Nightmare Alley

 

I want to tell you of an unusual man with an unusual book. William Lindsay Gresham wrote a novel in 1946, a novel about carnival workers and wannabe prophets that are hustlers and femme fatales. It was a noir literature with a spin on it. The book was Nightmare Alley and was later made into a movie with Tyron Power in 1947 and then a remake in 2021 with Bradley Cooper.

Gresham was born in Baltimore and when he was a child the family moved to New York City and that is where he became fascinated with the sideshows at Coney Island. After high school he drifted from job to job, and after a series of bad relationships that ended with a divorce, Gresham made his way to Spain. He served with the Loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War as a medic. While there, Gresham would hang out with other Americans who also signed up for service. One of them was a former sideshow employee by the name of Joseph Daniel “Doc” Halliday who inspired Gresham to write his most famous work.

When he came home from Spain, he had a stay at a tuberculosis ward, which lead to an attempted suicide. Eventually, Gresham got a job working as an editor for a “true crime” magazine. In 1942, Gresham will marry Joy Davidman, a poet. They will have two children together, David and Douglas. It will be Joy who inspires Gresham to write the nonfiction Midway Monster as well as Nightmare Alley.  Nightmare Alley portrays a character named Stanton Carlisle who starts to work at a carnival and will become a mentalist and will eventually leave the carnival to become a psychic. This hustle gets Stanton in hot water and he will later become a hobo and do Tarot cards readings. The book has a self-prophecy ending, of course. Gresham sells the rights to Nightmare Alley for $60,000 dollars that would then become the 1947 movie.

This money, almost a million in today’s money, will land Gresham and Davidman in a beautiful mansion in Staatsburg, New York. Things were alright for a while, but tensions arose in the marriage because of Gresham’s unfaithful ways and his alcoholism. Gresham will then become interested in Dianetics, a book written in 1950 by L. Ron Hubbard, but after a couple of years he will denounce it as a “another type of spook racket”.  Davidman, who was an atheist as well a member of the American Communist Party, was a fan of C.S Lewis, and his works became the factor of her becoming a Christian. Davidman will eventually divorce Gresham and make her way to England with their two sons. Before Davidman left, she invited her cousin, Renee Rodriguez, to come to their house while she went to England. Rodriguez and Gresham soon began an affair.

Joy Davidson will become friends with C.S. Lewis and she will write her best-known work Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments with a preface from C.S. Lewis in 1954. C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman will then marry in 1956. Unfortunately, their wedding bliss would end with Davidman cancer diagnosis.  She will pass in 1960. The relationship between Lewis and Davidman became a BBC film, stage play, and a theatrical film Shadowlands. Lewis was struck by grief and under a pseudonym, will publish A Grief Observed in 1961. Lewis will write this of Joy:

“Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.”

   After Davidman’s death, Gresham went to England to see his sons. When he saw that they were well taken care of, he left them in the care of Lewis. Gresham then joined Alcoholics Anonymous and became interested in Spiritualism, and the debunking of mediums. He then wrote a book about Houdini with the assistance of James Randi, a magician turned skeptic paranormal investigator.

In 1962, Gresham’s health took a turn for the worse. He was diagnosed with tongue cancer and checked into the Dixie Hotel in Manhattan, which he frequently visited while writing Nightmare Alley. There, the 53-year-old author took his own life by an overdose of sleeping pills.

 

 

G. J. Griffith

 

One of the most recognizable areas in Los Angeles is Griffith Park. This 4,300-acre park is home of the Autry Museum of the American West, The Los Angeles Zoo, The Griffith Observatory, as well as the Hollywood sign. It is a massive park in the middle of Los Angeles, which varies in geography from flat, green athletic fields to rugged trails that lead into the hills peppered with native plants. This magnificent park was once part of the Rancho Los Feliz, the ranch owned by Griffith Jenkins Griffith.

