothing item to someone facing housing insecurity. One purchased equals one donated, with over 200 million donations and counting.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  So head on over to bombas.com/sysk and use code SYSK at checkout for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash SYSK, using code SYSK at checkout.

• 45:48Josh Clark?

  You know, eating is a huge part of our lives. It fuels us, it brings us together, and it's one of life's great pleasures. But once a meal's over, we don't think much about what happens next unless something starts to feel off, because what we eat and how our bodies respond to it is complicated.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  That's right. From the very first bite, food kicks off a chain reaction, signals moving between the gut, the brain, and the immune system, the constant back and forth we can't see and often don't fully understand. So we want to introduce to you Eating Interrupted, a new podcast from iHeart Ruby Studio. It's hosted by longtime journalist and Crohn's patient Cynthia McFadden. Eating Interrupted explores everything from food allergies and intolerance and why they seem to be on the rise, to how digestion changes as we age, and what it's really like to live with a chronic GI condition.

• 46:32Josh Clark?

  Through personal stories and expert insight, listen in to unpack what it means when your body doesn't always respond to food the way you expect, and what science is now revealing about why. Listen to Eating Interrupted on the iHeart app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  All right. So, pre-Civil War in the United States, spiritualism was popular. It was booming, but it was more like the kind of thing that you did in a theater and you would go see it as a curiosity, or you might just maybe even knew it was fake and it was just entertainment. There wasn't a lot going on back then.

• 47:23Josh Clark?

  Kind of like looking at penguins in a zoo today. Like, you know they're fake, but it's still fun to look at.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Right. Why not go pay a nickel to see Madame whatever do her little erotic, because we'll get into that, these got a little sexy at times, too.

• 47:38Josh Clark?

  A little ghost shimmy?

• 47:39Speaker 02

  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...

• 48:00Speaker 02

  The way Christianity was, and some might argue still is in the South, didn't leave a lot of room.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 48:17Josh Clark?

  They're like, we'll stick to our voodoo, thank you very much.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 48:21Josh Clark?

  And keep that spiritualism stuff out.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it was just not a big thing in the South.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  The mediums at the time would move off the stage sometimes and have these private séances.

• 48:35Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  Sometimes they would get in touch with a family member, but oftentimes it would just be kind of the same in the state, as a 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.

• 48:48Josh Clark?

  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, know 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.

• 49:30Josh Clark?

  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 good at getting in touch with the dead. Why don't you have a séance with him? You just have to, you know, pay him to do this work, because it is 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 séances, these performances, were decreased in size, but vastly increased in frequency.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  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 and 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.

• 50:32Josh Clark?

  Right. And that's where I think a lot of the genuine skeptics who, who beat this kind of stuff to a pulp, that's the place that they're coming from. You know, not, not, not necessarily that it's like an affront to 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, you 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.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  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?

• 51:16Josh Clark?

  Right. It's true.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  Like Sell the Family Farm, like, stuff like that.

• 51:20Josh Clark?

  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.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  For what? Something's coming through. They're saying pennies on the dollar.

• 51:31Josh Clark?

  That's great. Oh, wait, that's the opposite of great.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 51:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 52:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Go big or go home, but eventually you're gonna go home anyway.

• 52:08Speaker 02

  That's the end of that saying. I love it.

• 52:10Josh Clark?

  Right. So, um, part of it was that they, they were making more and more audacious claims. But also, there were more and more scientists, like those that, that, um, open-minded scientific approach had become a lot more hardened toward, um, spiritualism and mediums because so many had been investigated and found to just be total frauds. Most of the time, the outcome was this, the medium couldn't reproduce this ectoplasm or get in touch with the spirit when they were under controlled conditions. Or they, they went for it and they were found

• 52:51Josh Clark?

  to be a fraud. Like the, the, the knuckle of their toe was found to be wrapping on a stool or something like that. Um, 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, the, just the general public kind of turned away from spiritualism as, as hokum and bunk. But the thing is, is not everyone did. And even still today, go ask Dan Aykroyd, there is a, a group of people who adhere to spiritualism as, as a religion.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  No, for sure. Um, and one of the big reasons that it didn't completely go away was, uh, spiritualists were very smart in that they would use influencers of the day in their act. They would seek out these well-known people. Um, they would tour the world sometimes, tour Europe and do, um, seances with like royal families of various countries.

• 53:51Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  The newspapers write about this. Um, they would get a quote or maybe demand a quote from someone, uh, like well-known and they would say, all right, I'll come do a seance, but you gotta give me a quote that I can use on my, my flyer or whatever.

• 54:06Josh Clark?

  What's it called?

• 54:09Speaker 02

  Pull quote?

• 54:10Josh Clark?

  No, no, the, that, that fallacy, the logical fallacy, appeal to authority, I think?

• 54:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, the appeal to authority, sure.

• 54:17Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, which, you know, makes a lot of sense if people see, oh, well, they did a science for the Prince of Monaco.

