Nice? Nice.

Another very rare electrical appliance for tapping into the great river of the dead, is a device known as William B. Lamont Spirit Telegraph, the backroom company was started sometime in the middle 50s we only know that it went bust somewhere around 1957. Nothing about this device could be more basic it was two D-cell batteries hooked to a telegraph key to initiate the spark for the telegraph key to strike there are two metal disks facing each other and of course the telegraph key will not strike unless there is something conductive introduced to complete the circuit. According to the inventor that substance was ectoplasm, a mysterious ( and I’m guessing conductive) material produced when spirits manifest themselves. The telegraph was intended to be used during séances when the spirit appears the presence of ectoplasm would cause the telegraph key to strike. According to the hand written manual the spirit can be trained to answer yes or no questions. I won’t go into the other inaccuracies of the manual here.

Recently some of these devices resurfaced it’s very odd that the person who has the website treats this as new find, in my heyday of collecting antique photographs the complete history of the Spirit Telegraph hung out there like some kind of urban legend. Here is a link to that site http://www.mortlakemagic.com/spirit.htm since I have so much research material I’ve been encouraged recently by many to put together a book on the history of spirit communication via electronic means, and to also try to put to rest some urban legends about Thomas Edison’s alleged involvement in building a machine to talk to the dead. But my wife says I cannot do this until she finishes her book on what it is like to live with a skeptic.

I recently went through one of my old mentalist catalogues from a company that specialized in mediumistic stunts and props and was reminded that such gimmickry as “Telephones to the Dead” are nothing new.

Telephones? Telephones? Today’s youth want to know about sexting the dead, especially the sexting of virile vampires.

(*) Our secret? Show hypnosis is actually kinda fake: you actually abuse the person’s ability to delude him or herself to conform with what is expected. It’s just strange psychology.