Real spiritualism and sham mesmerism—Spoof sÉances—I ring one off on my landlady—The self-playing piano—The spirit that walked upside-down—Some simple explanations—Manufacturing a telepathist to order—Thought-reading extraordinary—The colour test—Telepathy by wire—A brief dream of wealth—A sleepy wife and a hidden match-box—The head-head who was spoofed—A disconcerting reception—Story of Houdini, the “Handcuff King”—More telepathy—Over the telephone this time—A puzzling link—And the explanation.

One of the most famous conjurors who ever lived publicly expressed his disbelief in spiritualism. He held the view that it is all a fake, got up by clever swindlers in order to bamboozle credulous fools.

With all due respect to the late Mr. Maskelyne’s undoubtedly sincere views I disagree with them. That there is a lot of spoof spiritualism knocking about nobody can deny. In fact I will go further and assert that in the vast majority of instances the ordinary sÉance, for which one pays one’s guinea or two for the privilege of being present, is neither more nor less than a fake and a swindle of the most pronounced kind.

But, admitting all this, the fact remains that there are phenomena in connection with spiritualism that cannot be explained away by any known rule of logic or reasoning. At least, such is my opinion. Why, I have heard a little Cockney wench of sixteen, who to my certain knowledge has never been any nearer to South Africa than the Battersea Park Road, hold forth in pure Zulu dialect while in a state of trance at a private sÉance in a house near Clapham Junction. And when she came to, she didn’t know a word of what she had been saying. She spoke Zulu with the proper native accent, too, and not as an ordinary Englishman or Englishwoman does when trying to imitate their guttural clicks and clucks. I know. I’ve been there.

All the same, I would not advise any of my readers to “go in” for spiritualism. That way madness lies. I once tried it myself, but had to give it up. Better stick to the things of this world, and leave those pertaining to the spirit world severely alone.

Telepathy stands on an altogether different footing. I don’t believe in it one little bit. As I have already had occasion to remark, so-called thought-reading is merely trickery, clever trickery, no doubt, but none the less trickery. To the ordinary man the feats performed by the Zancigs and others seem absolutely inexplicable. But then so, too, do some of my card tricks.

Reverting to the subject of spiritualism! I once engineered a spoof sÉance all on my own. Not in order to make money; but just for a lark.

I was performing at Hastings, and as it happened the landlady of the house where I was staying was a firm believer. Of course, I was not long in finding this out; whereupon I pretended that I also was one of the elect, and just before the termination of my engagement there I suggested that she should invite a few friends to a private sÉance. To this she assented, and at my suggestion it was held in my sitting-room, where was the usual collection of plants in pots, gimcrack pictures, and worthless ornaments, together with an ancient and asthmatic piano such as is to be found in most “pro.’s’” lodging-houses.

That evening after my performance at the theatre, and shortly before the witching hour of midnight, the sÉance began. The landlady asked us all to attune our minds to receive humbly and without scepticism the spirit manifestations which she hoped and trusted were about to be vouchsafed to us. The lights were turned down, and a young lady with a greenery-yallery complexion and straight black hair sang very soft and low “Lead, kindly Light,” with mandoline accompaniment.

When she had finished, the landlady invited us to sit round the table and place our hands upon it. This we did. Pretty soon the table began to wobble about and rotate.

“Wonderful!” ejaculated everybody in a series of hoarse whispers.

“Not at all,” I replied. Then, in low solemn tones, I called upon the spirit present to manifest itself in regard to an aspidistra plant that stood in the far corner of the room.

No sooner were the words out of my mouth than the leaves of the plant were violently agitated, the rustling noise being plainly audible to everybody.

“Wonderful!” cried everybody once more. “The spirits are indeed with us to-night.”

“They are indeed,” I replied, “and we’ll make the most of ’em.”

Then in lower tones: “Spirit, if it be thy will, let us have a manifestation in regard to that vase on the mantelshelf.”

Instantly, and without more ado, the vase jumped up of its own accord and came crashing to the floor.