• 54:23Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  Or, or Sammy Davis Jr., then it's gotta be good enough for me, it's not pseudoscience at all, because why would Sammy Davis Jr. Believe in pseudoscience?

• 54:33Josh Clark?

  Right, he's just a Satanist, he doesn't care about pseudoscience.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 54:39Josh Clark?

  So, um, one of the other authorities that they would appeal to Chuck was, um, 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, uh, 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 one of, 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

• 55:22Josh Clark?

  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?

• 55:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, even if you talk to 100 scientists and one of them was a top heavy who'd said something valuable to you, that's the only one, you're, you're the 10th dentist of the nine out of 10 dentists.

• 55:51Josh Clark?

  Right, exactly, exactly, and that's all you need, especially if the other nine 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, um, I guess actually one, a legendary top heavy, even though he wasn't a scientist credential or otherwise, was, um, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

• 56:15Josh Clark?

  I don't know, what's wrong with me? I'm sorry, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?

• 56:22Speaker 02

  By the way, before I forget, if there's not a band called The 10th Dentist out there, then I don't know what to think anymore.

• 56:28Josh Clark?

  That's a good one. Remember those Trident commercials? I think it was four out of five dentists.

• 56:32Speaker 02

  That was a four out of five?

• 56:33Josh Clark?

  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.

• 56:41Speaker 02

  Maybe it should be the fifth. It is four out of five. It's not nine out of 10.

• 56:44Josh Clark?

  Do you remember that, though?

• 56:46Speaker 02

  No.

• 56:47Josh Clark?

  It was a great, great.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  The, uh, what was the, what was the col- was it, "We make holes in teeth"?

• 56:54Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  Remember that, the cartoon?

• 56:56Josh Clark?

  That was Crest.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 56:58Josh Clark?

  You want to hear, you want to hear the pinnacle of 80s marketing to kids? My third grade, maybe fourth grade class, put on a play about...

• 57:12Speaker 02

  Toothpaste?

• 57:12Josh Clark?

  Yes, and cavities, sponsored by Crest.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, they had a big push back then for taking over the minds of American children.

• 57:20Josh Clark?

  Well, it worked. What's funny is, is I now use Aqua Fresh, the orange tube. Oh, man. If, if there is a favorite toothpaste that any boy in America has ever had, that is it in its mind.

• 57:33Speaker 02

  That was from the 80s?

• 57:34Josh Clark?

  No, it is now. But I'm saying the Crest takeover of my mind didn't work.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  Gotcha.

• 57:40Josh Clark?

  I'm an Aqua Fresh boy now.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  Is that the one with the tri-color?

• 57:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah, which is another very appealing part of it.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  Man, you'd buy it all, don't you?

• 57:49Josh Clark?

  I do.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  So gullible.

• 57:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I am a little gullible.

• 57:52Speaker 02

  You're like an Arthur Conan Doyle.

• 57:54Josh Clark?

  So, he, if you recognize his name, he was the author of Sherlock Holmes, of course. He was super into this. He joined the Society for Psychical Research, which was an early skeptical slash believer society. And he always, 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 mouths shut. They were the other four who would say like, "No, everybody, actually, this guy's wrong. My esteemed colleague is, has been taken." But then the head of those guys was Harry Houdini, amazingly enough.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, Houdini, which makes it super ironic that at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles, they have have long had Harry Houdini seance nights.

• 58:41Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:42Speaker 02

  Where you can go into the Harry Houdini room and do a seance.

• 58:45Josh Clark?

  That's neat.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  Which is, you know, it's all for fun, but

• 58:47Josh Clark?

  That's fake.

• 58:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 59:08Josh Clark?

  You're right. And 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.

• 59:21Josh Clark?

  Do you remember that scary stories to tell in the Dark Book?

• 59:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. Where was that? What that was from?

• 59:25Josh Clark?

  It was like two friends who played baseball together.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:28Josh Clark?

  They had a pact like Harry Houdini and his wife, apparently.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  I think that's a there's different versions of that joke, though.

• 59:34Josh Clark?

  Man, the illustrations in that book were just bar none.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was great stuff. And by the way, we should give a big rest in peace to Mr. Mort Drucker, who passed away.

• 59:46Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 59:55Josh Clark?

  Agreed.

• 59:56Speaker 02

  He passed on, and he was one of the greats.

• 59:59Josh Clark?

  He definitely shaped my childhood in a very large way.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, big time.

• 1:00:04Josh Clark?

  With his drawings.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  R I P, sir.

• 1:00:06Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Nice.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  We'll hear from you soon.

• 1:00:10Josh Clark?

  Right. He's like, you guys are pitching tonight.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  Oh, no, both of us?

• 1:00:14Josh Clark?

  So, so Harry Houdini is like, yeah, Josh is gonna flub it and Chuck's gonna have to be brought in for the save. So Harry Houdini, Harry Houdini created this longstanding tradition of stage magicians exposing the fraud of spiritualism, basically.

