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Exhibits in the Haunted
Museum are based on the work of Troy Taylor from his
book, Ghosts by Gaslight!
Click on the Cover for More About the Book!
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As as been pointed out many times already in the pages of
the Haunted Museum, Spiritualism was
unfortunately riddled with cases of outright fraud. Many deceptive mediums
would do whatever they could to bilk unsuspecting clients and sitters out of
money to "contact their deceased loved ones". Many of these deceptions came
about during séances, which was, according to the
mediums, the most effective way to contact the dead. In nearly every case,
these séances were carried out in near or total darkness, effectively
concealing the practice of fraud. And while not every medium was dishonest,
there were enough of them to color the entire movement -- and to give
Spiritualism a bad name.
One of the most thrilling aspects of any séance was the
materialization of the spirits. Some mediums built an entire career on such
materializations, which were said to be formed from
ectoplasm, a mysterious substance that could emerge from the medium in all
shapes and forms. Some mediums, like
Florence Cook,
became so closely tied to the spirits they materialized that they became very
widely known for them. Because the appearance of the spirits was so important
to a good séance, fraudulent mediums would do just about anything to cause it
to happen -- from smoke to mirrors to even more dishonest shenanigans.
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As has already been mentioned previously in the section of
the site about the early investigators of Spiritualism,
the two greatest passions of Victorian era England were science and
Spiritualism. While a number of eminent scientists of the day became involved
in the movement, perhaps no greater example of a merging of the two was in the
person of John Henry Pepper.
Pepper was an analytical chemist, who in 1852 became
director of London's Royal Polytechnic Institution, an establishment that
worked to disseminate scientific knowledge to the public. Pepper believed that
this could be be done by making science entertaining and he especially liked
explaining complex concepts and devices by using optical illusions and
programs that produced grand dioramas and dissolving views. It was in this way
that he came to devise the "Ghost Show", which enchanted audiences in Britain,
Canada, America and Australia. |
John Henry Pepper
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The Ghost Show allowed an audience the illusion of
interacting with the phantoms on stage and its primary effect relied on the
same principle that lets a person see successive reflections of themselves in
a automobile window, while riding in a lighted vehicle at night. The "ghost"
was an actor positioned in front of the stage and below it, concealed from the
audience's view. Hidden beneath the stage, a projectionist illuminated the
actor, whose image reflected in a mirror and from there onto a large glass
pane that was stationed in front of the onlookers and was more or less
invisible to them. A variety of startling apparitional special effects
were possible, making the "spirit" seem to menace either the actors onstage or
the audience itself.
An illustration showing how
Pepper's "Ghost Show" actually worked
By the 1860's, Pepper became renowned as a showman of
science but never pretended that his ghosts were anything but illusions
--- as some have pointed out, a refreshing change for a time when mediums
abounded who insisted that their trickery was real!
CHEAP CLOTH AND GREASEPAINT
As the heyday of the Spiritualist movement began to wind down, the fraudulent
mediums became more and more sloppy with their tricks and manipulations. Gone
were the days of elaborate stages shows like those that had been created by
Pepper and in their places were cheap displays and shoddy hoaxes. A case that
illustrates this point was reported in newspapers in 1906. As it turned out,
two ardent and legitimate Spiritualists were responsible for exposing the
fraud.
There men went to an apartment where a
séance was to be conducted and became suspicious of the chair and the cabinet
used by the medium. They managed to examine the chair and found a secret
compartment in the rear and also a keyhole, which was carefully concealed
beneath the upholstered material that covered the rest of the chair. The
investigators then had a key made, which would open the lock, and found
another secret compartment that was 15 inches deep.
At the next séance, the men noticed that the back of the
chair seemed to be stuffed much better than the rest of it and suspected that
"ghostly" materials had been placed there before the sitters arrived. During
the sitting that followed, the men were not surprised to see that all manner
of "ghosts" materialized and when it was over, they exposed the medium as a
fraud. They opened the secret compartment on the chair with their own key and
began removing the items contained inside. They found a collapsible dummy head
made of pink material; a flesh colored mask; six pieces of china silk that
comprised about 13 yards of material; two pieces of black cloth; three beards
and two wigs of various color and length; a telescoping rod from which drapery
could be hung to represent a second ghost; a small flashlight with four yards
of wire and a switch, which would be useful to make "spirit lights" and
various other contraptions.
THE SPOOK SHOWS
After Spiritualism breathed its last shuddering gasp in the late 1920's
(although there are colonies and believers across the country today -
See this history), sheer entertainment
came along to take its place. The pioneers of the "ghost show", also called
the "spook show", began developing the format of the midnight ghost and magic
shows in the 1930's. The spook shows of those days mainly appealed to young
people in their late teens and twenties. This audience, in the days of the
Great Depression, were looking for a way to escape from the toil of poverty
and the despair of everyday life.
Even though the shows were never advertised as such, the
spook shows were essentially magic performances. They were really the
anti-Spiritualism shows that were performed by
Houdini
and other magicians in the 1920's to show that the workings of the mediums
could be duplicated on the magic stage. In the cases of the spook shows
however, the magicians never explained how the tricks were accomplished and
instead, let the audiences wonder for themselves. The advertising always
emphasized the presence of ghosts and as most shows were held in the grand old
vaudeville houses of the early century, now converted for movies and sound,
the atmosphere certainly invited these conclusions.
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An advertisement for
one of the "Spook Shows" of the 1930s |
Each show usually began with a brief lecture on ghosts,
followed by a 45 minute demonstration of telepathy, clairvoyance,
cold readings and conjuring tricks that
emphasized the mysterious, using floating objects, séance cabinets, spirit
paintings and more. The highlight of the show however was the grand finale,
often called the "dark séance". All of the lights in the theater would be
extinguished and soon ghosts and other fearsome creatures would suddenly
appear on stage and would fly about over the heads of the audience. Sometimes,
the specters would even make contact with the audience members. After several
minutes of wild screams and laughter, the lights would come back on as the
spirits would have vanished. Moments later, the magician would bid the
audience good night and the flickering images of a "B" horror film would
illuminate the theater's screen.
This final part of the evening is probably the most
important reason for the success of the spook shows. By performing after
hours, the spook show operators had no problem convincing theater managers to
open their houses for them. In fact, exhibitors were more than eager to book
midnight ghost shows, as it filled their theaters at a time when they would
have been otherwise empty. These novel attractions were able to do a week's
worth of business in a single night and a well-planned show could earn the
operator several thousand dollars a week -- an unbelievable sum in those
times. |
Spook shows, which were really little more than an
elaborate staging of a Spiritualist séance, became popular all over the
country and proved to be a vehicle for getting people into theaters at a time
when the economy was killing off every other form of live entertainment. But
the spook shows were destined to last for only so long. Like the heyday of
Spiritualism, their days were numbered from the very beginning. By the 1940's,
audiences had become jaded with spooks and ghosts and wanted more from the
shows. From this point, until the early 1950's, many of the shows began to
offer horror elements into their programs, like skeletons, monsters, and
popular horror film characters. Essentially, they became an onstage version of
the local Halloween "haunted house". These types of shows, still mixed with
shows offering ghosts and magic, lasted until the advent of television and
then they too finally died out -- and another fascinating era of "ghost
history" came to an end.
© Copyright 2003
- 2008 by Troy Taylor. All Rights Reserved
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