At this something like consternation reigned. By the dim light of the single turned-down gas-jet I could see that the eyes of my neighbours on the right and left were fixed on me in awe, and I could feel their hands tremble as they sought mine on the table.

“The piano!” I cried in a stage whisper, pretending to get wildly excited, and jumping to my feet. “The piano! I’m going to ask the spirits to take it out at the window, and bring it in at the door.”

But this was too much for even my landlady. “Mr. Carlton,” she exclaimed, “please don’t joke. The spirits are all about us. Never before have I seen such manifestations.”

“All right!” I replied, “If you think they’d be offended at my asking them to move the piano, why I won’t ask them. But I’ll tell you what we will do. We’ll ask ’em to give us a tune on it.”

“No! No!” objected the landlady. “Impossible! Such a thing is unheard of. The spirits can’t do it.”

“Well, let’s try anyway,” I said. “Come along!” And suiting the action to the word I got up and went over to the piano, which I locked, and put the key in my pocket.

Then we all put our hands on the closed cover of the instrument and waited. For a while nothing happened. Then suddenly from one of the lower notes there came a deep resonant “boom,” followed by another, and another.

There could be no mistaking whence the sound came. Somebody was playing on the closed and locked piano.

At that moment there was a loud shriek, followed by a heavy thud on the floor. One of the women, completely overwrought, had screamed and fainted. That was the end of the sÉance. Somebody turned up the lights. The girl who had swooned—she was the same who had played the mandoline—was brought to with water and smelling-salts, and the awe-stricken guests took their departure.

Now for the explanation. Before summoning the landlady and her friends to the sÉance, I had gone to the trouble of fixing threads leading from where I was sitting to the aspidistra plant and the vase, and I had also affixed similar threads, half a dozen of them, to the hammers of the notes of the piano underneath the keyboard, allowing them to dangle down in such a way that I could easily reach them by stretching out my hand.

Simple, isn’t it! Yet it spoofed completely everybody there that night; and to this day, I suppose, they believe that they witnessed some very wonderful and perfectly genuine spirit manifestations.

The following morning early I made up my face delicately with hollow eyes, and wan cheeks, so as to suggest a sleepless night, and when the landlady came in with my morning cup of tea I remarked in awestricken tones that I believed her house was haunted by the spirits. “Why,” I said, “they’ve been walking about in the night upside-down on the ceiling above my head.”

Instinctively the good lady turned her eyes up to the ceiling. Then she let out a yell, dropped the tray she was holding with a crash, and fell gasping and shaking into a near-by arm-chair.

And small wonder! For there on the white plaster of the ceiling, plainly visible, were the marks of naked feet, circling the room and leading out at the door.

And now for another simple explanation. The next bedroom was occupied by a friend of mine, an acrobat. After the household had gone to bed on the previous night, he had stolen into my room, slightly blackened the soles of his bare feet with soot from the chimney, and then, balancing himself upside-down with his hands on my shoulders, he had made the prints on the ceiling which so puzzled and alarmed the landlady.

So simple! And yet she never guessed.

I once persuaded a fat chap who used to work for my show that he was a telepathist. The beginning of it was this way. I used to perform feats of the so-called thought-reading variety that were as genuine as such feats ever are. The fat chap used to try to imitate them. There was, for instance, the trick of walking blindfold into a room, and finding an article that had previously been hidden.

One day when there were a lot of us together in my dressing-room at the Hippodrome, Sheffield, I turned the conversation on to my assistant’s wonderful telepathic gifts, flattering him to the top of his bent. Previously, I had put the others up to it, and they one and all clamoured for an exhibition of his powers.

Fatty was nothing loth, and at my instigation he was taken from the room and blindfolded. An article was supposed to have been previously hidden somewhere within the room by one of the crowd, and I was deputed to walk behind him and “will” him the way he was to go in order to find it.

“You must,” I told him, “stand perfectly upright with your heels and toes close together, and presently you will feel my will power urging you forward in the direction you ought to go. Don’t resist the influence. Let yourself go. And you will find that, if my will power is sufficiently strong, it will lead you to where the hidden article is.”