Griffith was born in South Wales on January 4^th, 1850. As a young boy, he was taken to America by his uncle and spent part of his youth in Pennsylvania where he became a journalist. His journalism career brought him to San Francisco in the 1870s, where he reported on the mining beat in Early California. This experience made him an expert on the mining business, at least he thought so. He used this expertise to get a small fortune from the mine owners who employed him. In 1882, Griffith came to Los Angeles, which at this time was mostly ranch lands and farms but was beginning to become more industrial with a bustling downtown area. He soon bought the Rancho Los Feliz from Thomas Bell. Griffith spent tons of money on sheep and cattle and horses to try to make it a productive rancho, but to no avail.

In 1887, Griffith married Miss Mary Agnes Christina Mesmer in a beautiful society wedding. A Los Angeles Times reporter commented, “By this marriage two immense estates were united. The large possessions of G.J. Griffith and a vast amount of Los Angeles property owned by the charming bride, Miss Mary Agnes Christina Mesmer, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Louis Mesmer, familiarly known among her most intimate society friends as ‘Tina.’”   This marriage was a sham. Tina and he sister Lucy, were the heiresses to a quarter of a million-dollar fortune left for them by a family friend, Andre Briswalter. A quarter of a million doesn’t sound like much but that is 8.2 million in today’s money. Griffith thought that Tina was the sole heir, and when he found out that Lucy got half, he called off the wedding and Mesmer family, who feared the shame that would come to the family agreed that if Griffith married her, Tina would be given the whole fortune. Griffith demanded that the money come to him, rather than Tina, in order to “protect” her from swindlers. At their wedding breakfast, Griffith told his new family that he was going to say goodbye to his friends that came to the wedding. Instead of saying his goodbyes, Griffith went to the courthouse that was right across the street and within six minutes he transferred 250,000 dollars from Tina to himself and then went back to the breakfast.  

Soon After the marriage, Tina gave birth to their only child, a son, named Vandall. Griffith himself had injected himself into Los Angeles society. He gave himself the rank of Colonel even though he never was in the military, only the reserves, where his rank was Major. 

Giffith survived an assassination attempt in October 1891. One of his tenants ran an ostrich farm that was doing poorly. and after falling behind in rent, he became deranged.  He ambushed Griffith and his wife and her sister in their carriage on their way to bring flowers to the grave of Tina and Lucy’s mother who had passed earlier that year. The would-be assassin shot at Griffith, grazing his head with buckshot, then the tenant rode away. Upon realizing that the assassination attempt failed, the tenant drew a revolver from his pocket and placed the gun behind his left ear and took off the back of his head. Griffith himself was only mildly injured.

In December 1896, Griffith and his wife gave a goodly portion of the Rancho Los Feliz to the city as a “princely gift”. His enemies such as Horace Bell, actually thought the reason for the gifting of the land was because Griffith’s ranch had failed, and he was donating the land for tax purposes. The 3,015-acre allotment of land to be used as a park for “the plain-people” of Los Angeles as Griffith described the populace of the city. It was called a Christmas gift to the city.  

Griffith came across as a teetotaler and even gave money to the temperance movement in Los Angeles, but he was actually a secret alcoholic. As Tina later told, “He never left the house without taking a drink, and he never came into the house without taking one, and, of course, I don’t know how many he took in between.” In May 1903, Griffith in a drunken rage threatened Tina with a gun at the Hotel Freemont. Their marriage was in shambles, but they kept up appearances because Griffith himself was a very proud man and didn’t want the public to know that he was a drunk and a wife abuser. During the summer of the same year, the family took a trip to Santa Monica and stayed in a suite at the Hotel Arcadia. Griffith himself was on an alcoholic bender and he became paranoid and thought that people were out to kill him.  He even went as far as to have the soup changed at the last minute in the hotel dining room because Griffith feared that he could be poisoned. On September 4^th, Tina was packing their belongings to return home from the hotel when Griffith stumbled into the room, carrying a revolver in one hand and his Prayer book in the other. He made Tina kneel down before him and he asked her to swear upon the prayer book, as if it was the Bible, if she had heard anything about Briswalter (the person who gave Tina and Lucy their fortune) being poisoned. He then asked her if she or anyone she knew was trying to poison him. He then asked the coup de grace of questions, had she always been faithful to her wedding vows.  And she said, according to her court documents, “As God is my Judge, I have, and you know that I have.” At that, he shot her.

