#Rose Mackenberg

[libelula202]

Also check out the podcast episode called ‘The Rev’ Rose Mackenberg from Stuff You Missed in History Class (aired 10/17/2022)

Goes into a lot of detail about Rose and the charlatans she unmasked. 10/10!

you know what really grinds my gears?

okay, bear with me: so as you may know, harry houdini and arthur conan doyle were friends, at least for a while.

by the early 1920s, both arthur conan doyle and acd's wife jean, aka lady doyle, believed whole-heartedly in spiritualism, talking to ghosts and all of that. (sidenote: this was of course right on the heels of a devastating world war and a devastating pandemic, both of which had created a huge population of grieving people, so spiritualism was having a moment.)

lady doyle sincerely thought she had the ability to go into a trance state and pass along messages in writing from the dead. she offered to do this for houdini. houdini agreed.

lady doyle attempted to channel houdini's late mother. she basically drew a cross at the top of the paper and filled it with generic platitudes addressed to "harry." houdini's mom was jewish and didn't talk like that, so houdini knew the jig was up, even if lady doyle didn't. but not wanting to make the situation awkward, he kind of went along with it to their faces.

then acd decided to publish a glowing account of the seance, and since both he and houdini were super famous, it got a lot of attention, and letters started pouring in for houdini, asking if this was true. ultimately, houdini couldn't life about it. so he essentially said, like, "yeah, i think lady doyle THINKS she can talk to ghosts but she absolutely can't." and it ruined his friendship with acd forever.

and then of course a lot of the people running seances weren't even well-intentioned like lady doyle, they were just simple charlatans taking advantage of traumatized people mourning loved ones. in houdini's youth, he and his wife had traveled the carnival circuit where he did an act pretending to commune with spirits, so he knew all the tricks of the trade AND he had lingering guilt over having done this, AND he was infuriated by this increasingly popular wave of con artists so he decided to assemble a team of anti-grifting grifters and together they went on the road exposing whichever spiritualists were preying on the locals.

houdini's best agent was a young woman named rose mackenberg, who donned disguises to visit the fraud de jour and then importantly sussed out what non-supernatural thing was actually happening, and then houdini would demonstrate the techniques onstage to packed audiences.

(if you want to know more, check out episode 175, "ghost racket crusade" of the podcast Criminal or read Tony Wolf's book The Real-Life Ghostbusting Adventures of Rose Mackenberg.)

but yeah, what really gets my goat is that all this happened and as far as i know, we still don't have like four seasons of a Leverage-style historical procedural about rose mackenberg and the rest of the crew having adventures in the 1920s as they unmask craven hucksters all over the united states. (what we do have, apparently, is one season of a show called "houdini and doyle" which is about the oddball friendship of two contrasting men solving sometimes-actually-supernatural mysteries, and whose premise does i think at the very least a real disservice to houdini's whole quest and also totally erases rose, who is arguably the most interesting part of this story to me.)

i am just steamed about this. steamed.

[kaiyves-backup]

ROSE MACKENBERG STARTED AS A believer: In the early 20th century, the American public seemed to be in a state of continuous mourning. In just a few years, World War I and the Great Flu of 1918 had claimed nearly 800,000 American lives. The environment of grief provided a fertile ground for the movement known as Spiritualism, and its practitioners gained huge followings by claiming they could communicate with the dead.

In the early 1920s, Brooklyn-born Mackenberg was working at a detective agency in New York when she was assigned a case about a psychic who had recommended worthless stock to a local banker. A mutual friend introduced her to magician Harry Houdini, who was then waging his own crusade against Spiritualists. At the peak of his career, Houdini had decided to use his spotlight to denounce a practice he just couldn’t stomach: psychics who preyed on the bereaved. He’d recently announced a $10,000 reward to any medium who performed a feat he could not replicate with various well-known tricks.

[cashthecomposer]

Lol THIS is the kind of commentary I love.

I've figured out my niche as a composer- horror musicals with female (or female coded) protagonists! So that's the theme tying all of these premises together.

Gatsby x Cthulhu is born of a joke I made, that both properties became public domain around the same time, so it's 'only a matter of time' before such a crossover event is made. I know there's going to be like 50 Gatsby musicals out there in the next few years, so if I write one, it's going to satirize everything in the 20's. Everything. And Lovecraft is perfect for that.

