![]() In 1924, Houdini was part of a committee investigating Boston medium Mina "Margery" Crandon, the wife of a respected surgeon and Harvard faculty member. He even asked his wife to help him show how mediums pull off certain tricks. In fact, he had almost a secondary career debunking the methods of famous mediums during séances and performing their tricks as part of his stage show. Mediums had no greater opponent than magician Harry Houdini, who denounced them as frauds. Harry Houdini delighted in debunking mediums. With that in mind, here are 11 weird vintage pictures from séances and some explanations for what’s happening in them. “Slate writing, spirit pictures, table tipping, rapping, and other features of Spiritualism have been exposed time and again. “Exposures are of frequent occurrence, many of them highly sensational in character,” The New York Times wrote in a Novemarticle. Those were excellent tricks, but that's all they were-mediums were often shown to be frauds. The medium not only delivered messages from the dearly departed, but also demonstrated the presence of spirits in the room by levitating objects, ringing bells, and producing a substance from her body known as ectoplasm. ![]() There was no trendier activity than holding a séance led by a medium, who would facilitate communication between the living and the dead. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, spiritualism-the belief that the spirits of the dead can communicate with the living-was all the rage. ![]()
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