The bullet split into two pieces upon impact. One half went into the bone next to her frontal lobe, the other half went downward and tore out her right eye. Tina then ran to a window and plummeted out onto the roof and was found by a couple staying in another suite below. Tina would spend a month in the hospital recovering, but the damage to her eye and face was extensive.  Shortly after the shooting Griffith was arrested for trying to kill his wife.

If Griffith could be called the OJ Simpson of the time, his lawyer, Earl Rogers, would be Johnnie Cochran. Rogers had defended 77 accused murderers and had lost only 3 of the trials. Rogers would go on to defend Clarence Darrow when he was accused of jury tampering in the case of the LA Times bombing. Earl Rogers was a genius, and an alcoholic, just like Griffith, so his defense against the charges of attempted murder was that Griffith had a bout of “alcoholic insanity”, so he was not responsible for his actions. Witnesses were called in about his alcoholism and paranoid delusions. Finally, on November 3, 1903, Tina gave her testimony. She wore a veil and tinted glasses, because of the injuries to her face and her ruined eye. She was questioned for several hours before she fainted on the stand, then after she rested in a nearby office, she regained her strength to continue the testimony. In the end, the jury pronounced an acquittal for the charge of attempted murder, but they got Griffith on a lesser charge of assault with a deadly weapon. For that he got two years in San Quentin. Tina was awarded some cash, a divorce and custody of their son.

After 20 months Griffith was released, and he claimed that he was a new, humbler man and began trying to restore his name. He demanded to know why the city hasn’t done more with the land he donated as a park, even though the fledging Los Angeles was having money issues of its own. In 1908, Griffith went to Mt Wilson observatory, and he became fascinated with the heavenly bodies. Griffith later wrote, "If all mankind could look through that telescope, it would change the world." Out of that experience, Griffith knew what he wanted at the top of Griffith Park.

In 1912, Griffith offered money to the city of Los Angeles to build an observatory at Griffith Park and in 1913, he offered money to build a public theater, the Greek. But the city fathers turned down the offers because of Griffith’s past. Finally, Griffith Jenkins Griffith died of liver disease in 1919. In his will, Griffith gave the city the money in a trust for the building of the observatory as well as the theater. Even though the city was not fond of the idea, the trust made sure that the money was used only for the creation of these two structures. 

Charles Dickens and the Staplehurst Train Incident

 

   Charles Dickens is most notable for his work A Christmas Carol, but that tale wasn’t the only Christmas ghost story that he wrote. The Signal-Man was published in the Christmas edition of All the Year Around in 1866. It is a fantastical ghost story and full of foreshadowing. Not only is it the kind of tale that Victorians would have loved, but the author had very intimate knowledge of the subject for he was in a train accident, the Staplehurst rail crash in June of 1865.

   It was the 9^th of June, it was midafternoon, and the train was crossing the viaduct at Staplehurst, Kent. A signal man was dispatched by the railroad company to warn the train that a small length of track was being repaired. In the Board of Trade report, the signal man was 554 yards away from the track being installed, instead of the 1000 yards that was the regulation standard, so by the time that train engineer saw the signal man, it was too close to stop in time. No 199 locomotive, along with the brake van and the second-class carriage, made it across the viaduct when it derailed, the rest of the carriages, seven in all, wound up in the muddy riverbed. One of the witnesses said of the incident "two terrible jolts and in an instant ... all became darkness ... and chaos".  Victims who were able help those who were trapped inside the derailed train cars, would talk about the violent screaming coming from the carriages as the seriously wounded were hauled away from the train. These people were treated on scene until carriages and wagons could get them to a doctor. In all 10 people were killed and 40 people were injured. One of these brave souls who helped the wounded and dying was 53-year-old Charles Dickens. Dickens recalled a scene from the tragedy including seeing a man covered in blood, who he gave water to and helped him lie on the grass, where he died. He later wrote about the incident as, “No Imagination Can Conceive the Ruin”. Dickens worked all throughout the afternoon and into the evening carrying water from the river in his top hat and giving brandy to shocked passengers from his flask. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it.