Medusa is the one myth I feel comfortable turning into a musical, purely because I feel like it's one of very few that men can't touch. So I don't see it getting readily adapted today, even in this age of love for Greek mythos, because Broadway isn't exactly welcoming to female composers and female stories. I mean men can try to write this story, but at its heart, it's a story by, for, and about women. In good ways, and bad.

I was always a fan of twisted fairy tales as a kid, and loved the original snow white and sleeping beauty stories. I actually wrote a story of my own when I was around 8 or 9, which combined their stories. A lot of it was about dreams. I know that doesn't scream horror, but... Trust me when I say it would be.

Read up on Rose Mackenberg. "Come to Light" is my working title. It was another one of my dad's ideas. :)

And thanks for the word of support!! The more I get, the more time I can devote to writing.

If you vote, please reblog with your reasoning in the tags. And as always, if you want to read up on my current project (about the summer Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein), check out my patreon!

Whichever thing wins the poll, I will (try to) write a quick song that may or may not make it to the actual final product. So, stay tuned for that.

[mzrowan]

Tag yourself! I’m Rustic Schoolteacher.

Source: NYT Obit of Rose Mackenberg

(Description: photos of Rose Mackenberg, undercover exposer of fraudulent psychics, in various disguises, from a 1929 news article. List of disguises: Smartly Garbed Widow; Rustic Schoolteacher; Small Town Matron; Credulous Servant Girl; “Believing” Semi-Invalid; Woman Seeking Lost Relatives; “Vamp” from the Country; Tipsy Consultant)

[johannesviii]

The full illustration for the cover of Speakeasies and Spiritualists.

[Image: watercolor painting in black, purple and yellow tones. Several people are sitting around a candle lit on a round table, holding each other's hands, apparently in the middle of a seance. One of the characters is Rose Mackenberg, wearing a scarf, a simple black dress and a large hat. Her eyes are looking at something in the upper right corner of the picture - there's a barely noticeable thread just above the heads of the participants.]

[talesofdrunkennessandcruelty]

The Female Ghost Buster Who Rooted Out Spiritual Fraud for Houdini

[mosylufanfic]

Of Spirits Ethereal and Alcoholic

I'm basing Jyn on the real-life person, Rose Mackenberg, who worked for Harry Houdini investigating scammy mediums so he could expose their fraud. 

I listened to an episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class about her and it tickled me so much I envisioned Jyn and Cassian pulling the same scam on the scammers.

Of Spirits Ethereal and Alcoholic

New York City, 1923

The circle of people around the dining room table, holding hands, listened raptly to the woman at the head, who had her eyes shut and her head thrown back. In a peculiarly deep voice, she groaned, "My dearest child, my little stardust! Be happy, my dear! That is all your loving papa wants for you. Be happy!"

"Oh, Papa!" said the young lady at the other end of the table. "How can I be happy without you?"

"You must, my love! For I am gone to the great beyond and you must stay here in the land of the living."

"Papa," she wailed, but Madame Krennic had slumped, her head dropping forward like a marionette with the strings cut. 

After a long moment, she breathed out, in a more womanly voice, "The spirits are gone."

As if on cue, the gas lamps turned back up, flooding the parlor with light and leaving the people crowded around the table blinking. The girl on the end sniffed into her handkerchief, tears coursing from her eyes.

"I must - yes, I must rest," Madame said mistily, pushing herself up from the table as if it took all her strength. "My dear Orson, you don't mind seeing to our guests?"

"No, of course not," he murmured. "Please, my love, allow me to help you out of the room." He took her arm and gently guided her to the door, and was back in a startlingly short amount of time for someone tending to his ailing love. 

"I am so sorry we weren't able to contact all of your loved ones," he said to the most disgruntled-looking of the guests. "But we are at the mercy of her spirit familiar, you know, and there is only so much her constitution can stand. Perhaps if you come back tomorrow night?"

At the broad hint, they all began to get to their feet. Orson picked up a silver-ish plate and said pointedly. "Of course, Madame would never think of charging money to contact the spirits. But if your heart moves you to generosity, the merest pittance will allow her to continue her important work."

With a meaningful look, he passed the plate around, and if there was a certain greedy glint in his eyes as he heard the clink and rustle of money being set into it, nobody noticed.

