The Humbugs of the World, P. T. Barnum [suggested reading .txt] 📗

medium. When the person sitting with the medium was asked if the hands of the latter had constantly hold of his arm, he replied in the affirmative. Of course, he felt what he supposed to be both the medium’s hands; but as I before explained, the pressure on his wrist was from the medium’s left arm⁠—the left hand of whom, by means of a very accommodating crook in the elbow, was grasping the investigator’s arm where the medium’s right hand was supposed to be.

From Boston the Allen boy went to Portland, Maine, where he succeeded “astonishingly,” till some gentleman applied the lampblack test to his assumed mediumship, whereupon he “came to grief.”

The following is copied from the Portland Daily Press, of March 21.

“Exposed.⁠—The ‘wonderful’ spiritual manifestations of the ‘boy-medium,’ Master Henry B. Allen, in charge of Doctor J. H. Randall, of Boston, were brought to a sad end last evening by the impertinent curiosity and wicked doings of some of the gentlemen present at the séance at Congress Hall.

“As usual, one of the company present was selected to sit at the side of the boy, and allowed his hand and arm to be held by both hands of the boy while the manifestations were going on. The boy seized hold of the gentleman’s wrist with his left hand, and his shoulder, or near it, with the right hand. The manifestations then began, and among them was one trick of pulling the gentleman’s hair.

“Immediately after this trick was performed, the hand of the boy was discovered to be very black⁠—from lampblack, of the best quality, with which the gentleman had dressed his head on purpose to detect whose was the ‘spirit-hand’ that pulled his hair. His shirt sleeve, upon which the boy immediately replaced his hand after pulling his hair, was also black where the hand had been placed. The gentleman stated the facts to the company present, and the séance broke up. Dr. Randall refunded the fifty cents admission fee to those present.”

The spiritualists of the city were somewhat staggered by this exposé, but soon rallied as one of their number announced a new discovery in spiritual science. Here it is, as stated by himself:

“Whatever the electrical or ‘spirit-hand’ touches, will inevitably be transferred to the hand of the medium in every instance, unless something occurs to prevent the full operation of the law by which this result is produced. The spirit-hand being composed in part of the magnetic elements drawn from the medium, when it is dissolved again, and the magnetic fluid returns whence it came, it must of necessity carry with it whatever material substance it has touched, and leave it deposited upon the surface or material hand of the medium. This is a scientific question. How many innocent mediums have been wronged? and the invisible have permitted it, until we should discover that it was the natural result of a natural law.”

What a great discovery! and how lucidly it is set forth! The author (who, by the way, is editor of the Portland Evening Courier) of this new discovery, was not so modest but that he hastened to announce and claim full credit for it in the columns of the Banner of Light⁠—the editor of which journal congratulates him on having done so much for the cause of spiritualism! Those skeptics who were present when the lampblack was “transferred” from the gentleman’s hair to the medium’s hand, rashly concluded that the boy was an impostor. It remained for Mr. Hall⁠—that is the philosopher’s name⁠—to make the “electromagnetic transfer” discovery. The Allen boy ought ever to hold him in grateful remembrance for coming to his rescue at such a critical period, when the spirits would not vouchsafe an explanation that would exculpate him from the grievous charge of imposture. Mr. Hall deserves a leather medal now, and a soapstone monument when he is dead.

A person, whose initials are the same as the gentleman’s named above, once lived in Aroostook, Maine, and was in the habit of attending “spiritual circles,” in which he was sometimes influenced as a “personating medium,” and to represent the symptoms of the disease which caused the controlling spirit’s translation to another sphere. It having been reported in Aroostook that a certain well-known individual, living further east, had died of cholera, a desire was expressed at the next “circle” to have him “manifest” himself. The medium above referred to got “under influence,” and personated, with an exhibition of all the symptoms of cholera, the gentleman who was reported to have died of that disease. So faithful to the supposed facts was the representation, that the medium had to be cared for as if he was himself a veritable cholera-patient. Several days after, the man who was “personated” appeared in Aroostook, alive and well, never having been attacked with the cholera. The local papers gave a graphic account of the “manifestation” soon after it occurred.

But to return to the Allen boy. After his exposure by means of the lampblack test, and Mr. Hall, of the Portland Evening Courier, had announced his new discovery in spiritual science, several of the Portland spiritualists had a private “sitting” with the boy. While he sat with his hands upon the arm of one of their number, they tied a rope to his wrists, and around the person’s arm, covering his hands in the way I have before described. After some wriggling and twisting (the usual amount of “nervousness,”) the bell washeard to ring behind the clotheshorse. The boy’s right hand was then examined, and it was found to be stained with some colored matter that had previously been put upon the handle of the bell. As the boy’s wrists were still tied, and the rope remained upon the man’s arm, the “transfer” theory was considered to be established as a fact, and the previous exposure shown to be not only no exposure at all, but a “stepping-stone to a grand truth in spiritual science.” Again and again did