   Out of all of this, Charles Dickens will write the Signal-Man in during the summer of 1866. The story, a first-person narrative, is a stroke of genius. It involved an unnamed narrator and his meeting with a signal-man in his office, which was basically a telegraph and signal bells on a table located in a cutting, which was a hill that was cut into two for the tracks to be placed. During their brief time together, the signal-man relates that he is haunted by an apparition that always appears right before a tragedy.  During the conversation between the signal-man and the narrator, only the signal-man hears the warning bells go off periodically. The narrator, a skeptical man who doesn’t believe in the supernatural, believes his new friend is overtaxed and needs to see a doctor. The next day, the narrator comes to see the signal-man, but he sees what he first thinks is a ghost, but it is just a railroad official; investigating the newest accident on the track, the death of the signal-man. The signal-man was struck by an oncoming train. The train operator said he was standing in the middle of the tracks and staring at something. The train operator then called out to him, "Below there! Look out! For God’s sake, clear the way!" The story ends with the narrator contemplating the last words of the engineer and the last words of the apparition that the signal-man related to the narrator.

   It is a weird tale that is part horror, part mystery. A tale that I would be more inclined to attribute to Poe or his ilk, but not Charles Dickens. But what is more shocking than the tale itself is who Charles Dickens was travelling with. Her name was Ellen Ternan, an actress of minor repute, and her mother who was traveling with Dickens on a tour. They met in 1857, when Dicken was 45 and Tenan 18. She was hired for a play that Dickens wrote with Wilkie Collins called The Frozen Deep. Dickens’ marriage to Catherine Dickens was on the rocks for many years and he, according to some, sought to have her institutionalized, which of course failed, and they eventually became separated. In 1860, Dickens made a bonfire behind his home, where he burned all of his correspondence, saving only his financial letters. Ellen in her home did the same, which makes the relationship between the two speculative, at best. Was Ellen the mistress of famed writer Charles Dickens, or was she something else, an illegitimate daughter? There was always the scandalous writing of their contemporaries who say that Dickens and Ternan has a child together but the child died in infancy. But this is only hearsay and very little is known about the relationship between them. On his death, Dickens settled an annuity for Terran which made her financially independent. Which he would have done for his mistress, or his daughter.

    After the incident, Dickens became very nervous when he traveled by train, and he sought many ways to avoid it. In 1866, Dickens wrote, “have sudden vague rushes of terror, even when riding in a hansom cab, which are perfectly unreasonable but quite insurmountable." Dickens would take his son, Henry, on some book tours. Henry recalled, “I have seen him sometimes in a railway carriage when there was a slight jolt. When this happened, he was almost in a state of panic and gripped the seat with both hands." The Staplehurst incident affected Charles Dickens for his remaining years. He continued to write and did a final tour to the United States in 1868, making sure he visited American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He then returned to England and he did a tour of “farewell readings” and when he was on that tour, he suffered a stroke which took place in April 1869. The tour was cancelled. It was June 8, 1870, and he was working all day on the manuscript of Edwin Drood, he suffered another stroke, and he never regained consciousness. He died the next day, June 9^th, which was the five-year anniversary of the Staplehurst incident.

Maelzel’s Chess Payer or How Edgar Allen Poe Set the Literary World Ablaze with a New Genre, Mystery

 

 

   Before Poe made a name for himself as the author of The Raven, The Mask of the Red Death and others, he was a journalist and a literary critic. How he got the assignment covering the Turk when it came to America remains a mystery, but it had a lifelong impression on him and his approach to writing.