He bowed to the gentlemen, pressed the delicate hands of the ladies, and saw them out. 

Still dabbing her eyes, the girl who'd spoken to her Papa walked slowly down the street. She turned the corner and her gait became swifter, more purposeful. She stuffed the handkerchief, which strangely smelled of onions, into her clutch. 

Another block and she found the bus stop and propped herself on the bench. She rustled in her clutch and pulled out a battered packet of cigarettes, popping one in her mouth. More rustling in the clutch, and some very unladylike language.

A hand appeared, with a cigarette lighter in it. "Miss Hallik. May I?"

She looked up, the cigarette dangling from her lips, and found the man who'd sat next to her at the seance. "Oh, Mr. Willix," she said in a shaky voice, very different from the one she;d been using a minute before. "If you would."

Cigarette lit, she leaned back and took a deep drag. "I just needed one to calm my nerves," she said, blowing out smoke. "It has been so long since I heard from my dear, dear Papa."

"Of course," he said. "You know, I think I've seen you before."

She gave him a quelling look. "I'm certain you haven't."

"The seance at the Great Blavatsky's house? I happened to be there as well. You don't remember me?"

She eyed him. "I think you had a beard," she said. 

"Yes. And you were seeking to contact your sweet husband. Dead in the 'flu pandemic, wasn't it?"

"I have had a lot of deaths in my life," she said calmly, taking a drag of her cigarette. "It's all very tragic."

"Right, yes, but you were a widow of ten years' standing and your name was Mrs. Kestrel."

She gave a snort. "All right, what's the game, pal? You work for the Krennics?"

"If I did, I'd tell 'em that business with the knuckles is so old it's got moss growing on it."

Her lips quirked in appreciation. "She did good voices, though," she said. "Throwing her voice across the room like that, for the woman with the dead baby, was pretty slick."

In opposition to her careless words, there was a troubled look in her eyes. 

"I take it your Papa's not really dead?" Willix said.

The troubled look disappeared. "Hell if I know. I haven't seen him in fifteen years. He might as well be."

"What's your game, then? You work for someone? One of Houdini's? Or maybe the Partisan."

"The Partisan?" she said contemptuously. "Lining my birdcage with that piece of trash would be a compliment. No, I'm independent."

"What's that mean, when it's at home?"

She smiled sweetly. "I blackmail them." She narrowed her eyes at him. "Until that stinking rag the Fulcrum exposes their tricks and they leave town. That's you, isn't it? Cassian Andor, star reporter?"

Caught, he gave her a smile. "Always nice to meet a fan."

"Wouldn't call myself that. You know how much work it is to do what I do?"

"I have an inkling. How about if I buy you a drink to apologize?"

She arched a brow. "You think you're gonna get on my good side by buying a damned sarsaparilla?"

"First of all, I haven't seen any evidence of a good side. And second, I can do better than a sarsaparilla."

-

His smooth entry into the speakeasy down the street, and the gin cocktail he bought her, loosened her up a  treat. Smoking another cigarette at a tiny table up against the wall, she said, "You never answered me, you know. What's your deal, huh? I know why I do it. I like eating. But why do you put all this time into these con artists? Just to sell your paper?"

He swirled his own drink for a moment before answering. "The Krennics and people like them are parasites. They feed on grief and desperation. You know there are people who've lost everything they had trying to contact the ones they love?"

She shifted, looking uncomfortable for a split second. "They should know better."

"Perhaps they do," he acknowledged. "But hope is a hell of a thing."

"So you want to take that hope away from them? How cynical."

"I believe in hope. But it's a double-edged sword." He shrugged. "Sometimes, in life, you just lose people. One way or another. Nothing you can do about it but move on."

"Who did you lose?"

His eyes flicked up for a moment, then away. "We're not talking about me."

"Weren't we? My mistake. What were we talking about?"

Presented with such an opening, he took it. "About you coming to work at the Fulcrum."

She laughed loud enough to draw the attention of neighboring tables. "Pull the other one, pal, it's got bells on."

"No, I mean it."

"Why should I?"

"You could do exactly the same work without the blackmail part."

"The blackmail part is how I earn a living."

"We'll pay you."