Now it is a fact, as the reader can easily prove for himself, that if a man stands upright, blindfolded, or even with his eyes tightly shut, and with his heels and toes close together, his body will automatically sway forward; and this is precisely what happened to Fatty.

“I can feel the influence pushing me on,” he exclaimed excitedly, and started groping about the room. In a minute or two one of the men present quietly placed a cigarette-case on the table in front of his outstretched hand, and of course he grabbed it.

“Wonderful!” they shouted. “He’s found it.”

Fatty pulled the bandage from his eyes, and stood triumphant, his big, round, simple face beaming with pleasure and pride.

“I didn’t think I could do it,” he cried. “I didn’t think it was in me. I’m a marvel.”

But I pretended to be in doubt.

“Some of you chaps are having a lark with us,” I said.

“No! No, we’re not. It’s all fair and aboveboard; isn’t it, Fatty?” they cried.

And Fatty, of course, assured me on his word of honour as a man and a gentleman that he did not even know what was the article he had to find. Which was quite true. And neither did we in the beginning.

“Well,” I replied, as if still unconvinced, “I’ll mark a penny myself, and we’ll see if you can find that.”

Again Fatty was led from the room, blindfolded, and the same rigmarole gone through, the penny being slipped right under his hand as he groped along the mantelpiece. “My God!” he cried excitedly. “I’m a marvel. I’ve found it.”

I pretended to be surprised, but still somewhat incredulous.

“Look here,” I said, picking up a piece of paper and an envelope from my dressing-table, “we will have one more test. I am going to write the name of a colour on this sheet of paper, seal it up in the envelope, and place it inside my coat-pocket. Then you must leave your mind a blank, and I will try and will you to tell me the colour I have written down.”

This test also succeeded. He named a colour, and it proved to be the one written on the paper inside the envelope I took from my pocket. As a matter of fact I had a dozen or so envelopes in rotation in my pocket, each with a different colour-name inside, so that was impossible that the test should have failed. But this, of course, Fatty did not know.

I made out to be really and truly surprised now. So did all the others. Nevertheless, I suggested one more final test, a drastic one that would place the matter beyond doubt for evermore; or, at least, so I told him.

I knew that he had a brother who was manager of a well-known London music-hall, so when I asked him suddenly if he knew well anybody in Town whom he could send a wire with the probability of being able to get an immediate reply, I was not at all surprised when he answered:

“Yes. There’s my brother, who manages the Holborn Empire.”

“Right!” I exclaimed. “He’ll do.” And taking a pack of cards from my pocket, I spread them out face downward on the table.

“Now,” I said, “I want you to select one card at haphazard from this pack, and when you have examined it you are to send a reply-paid telegram to your brother asking him what card you are thinking of. You must concentrate your thoughts on your brother, and try and tell him mentally which is the card you hold in your hand. Meanwhile, in order to avoid any chance of collusion, no one is to leave the dressing-room until the answer comes back.”

“I’ll try,” said Fatty haltingly, as if doubtful of the result. “I’ll try my best.”

He took up a card. It was the ace of spades. Then he wrote out a telegram as follows: “Dear brother. What card am I thinking of? Please wire immediately.”

The telegram was given to a messenger to send off. Then we lit cigars, poured out whiskies-and-sodas, and sat down to wait—and chat. Fatty sat by himself in a corner, his head between his hands, intent on conveying a telepathic message to his brother two hundred miles away in London.

Presently the messenger entered with the reply wire. Fatty seized it, tore it open.

“My God!” he cried, reading it aloud. “It says ‘the ace of spades.’ Now, gentlemen, will you believe in me?”

“We will,” we said solemnly. “That settles it.”

For the benefit of the reader I may explain that the pack of cards I took from my pocket and spread out face downwards on the table was a trick pack, of the kind used by conjurors. Every one of the fifty-two cards comprising it was an ace of spades.