   The Mechanical Turk was invented in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen to impress the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria.  The Turk was an automaton that could play chess against a human opponent as well as perform the Knight’s Tour, a puzzle that requires the player to occupy every square on a chessboard exactly once. Was this machine even possible? And did this machine beat both Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon (more than one paper I read stated that the Turk caught Napoleon cheating)? But what if it was not a thinking machine at all, but instead a mechanical illusion that allows a human chess player to be inside the cabinet, and it took the world by storm. After the death of the creator in 1804, it was purchased by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who took it on tours including Europe and America. Eventually it made its way to John Kearsley Mitchell of Philadelphia, a physician. For over 84 years, it played chess until its unfortunate demise on July 5^th 1854, when a fire that started at the National Theater in Philadelphia reached the museum where the Turk was on display and destroyed this piece of mechanical magic. Mitchell’s son, Silas, believed that he heard through the flames “The last words of our departed friend, the sternly whispered, oft repeated syllables, ‘echec! echec!’” (French for check).

   But we now must backtrack to April 1826 when the Mechanical Turk came to America. The debut was in New York, and it was all the rage and had many reviews in New York newspapers. But it wasn’t just the idea of a chess playing robot that made the people interested in it, it was the idea of the Industrial Age that was blossoming and the idea that machines like the Turk could become commonplace. Many people thought that The Turk was a fake, but it inspired people to dream. A writer for The Evening Post commented on it, “Nothing of a similar nature has ever been seen in this city, that will bear the smallest comparison with it.” Poe also wrote about this technological wonder in the Southern Literary Messenger published in 1836.

   His essay on the Turk was true to Poe’s form, ruthless and discriminating. He read many articles and essays on the automaton, before examining it himself, including Letters on Natural Magic by Sir David Brewster.  Poe came up with many theories on how the machine worked and although some of them were wrong, they showed where his mind was going and how he would use that train of thought in his later fiction. I included this one portion to show the workings of his mind on the matter of the Turk, “When the question is demanded explicitly of Maelzel — “Is the Automaton a pure machine or not?” his reply is invariably the same — “I will say nothing about it.” Now the notoriety of the Automaton, and the great curiosity it has everywhere excited, are owing more especially to the prevalent opinion that it is a pure machine, than to any other circumstance. Of course, then, it is the interest of the proprietor to represent it as a pure machine. And what more obvious, and more effectual method could there be of impressing the spectators with this desired idea, than a positive and explicit declaration to that effect? On the other hand, what more obvious and effectual method could there be of exciting a disbelief in the Automaton's being a pure machine, than by withholding such explicit declaration? For, people will naturally reason thus, — It is Maelzel's interest to represent this thing a pure machine — he refuses to do so, directly, in words, although he does not scruple, and is evidently anxious to do so, indirectly by actions — were it actually what he wishes to represent it by actions, he would gladly avail himself of the more direct testimony of words — the inference is, that a consciousness of its not being a pure machine, is the reason of his silence — his actions cannot implicate him in a falsehood — his words may.” This sounds like Poe’s fictional character C. Auguste Dupin more than Edgar Allen Poe himself doing what the author called “ratiocination.”

    In the end, Poe thought that it was a hoax, yet his theory on how it was done was wrong. Close, but no cigar. Eventually it was the son of the last owner, Silas Mitchell who revealed the secret of the Turk. I came across this explanation from the Museum of Hoaxes, that probably explains it best:

A series of sliding panels and a rolling chair allowed the automaton's operator to hide while the interior of the machine was being displayed. The operator then controlled the Turk by means of a 'pantograph' device that synchronized his arm movements with those of the wooden Turk. Magnetic chess pieces allowed him to know what pieces were being moved on the board above his head.

   If it was not for the Turk, Poe may not have come up with his characters such as Dupin, and the beginnings of the earliest form of the detective genre. His literary career might have taken off in a different direction, and the world would have been a sadder place for it. Because without the work of Poe, we would not have Lovecraft, and King, and a multitude of authors that read his work as children.