• 1:00:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, cuz they were they're like, they're stealing our tricks.

• 1:00:37Josh Clark?

  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.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was very relentless.

• 1:00:50Josh Clark?

  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 Sheldon Drake 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 séances from the 19th century. And has shown how willing people are to totally misreport the events that went on in the séance. To say that, yes, you know, the table did levitate, or all the stuff that he's studying

• 1:01:29Josh Clark?

  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 felt the phantom arm tap me on the shoulder. The medium didn't have anything to do with that. That was just something that kind of came out of the environment that was produced in the séance, you know?

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty interesting.

• 1:02:01Josh Clark?

  It is pretty interesting.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  So we'll finish up here with this. I thought this was 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 like 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.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:02:59Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  So that's a good thing. They gave them some agency, but these, 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.

• 1:03:26Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  And that kind of ended up happening in some ways.

• 1:03:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, there was a huge connection between spiritualism and spiritualist movement and abolitionism, the women's suffrage movement, the women's temper, or the temperance movement.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:40Josh Clark?

  A lot of these progressive movements, workers' rights. And that, 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 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.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:04:29Josh Clark?

  Exactly, especially if they'd attached their ego to you and your success.

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  Very strange.

• 1:04:36Josh Clark?

  So I just want to give two shouts out. One to the probably the greatest ghost movie that involves seances ever.

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  Ghost?

• 1:04:47Josh Clark?

  No.

• 1:04:48Speaker 02

  Whoopi Goldberg?

• 1:04:49Josh Clark?

  No.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:04:52Josh Clark?

  The Others with Nicole Kidman.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, that was good.

• 1:04:56Josh Clark?

  It was so good.

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  Don't spoil it.

• 1:04:59Josh Clark?

  And then 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 Night Side. It's a short story. It's the same title as a collection of her short stories from the seventies, I think 1977. Night Side, look it up and thank me later. It's seriously just bone chilling how good it is.

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  I wonder if we could get in touch with her and read that for our Halloween episode this year.

• 1:05:28Josh Clark?

  I tweeted to her once kind of crassly and never heard anything back, even though she was on Twitter. I know she saw that tweet.

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  Hey, at Joyce Carol Oates, you think you're so cool?

• 1:05:38Josh Clark?

  Right. 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.

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  She's great.

• 1:05:51Josh Clark?

  She's so wonderful. I would read any of her stories. So if you out there know Joyce Carol Oates 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.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  That's right. So I think she might like that aspect.

• 1:06:12Josh Clark?

  Okay. Oh, one last thing, Chuck. There's a place called Lilydale in New York appropriately enough, which is basically a spiritualist community where you can go basically be among spiritualists as a religion today.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  Wonderful.

• 1:06:28Josh Clark?

  Since I said today, it's time for listener mail.

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  I'm gonna call this, uh, we haven't gotten emails in two weeks from people because something's wrong with our email server.

• 1:06:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  So it's on bidets again. You're gonna get a couple on bidets, I think.

• 1:06:47Josh Clark?

  All right.

• 1:06:48Speaker 02

  Uh, "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 and 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. Uh, 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

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  and released a stream of water onto themselves and into our bathroom was always good for a laugh. Uh, "I sure appreciate you guys when we move from Michigan to the South, uh, to the South Carolina."

• 1:07:42Josh Clark?

  What?

• 1:07:43Speaker 02

  I said the South.

• 1:07:45Josh Clark?

  Was she once Miss South Carolina? Because that would explain that last bit.

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  No, I thought it was she meant the South and I didn't see on the next line it said Carolina, so that was just me.

• 1:07:54Josh Clark?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Uh, "Your voices accompanied us as we made many 12-hour trips back and forth. Uh, we enjoyed the knowledge and the tangents, even the tangents, uh, and now you continue to soothe and educate me as I go on my four-to-five mile recreational walks during the pandemic quarantine and temporary, hopefully, furlough." Uh, and that is from Michelle Salcedo.

• 1:08:18Josh Clark?

  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.

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  In the South Carolina.

• 1:08:26Josh Clark?

  That's right, Chuck. Um, and, uh, as it will eventually, go back to normal. Um, 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, uh, you can get in touch with us. Send us an email to [email protected].

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 1:09:05Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota Fordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 1:09:35Speaker 04

  Do you ever feel like your computer is tracking you? Well, it's not. It's your browser following you. But not if you come back to Firefox. Firefox blocks the trackers automatically, doesn't follow you from site to site, and supports the ad blockers other browsers dropped. Plus, you can switch AI on or off when its intelligence is acting too artificial. And switching? Totally painless. Your bookmarks, passwords, and browsing history come right with you. Come back to Firefox. Visit firefox.com.

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  Hey, everybody. You ever show up late to the game and your friends have already saved your seat and your drink and even a plate? Well, that's looking out. And that's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know that staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T: Connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Just visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.