Also Fatty’s brother in London, who was of course well known to me, had previously been instructed by me to reply “ace of spades” in case he received a wire from anybody inquiring, “What card am I thinking of?” In fact I have quite a number of people all over England who have received similar instructions, for I frequently work this particular wheeze, but in a slightly different form, at conjuring entertainments at private houses.

I lost sight of Fatty soon after the occurrence narrated above, but I have been given to understand that he believes to this day that he became for a brief while, and under my influence, a genuine, first-class telepathist. Nor did the fact that all his further experiments in the same direction resulted in complete failure shake his confidence in the least. He attributed it to the fact that the people he selected to influence him did not possess a sufficiency of will power.

Another man who used to work for me, and whom we christened Talking Tommy, holds a similar opinion. We worked the spoof on him, too, and he went home, after having a few drinks at about three o’clock in the morning, and tried the experiment on his wife, who was in bed and asleep.

Waking her up, he said: “Get out of bed, dear; I’m a telepathist. I want you to hide this matchbox downstairs somewhere. Then I’ll blindfold myself, and you shall will me to find it.”

“But I don’t want to will; I want to go to sleep,” expostulated the poor lady.

“Just this once, darling,” pleaded Tommy. “There’s a fortune awaiting us if we succeed. I can see us working it on the Halls together at one hundred pounds a week. It all depends on whether or no you possess sufficient will power. Hide the box, then concentrate your whole attention on guiding me mentally to the place where you have hidden it.” Thus adjured, the sleepy lady arose, and for the next half-hour she was wandering round the house in her bare feet, upstairs and downstairs, trying to will her blindfold husband to where the matchbox was. Of course she failed. Tommy fell over the coal-box, knocked two of his choice vases off the mantelpiece, but found no match-box. Then, in the end, he got wild, and told her it was all her fault, she hadn’t got as much will power as a she tabby cat.

Tommy was one of the most simple-minded men I ever came across. He had a lawn at home. It was almost as big as an ordinary billiard table, but Tommy was awfully proud of it. One year, however, the grass grew patchy. Tommy was quite upset about it, and used to bewail his ill luck to all and sundry.

“Oh,” said one of the dressers, “if that’s all, I can easily put things right for you”; and he went and mixed some permanganate of potash in a bottle, and told Tommy to take it home, dilute it with plenty of water, and sprinkle his lawn with the mixture at night before going to bed. “It’s the most wonderful fertiliser ever known,” concluded this champion liar, “and in the morning you’ll find your lawn a lovely velvety green all over.”

Tommy did as he was bid. But the lawn wasn’t green in the morning. It was a dull brick-red colour, and looked as if it had been devastated by a first-class prairie fire.

Another time Tommy came to me while I was showing at the Oxford, and asked me to pass two or three of his friends in. At first I was rather taken aback, for, of course, it is entirely against the etiquette of the profession for a performer to ask for free admission for even his most intimate friends or relations. And rightly so! We get paid our salaries, and we have no earthly right to try to sponge on managers for seats.

Tommy, however, I could see, had no idea of all this. To him his request appeared in the light of a quite natural one. And this gave me an idea.

I told him to get some cards printed with his name and address, and underneath the words: “Super and Comedian to ‘Carlton!’”

“These cards,” I said quite solemnly, “will pass you and your friends into the best seats in any Hall in London. All you will have to do is to ask for the manager and hand him one, stating how many seats you require.”

Tommy thought this an excellent idea, and went off there and then and got his cards printed.

“Where shall I go first?” he asked me later on in the day.

“Doesn’t matter!” I replied off-handedly. “Why not try the Oxford? Come to-morrow night, and bring half a dozen pals with you.”

“Right,” replied Tommy, beaming with pleasurable anticipation, “I will.”

And he did.

Meanwhile I had seen Mr. Blythe Pratt, the Manager, and told him about the joke; with the result that when Tommy appeared, with six rather nondescript-looking friends, he was received with every courtesy, and given a private box for the evening.

Of course he was delighted. Vistas of unlimited free entertainments loomed before his excited imagination.