   A lot of times, I get some inspiration for my posts. The inspiration for this came when I was out a couple of weeks ago with another magician, Vince Wilson. I was showing him around Hollywood, and we were having lunch at the Roosevelt Hotel, when his phone rang. He got us permission to visit the workshop of John Gaughan, master of props and other magic devices. Gaughan has built the only copy of the Turk using the most detailed drawings available.  His reproduction even has the original chessboard, which was not with the Automaton at the time of the fire. Gaughan spent $120,00 dollars in 1984 and took over 5 years to complete the copy. Vince wanted to see the Turk because he runs Poe’s Magic Theatre and the Poe’s Magic Conference each year.   He is on the board of directors of the Poe Museum in Baltimore. I could see his passion and so I needed to see it for myself. Gaughan was a gracious host, as we toured a room that includes several antique pieces of magic. And then we saw the Turk, and I was floored. The details and intricacies of the reproduction were magnificent. We spoke about the Turk for awhile and we talked about other automatons as well as magic itself. As we concluded our tour and walked through his workshop I noticed several boxes that included magic wands in various stages of completion. There were two young men were working on them. Their eye for detail uncompromising as they made these precious gifts. And gifts they were, but they were also trophies, as these were the wands that were to be handed out to the winners of the AMA (American Magician Award) award ceremony that next week.

   But what is my impression of seeing the Turk? It is a fraud? No, it’s not a fraud. It’s magic and illusion. Yes, I suppose all magic is in essence fraud. But magic lets you see what your conscious mind cannot believe. It allows you to dream while you are still awake. And that dream that happened in 1770 possibly gave us the intellectual fiction of Poe, and the first detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

In The Dark

 

   A big shout out to Rhonda Rae, who gave me the topic and an article to start with. I want to talk about something that has always bugged me in the past about the ghost hunting shows; the lack of light during the program as they are hunting ghosts. I am sorry, did I say lack of light? I mean in complete darkness with night vision cameras. One of the best paranormal investigators in my mind is Benjamin Radford, who tackled this investigative technique in a 2017 issue of Skeptical Inquirer.

   Radford equates the lack of light to the fakery of early spiritualism. Christine Wicker, who wrote the book Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town That Talks to the Dead, also studied the history of Spiritualism. In her book she notes that “mediums so disliked light that they nailed planks over the windows to their séance room.” She also commented that according to her historical research the “spirits demanded these conditions.” Now hindsight is 20/20. And to the Victorian mind, that may have made sense, but with a modern magician’s mind, I think it was pure genius on the part of the Spiritualist that came up with that. As Benjamin Radford commented, one of the unbroken rules of magic is that no one gets backstage, and the magician is in control of how the audience sits. But how can the magician do that? How does the magician control the audience’s field of view? Plunge them in darkness.

    Almost all the mediums that were caught using trickery were because the investigators played by their own rules and not the mediums. A lighted match, and later the investigator’s flashlight has put many so-called mediums to shame. The same could be said with spirit slates and spirit trumpet and other paraphernalia of the Spiritualist and medium.

   Because the popular television ghost hunting shows are shot in the dark, most ghost hunter’s groups will do the same, which hampers the scientific pursuit of the paranormal in many ways. Bradford commented that most ghost sightings happen not at night, but during the day. Elanor Sidgwick, did a paper in 1885 for the SPR (Society for Psychical Research) and reported that “ghosts may be seen in the daylight or in artificial light, at dawn or at dusk, and in various parts of the house or outside in the yard.” If you want to look further into the history of ghost hunting, I thoroughly recommend The Ghost Hunters by Deborah Blum.

I totally agree with Bradford that investigating in the dark is the equivalent of tying an anvil to a marathon runner’s foot. If you are trying to investigate using a scientific method, why would you hamper your best sense, sight? But, if you are trying pull the wool over somebody’s eyes, the dark could be your best friend. If I am doing magic, I want to control the angles of my audience, if I cannot, I want to make sure that I do not “flash.”  This is magician’s jargon for not letting the layperson see what I do not want them to see. For the ghost hunter shows that are so popular today, the best way for them not to “flash” is to plunge their audience into complete darkness.  Using night vision cameras can be even worse because it gives the audience the idea that they can see when they really cannot. One of the best things that ghost hunter shows do is stimulate drama and excitement when there is none. “Did you see that?” asks one paranormal investigator as the camera moves towards him with the night camera setting on because they are in complete darkness. And I am screaming at the television, “no I didn’t, because you are in the dark and the camera just got on you.”

