Midnight Spook Shows featured stage illusions borrowing from techniques used in fraudulent seances alongside vaudeville-style comedy and burlesque. Performances were staged in movie theaters, paired with a film screening, usually but not exclusively from the horror genre. The tradition began in the mid to late 1930s and ran into the early ’70s, reaching its heyday in the ’50s. After World War II, shows began catering to younger audiences and emphasizing movie monsters, horror and gore.
In this episode we examine the history of the genre and a few of its colorful artists, sometimes called “ghostmasters.” Two leading lights in the field were (Dr.) Bill Neff, and Dr. Silkini (actually a pair of brothers Jack and Wyman Baker). Other practitioners we look at include Raymond Corbin (Ray-Mond), George Marquis, Phillip Morris (Dr. Evil), Kara-Kum, and the various shows presented by Joe Karston. Bela Lugosi dabbled in the field and is discussed.
This episode picks up the thread from last October’s show about unruly American Halloween celebrations, those of the teens and twenties. While the 1930s offered relatively sedate Spook Shows, by their 1950s heyday, as box-office lines wrapped the block and theater balconies sagged under the weight of screaming teenagers, the Spook Shows shared something of that unruly, possibly even dangerous, spirit of old Halloween.
The 19th-century Spiritualist movement was rife with fraud and misplaced hopes, but what made people so eager to believe in the possibility of talking to the dead? This episode looks at some early mediumistic pioneers, attractions beyond the metaphysical that drew sitters to take part in seances, and the growing pressure within the movement to produce ever more vivid phenomena passing for proof of supernatural contact. This episode also kicks off our Fall-Winter season and a (3-episode!) October dedicated to the theme of “talking to the dead.”
As communication with the dead is necessarily a two-way process, we begin with a story illustrating, not why we may wish to speak to the departed, but why the departed may wish to speak to us. A typical folkloric reason for a spirit’s return is the desire for resolution regarding the circumstances of death and proper burial. Our first story illustrates this with the story of William Corder’s murder of Maria Marten in 1827 — what came to be known as “The Red Barn Murder” — in which a ghost appears in dreams of Maria’s stepmother in an effort to identify the perpetrator and the body’s whereabouts. I include a 1932 recording of a popular Victorian melodrama enacting the story and a description of the widespread fascination which this case held and some particularly morbid consequences. I also include a snippet from a popular period ballad recounting the tale.
Digging up the grave. A Victorian Penny Dreadful.
Vincent Price’s 1979 series of radio shorts, “Hall of Horrors,” gives us a audio introduction to the de facto founders of the Spiritualist movement, the Fox Sisters, Margaret, Kate, and Leah, of Hydesville, New York. Like the unfortunate Maria Marten, a murdered peddler and his attempt to communicate in 1848 with the siblings through a knocking code is the purported initiator of this historical movement. Even as the sisters are developing a following in the 1850s, other small groups of friend and relatives are gathering in “home circles” to emulate the Fox’s supernatural communications, and other “public mediums” are gathering their own followers and offering performing on an evolving circuit of Spiritualist hotspots. We return to the Foxes in Episode 12 next week for the unexpected end to their tale.
The Fox Sisters
One of these “public mediums” was Jonathan Koons of Mt. Nebo, Ohio, who in the early 1850s, claimed to have been directed by the spirits to build his “Spirit Room,” a log cabin, in which bizarre musical seances were held around a mysterious “spirit machine” handmade by Koons. We hear some strange firsthand accounts of the goings-on from newspaper accounts of the period.
As things progressed, greater proof of the spirits’ presence was demanded, and mediums complied with all sorts of gimmicks including physical tokens supposedly manifested from the spirit world (“apports”), spirit photography, and even impressions of ghostly body parts made in plates of warm paraffin left out during seances. We hear a couple cases of apports and spirit prints going terribly, terribly wrong.
We visit William and Horatio Eddy of Chittenden, Vermont, whose showman-like seances upped the ante with a cast of dozens of costumed spirits including costumed Native Americans, elderly Yankees, Russians, Asians, Africans, and pirates. A bizarre incident with a rat (or is it a flying squirrel?) and a dancing spirit is recounted.
William Crookes & “Katie King”
Next, we hear the more well-known case the teenage medium Florence Cook investigated by Sir William Crookes, known for his pioneering work with vacuum tubes and radiography. Crookes’ fanatical investigation of of Cook’s spirit guide “Katie King” did not meet with the same success as his mainstream work. Listen for the rather embarrassing conclusions drawn by his colleagues in the scientific community.
Annie Fairlamb Mellon with her alleged materialization Cissie.
The show concludes with some tricks of the trade, a look at the a super-secret catalog used by fraudulent mediums and an exploration of ectoplasm, how it might be simluted, what exactly it feels and looks like, and what it should be capable of doing.
Stanislawa P. during séance of 25 January 1913. Photo Albert von Schrenk-Notzing.