“Where shall I go to-morrow night?” he asked.

“Oh,” I said. “Why not try the T——,” mentioning a Hall where there was, I knew, an unusually grumpy and quick-tempered manager. He went. What exactly transpired there I never heard. But I can imagine the scene.

Tommy was quite upset about it.

“Oh,” there must have been some mistake, I told him. “Try the Palace to-night.”

And he actually did try it. But that finished it. The reception he met with there finally cured him of all further desire in the direction of cadging for free seats.

By the way, here is a funny story that occurs to me as I write.

Although it is not generally known to the public, it is, nevertheless, a fact that Houdini, the world-famous “Handcuff King,” and Hardeen, his rival in the business, are brothers.

They are, however, on the best of terms with one another personally, being rivals only professionally. Once it happened that Houdini had a week’s engagement at Leeds at the same time that Hardeen was appearing at Bradford.

Houdini arrived in the former town very late at night, and desiring to see his brother on an urgent matter of business he went over to Bradford, arriving there about two o’clock in the morning, when, of course, everybody had gone to bed.

However, Houdini made the best of his way to where his brother lodged, and after he had been knocking and hammering at the door for about twenty minutes, “loud enough,” as he expressed it, “to wake the dead,” the landlord put his head out of the window.

“Who are you? What do you want?” he asked rather irately.

“I’m Houdini, the handcuff king, and I want to see my brother, Mr. Hardeen, on important business,” was the reply. “Come down and open the door.” The landlord grunted. Then—“Oh, you’re Houdini, are you? That there chap as can open any lock?”

“Yes! Yes! That’s me!” cried the Handcuff King impatiently.

“Well then,” quoth the landlord, “if that be so, why don’t ’ee open t’ lock o’ front door, an’ walk right in? What dost want to knock me up for? I’m going back to bed.”

And go back to bed he did, leaving poor Houdini cooling his heels on the doorstep, until such time as he chose to take his departure and return to Leeds.

Here is a little telepathic spoof that anyone can accomplish who has a telephone in their house, or if not they can make use of the telegraph service.

Say you have a friend, or friends, dining with you. You lead the conversation round gradually to the subject of telepathy, mentioning incidentally that you yourself possess certain gifts in that direction.

Probably your statement will be received with polite incredulity; whereupon, pretending to get huffed, you take a pack of cards, spread them out on the table face uppermost, and invite any one of your guests to select any card he pleases.

He picks out, we will say, the three of hearts. Then you say to him: “Now I have a friend living at Hampstead (or wherever the place may be) who is telepathically en rapport with me. If you will keep perfectly still for a minute or so, I will try and place myself in communication with him, and let him know by means of telepathy which card you have chosen.”

You then bury your head in your arms on the table, pretending to be thinking deeply for a short while; then presently you look up with an air of relief, heave a deep sigh of satisfaction, ejaculate “Sakabona! I’ve got him!” or some similar phrase, and tell your friend to go to your telephone, and ring up a certain number, which you give him.

You then tell him to ask for “Charlie,” which, you explain, is your friend’s name, and say to him, “What card have I chosen?”

Wonderingly, and not a little sceptical, your friend does as he is bid. But his scepticism vanishes when the correct answer comes back over the ’phone.

“What card have I chosen?” he asks. And almost instantly the answer comes back: “The three of hearts.”

Now for the explanation of this very puzzling trick; puzzling, that is to say, to the uninitiated.

Like most other tricks of the kind, it is very simple, once you know how it is done.

There is, of course, no telepathy about it. The real fact of the matter is that the “spoof” is worked by means of a code previously arranged between yourself and your friend at the other end of the wire. On the wall near his telephone-box is a card made out as follows:—

Glancing at this immediately on receipt of the message, he sees that “Charlie,” the name he is addressed by, stands for the three of hearts, and he ’phones back accordingly. Had your friend chosen the ten of spades, you would have instructed him to ask for “Mac,” and so on throughout the whole pack of fifty-two cards.