Charles Dickens and Human Spontaneous Combustion

 

  

   I find it interesting that Charles Dickens, the beloved writer who gave us A Tale of Two Cities and A Christmas Carol, would be in the proverbial hot seat with his 1852 serialized novel Bleak House. The reason for this isn’t due to his satire of the legal system and the conflicting of wills, but that of spontaneous human combustion. Perhaps, it’s been a few years, or decades, since you read it, or maybe you’ve never read this author’s work, and for this, I give you the small snippet that started the ruckus.

The first thing they noticed was the smell—like someone frying rancid meat. The two men sat in their flat in central London, awaiting their midnight appointment with the old, alcoholic Mr. Krook, who lived downstairs. As they chatted uneasily, ominous sights and smells kept distracting them. Black soot swirled through the room. A pungent yellow grease stained the windowsill. And that smell!

At last, after midnight, they descended the stairs. Mr. Krook’s shop—crammed with dirty rags, bottles, bones, and other hoarded trash—was unpleasant even in daytime. But tonight, they sensed something positively evil. Outside Krook’s bedroom near the back of the shop, a cat leaped out and snarled. When they entered Krook’s room, the odor choked them. Grease stained the walls and ceiling as if it were painted on. Krook’s coat and cap lay on a chair; a bottle of gin sat on the table. But the only sign of life was the cat, still hissing. The men swung their lantern around, looking for Krook, who was nowhere to be seen.

Then they saw the pile of ash on the floor. They stared for a moment, before turning and running. They burst onto the street, shouting for help. But it was too late: Old Krook was gone, a victim of spontaneous combustion.

   Dickens wrote about many physical ailments, such as smallpox, and penned them in a scientific way so most of his readers took the story as scientific fact. At this time in the scientific field Michael Faraday was conducting his experiments in electromagnetism and electrochemistry, and many scientists were looking at things such as mesmerism, clairvoyance, and ghosts. William Crookes, who is known in my circle as one of the first paranormal investigators, had discovered the element thallium as well as helium. And one scientific mind took on the idea of spontaneous combustion as noted in Dickens’ tale, George Lewes.

   George Lewes, who was an English philosopher as well as a literature critic, was also an amateur physiologist. Even though Lewes was a friend of Charles Dickens he felt he needed to put in his two cents. Lewes wrote in a well-known newspaper at the time, The Leader, that Dickens was obviously bending the truth and that, “The[se] circumstances are beyond the limits of acceptable fiction,” he wrote, “and give credence to a scientific impossibility.” He accused Dickens of cheap sensationalism and “of giving currency to a vulgar error.”

   This became a series of both public and private letters of debate whether the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion was real. Dickens in a private letter told of an Italian countess in 1731 who died of spontaneous combustion. The countess had bathed in camphorated spirits of wine (a mixture of brandy and camphor) and the next morning her maid found the countess’ legs, just her legs, near a pile of ash and a charred skull. Nothing else seemed amiss, except for two melted candles nearby. A priest transcribed the story and so Dickens took it as fact. Lewes thought that all the stories that Dickens gave to back his own story up was “humorous, but not convincing.”

   Most of Dickens’ accounts involved alcohol in the system. Lewes retorted by giving data to show recent experiments that revealed how the liver metabolized alcohol, breaking it down for elimination, and Lewes pointed out that the human body is roughly 75 percent water, so it could not catch fire by itself. Their disagreement would continue for 10 months, while Bleak House was being serialized, eventually Lewes and Dickens made up and continued to be good friends.

   

There are those today who still believe in the possibility of human combustion. Others believe that an external agent, such as candles or cigarettes, is the real culprit that leads to the premature cremation of a person.  History and modern science tell us that Lewes was the winner. No human body has been the victim of spontaneous combustion, except of course in the tabloids.

