Skepticblog

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. The Robert Nelson catalogue I own is a treasured relic of a bygone era when magicians decided to cash in on the curiosity in the spiritualist trade that was on the wane, but still big enough news to get the attention of Houdini and other wonder workers. As a kid I spent hours pouring over every page. It took me many years to find out what exactly luminous paint, rubber hands and ectoplasm had to do with being a magician, but when I did I never looked back.  I was hooked. This stuff looked like the real thing! Ghosts were made to appear, tables floated and glowing faces appeared out of the dark – and all for under twenty dollars!  My ragged and dog-eared copy of this catalgue of wonders still survives. If the current spate of phonies touting their “Dead Telephones”  (or “DT’s” as I will refer to them from here on) want to get a lesson in how easy it was (and is) to convince the gullible that spirits can talk, Abbott’s “Enchanted Talking Tea Kettle”  was one act avalible for $300.00 that left audiences fully believing in the ability of the spirits to not only carry on conversations, but also accurately answer specific questions.

Chris Moon take note: Never mind having to use interpreted cold readings of blurry static and white noise to make a buck;  find yourself a Talking Tea Kettle and you can tell your clients exactly what they want to know without all that hard work!    

Back in the 1850’s, magicians wanted to get on the spirit bandwagon. After the fame of the Davenport Brothers and the Fox Sisters started such a money making brouhaha, savvy performers picked up the ball and ran with it . One such performer was David P. Abbott:

Before there were Cell Phones, ...or Frank's Box

David Phelps Abbott

(1836 – 1934) was a magician, author and inventor who created such effects as the floating ball, later made famous by Okito. The best known of his books is Behind the Scenes With the Mediums  (1907), considered by many to be one of the best exposures of the methods used by psychics of that era. Abbott invented the “Enchanted Talking Tea Kettle.”  Houdini later revealed the trick behind this kettle in one of his expose magazine articles showing how a special radio was built into the tea kettle. By putting the spout of the kettle to your ear someone in another room would whisper a message to the listener. Sound familiar? I actually like this nostalgic gaff better than “Frank’s Box” or the other ghost hunting toys currently making the rounds such as the latest: “Ovilus.”  But who am I among so many? Is one really more ridiculous than the other?  An act is an act.

Ancient Egyptian temples were built using optical illusions and had specially created tubes and vents that allowed voices like “the man behind the curtain” in “The Wizard of Oz”  to give out proclamations to the assembled masses, convincingly showing the reality of invisible gods. Statues talked freely and no one gave it a second thought back then.  According to ancient texts, these cult statues could nod their heads and talk. The reality was that priests secretly pulled strings to make the head move, spoke for the god by throwing their voices, or (like Mr. Moon and his contemporaries) represented their own words as the deity’s. Whatever the illusion employed, the statues were regularly consulted for their opinions on a variety of personal problems; one ancient record even credited a statue with solving a crime. According to a papyrus in the British Museum, cult statues even served as judges in courts of law!

Pedro, Senor Wences and ...his box

Sound familiar? Is it surprising that such antics are still venerated in our supposedly advanced scientific society? Ventriloquists could be making a fortune giving readings. In fact, why bother with any artifice or prop of any kind? If people are incredibibly ignorant they will listen to a guy sitting in front of a broken radio, why not  just cut to the chase and put a frigging sock puppet on your hand and say you are channeling Senor Wences? Aspiring mediums wouldn’t have to pretend to have a disembodied head in a box like Wences did with his masterful creation, Pedro. Just put a sock on your hand and go for it! This would be much more entertaining, to the point and also pave the way for that all-important child demographic to begin to accept mediumship in a form that makes much more sense than Oprah or fancy electronic apparatus. So Chris Moon, Sylvia Browne, John Edward, James VanPraagh and all the rest of you talkers to the dead: why don’t you put a sock on it ….or better still: put a sock in it.

A Handy Spirit Guide

Yesterday I received an interesting echo to all this from fellow magician Willem in South Africa. He sent this in to my Yahoogroup PSI-LIGHT. I will transcribe it with a little help with his English:

“I’m a new member of PSI-LIGHT living in South-Africa and have been interested in magick for a long time. There is this witchdoctor here that uses a small bottle that has a lot of beads around it so you can not see inside it. This guy uses this bottle to answer any questions. This little bottle makes a sound like a mouse that only he understands. He does not touch the bottle on the table so all the sound is made while this little bottle stands on the table. I asked him to sell me this bottle but he did not want to. I asked him what was in the bottle and he said it is a tokkolos. What do you think?”

I replied with my own theory:
Ventriloquism (obvious) or how about something like a plate lifter bulb under the bottle, tablecloth, table that makes sounds like you said? Of course, I would have to see this guy in action, but I doubt it’s much more than a simple noisemaker cleverly concealed. What does this demon say? The “beads” around the bottle make me wonder what’s hidden. How big is the bottle? How big is the mouth of the bottle? Is it stoppered closed or open?

He wrote back:

“This little mystery of the spirit in the bottle is very old. I shall ask the sangoma (witchdoctor) if  I can take a photo. I have been living in South Africa my whole live and this is the first time that I have seen this little bottle.I asked the sangoma what was in the bottle and he said it is a tokkolos this is a spirit.He said that they make these spirits from roots and plants that they use and that some of these spirits are bigger then other. The bottle they use is made of a small pumpkin that is decorated with small white and red beads.I was wondering if he used some kind of pk …Sadly  I don’t know how he did it but I could use many of the magic methods if I wanted to. Ghost in machine coming to mind. THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE :)”

Safrica, a Modern Day African Witchdoctor

I won’t go into the actual modus that this witchdoctor may be using, but I seriously doubt it’s a spirit made of roots and plants. That stuff never works. BTW: a “pk” refers to a “psycho-kinetic magnet” which is hidden under the table in a shoe or manipulated by a clever handling to make things move or stop watches ala Uri. The not-so-mysterious powers of magnetism are responsible for myriads of magical effects and the use of this scientific principle is universal. We can plainly see by Willem’s query that no matter how low or high tech we want to go, where there is a will there is always a way for witchdoctors, mediums or “researchers into EVP” to make a buck off of the unwary, uneducated and the gullible. The truth is out there and it’s called SCIENCE.  Willem’s last line tells it all. We could indeed use a magician’s trick methods if we wanted to. …Some do.

By the time this blog is posted, I will have talked my way through another radio pod cast on the paranormal. GHOST DIVAS will have had me as a guest and another session will soon be booked on The Paranormal Podcast. There’s a whole network devoted to the strange and the weird: The Supernatural Radio Network, which features “paranormal talk nightly.”  Maybe I’m in the wrong business? No…  …No, Brian and Ryan save me. I’m not going there. I’m talking common sense to the believers. The fight must go on. Somebody has to have a brain and be able to use it.

FYI: If anyone is interested in joining my Egroup; PSI-LIGHT, simply go to Yahoogroups.com, search for PSI-LIGHT and sign up. Tell me in the subscription box that you are part of the skeptical movement and I will immediately approve your membership. PSI-LIGHT is an international group of magicians, bizarrists and otherwise semi-social outcasts who specialize in story telling, seances, magic of the mind and generally doing weird things.  There’s tons of material in the PSI-LIGHT archives for the seeker of secrets.

SSSShhhhhhhh, it’s a sceret.