The Wizard of the North

 

   Continuing on with my blog of the history of magic and the magicians that made it happen, I want to write about John Henry Anderson, “The Wizard of the North”. Anderson was born on a tenant farm in 1812, in the north-east part of Scotland, a few miles from Aberdeen. Unfortunately, his parents died while he was young, and he would get an apprentice job with a blacksmith. He then became involved with a troop of actors and would start traveling with them as a call-boy. He stayed with the action troop for several years as an actor and he knew that he was meant to be a performer. He loved acting, especially in the dramas of the time. A conjurer would eventually join the troop. His name was Ingleby, and he sparked the young actor into learning magic. Anderson spent years trying to work out the secrets of Ingleby’s magic, and he finally decided it was time to leave the acting troop and strike out on his own.

   By the time Anderson was seventeen, he was working in the local inns and village town halls in the north of Scotland. His tour brought him to Brechin, and there he caught the eyes of a local laird, Lord Panmure. Panmure thought that young Andreson would be a great magician to entertain his guests at a dinner party in Brechin Castle. The dinner was a disaster, because the young magician didn’t know the ins and outs of society and the dinner guests thought he was a fool, until the magician started to perform his conjuring. The following day he received a 10-pound banknote (the first he had ever seen) along with a note:

Brechin Castle, 12^th March, 1831

Sir, - Your performance last night at Brechin Castle much delighted myself and party. You far excel any other necromancer that I have ever seen either at home or abroad.

I am, Sir, yours etc., PANMURE.

   Anderson took this letter, and had it subsequently printed on every poster that he made for years as a testimonial of his skill, yet he had problems securing larger venues. He eventually teamed up with another performance troop. He would marry the stage manager’s daughter and take his young wife on a performance tour of Scotland and England. During this tour he would take on the mantle of “The Great Caledonian Magician” and play over 103 nights in Edinburgh and 80 nights in Manchester. By 1840 he would be appearing at the new Strand theatre and was known as “Professor Anderson, the Wizard of the North”, a title that he will keep for the rest of his life.

  During his travels, he would have many ups and downs, as magicians do, but he always found a way to land on his feet. There is a story that while he was at a masked ball in Russia he ran into the Tsar and since he didn’t recognize the Tsar he didn’t apologize. Instead of being sent to Siberia, the Tsar had him entertain the court a few days later. He then said that the Tsar showed him a magic trick involving the production of a bowl of water. A trick that Tsar learned from a tribe known as the Khirgizians, near the Chinese border. Later the Tzar gave Anderson a robe which Anderson wore on stage. Now, whether this actually happened is mostly hearsay, but it’s great publicity. It was Anderson’s greatest trick, the trick of self-promotion, which rivaled that of Houdini himself. Anderson traveled with his own printing press and townspeople would wake early in the morning to find posters all over the town, and even the pavements would be painted with the words “ANDERSON IS COMING”. He even concocted the story that it was Sir Walter Scott who gave him the moniker of the “Wizard of the North”. Now that would be grand if Scott hadn’t died while Anderson was just a child. Sometimes a magician, especially a stage magician, needs to have more chutzpah than actual skill itself.

  Anderson was skilled indeed, as noted in a letter from Charles Betram, another great Victorian conjurer commenting on Anderson’s skill in the 1860’s:

Amongst others he performed the great gun trick, the trick that really made him…I fear that towards the end of his performance my mind was so confused with the seeming miracles I had seen that I am unable to remember all the items of his programme. I have never seen any performance so brilliant, or any stage so lavishly fitted as that of the wizard.

   John Herny Anderson gave the world what it wanted to see in magic and then some. Not only did he master the Bullet Catch but Anderson is credited with one of the most known tricks in a magician’s arsenal, that of producing a rabbit out of a hat. James Henry Anderson died in 1874 at the Fleece hotel in Darlington, County Durham. He was buried next to his mother. The same year that Anderson died, Erich Weiss was born in Budapest. Erich Weiss will become the famous magician, Harry Houdini. Houdini revered Anderson and thought of Anderson as an inspiration. In 1909, Houdini took over the upkeep of Anderson’s gravesite, which had fallen into disrepair, and did so until Houdini’s death in 1926.