"Sure you will. I've tried the newspaper gig before. Ten cents for every dollar the fella next to me makes. And since that fella's you - "

"I'll make sure you get paid equitably."

"You don't even know if I can write."

"You're the same Jyn Erso who wrote the best stories the Partisan ever published. And got pennies for it, clearly."

Pleasure and annoyance warred in her eyes.

"Listen. Wouldn't you like to leave off threatening people for a living?"

"You underestimate how much I enjoy threatening people."

"Yeah, and how often does one of them threaten you back?"

She took a gulp of her drink. "I can take care of myself."

"And then there's the fact that blackmail's illegal, and technically speaking, what they do isn't." Every medium and psychic he'd ever investigated was very careful to take donations, some cloaking themselves in the guise of a religious service. "It won't go well for you if one of them goes crying to the coppers."

She shrugged. "Only if I get caught."

He shook his head. "Which won't be too long. Listen, you going to the Scariftown tent revival next weekend?"

"Maybe."

"I'll meet you there. We'll write the story together. You'll get paid. Then you can make up your mind about something more permanent."

She rolled her eyes.

"I'm not hearing a no."

She leaned over and drowned her cigarette in his drink. "You're a dreamer, Cassian Andor. Thanks for the hooch." She got to her feet, snatched her clutch, and took off for the door.

He called after her, "Not a dreamer. I just believe in hope."

FINIS

[antique-symbolism]

hi bestie!!!! here are some asks for the nano meme :] 11, 3, 4, & 8 !

NaNoWriMo Asks

Hello beloved mutual and thank you!

Here's my story intro for context.

3. How much planning do you have done?

I've created a very bare bones outline that goes about 2/3rds into the story, wrote up a summary, collected a couple of articles for research, and made about 2-3 pages of disjointed notes. At the behest of my beloved mutual and historical consultant @shorthistorian I was also forced to pick a real year it takes place in (1925)

4. Any writing buddies?

Historically I've always had a pretty solid writing community for NaNo! The local groups I've been involved with are fun, so I'm hoping they'll be holding events again this year. Should all else fail, I live with another long-time NaNo participant, @thelonelyrainbowenby ! I have many other writing buddies here on writeblr and elsewhere, but I'm not sure who's in for NaNoWriMo this year and who's out.

(And of course I have YOU! <3 )

8. Any inspirations?

Yes! The story was inspired by a podcast I listened to over the summer about Rose Mackenberg's investigations into fraudulent psychics for Harry Houdini.

11. What are your MCs names?

Margaret Donahue (who goes by Mags) and Genevieve Merriman are the two main characters!

[maxwell-grant]

The Shadow and Houdini

The very first magic trick of Harry Houdini was called Metamorphosis, and he started performing it in 1893. Part of the performance involves an audience member being invited onto stage to inspect the crate and cuffs. In 1915, a 17-year-old Walter Gibson had that privilege. For the next decade, in Gibson's career as a newspaper writer, he would become one of Houdini's ghost writers, publishing books taken from personal notes that only Gibson had access to. Unknown to him at the time, he was taking the first steps into something much bigger and more fantastical than he could have possibly foreseen.

Unknown to him and the public at the time, the world-famous celebrity Houdini had a secret mission of his own. He had dedicated his brain and incredible gifts to fighting fraudulent spiritualists, keeping detailed records full of criminal mediums. Houdini was a master of disguise, donning wigs and beards and plaster noses to sneak into séances and expose fakes and swindlers. He employed a band of undercover operatives to infiltrate congregations across the U.S, agents who would operate hidden in the service of a greater cause. In January 20 of 1919, Gibson was recruited into Houdini's network to become one of those agents, and following Houdini's death, would succeed him as President of the Society of American Magicians.

A couple of years following Houdini's death, Walter Gibson ended up becoming known as the writer of stories starring a radio character. A globe-trotting wealthy adventurer with brilliant blue eyes and a hawklike nose who secretly hunts down and exposes crime via disguises, clandestine agent networks and sleight-of-hand. You might have heard of that character a few times. 

There are many, many similarities between The Shadow and Harry Houdini, right down to the descriptions of their most distinguishing facial features: bright blue eyes and a pointy hawk-like nose. A lot of what Gibson inserted in the stories was drawn from his own experiences with Houdini, and Houdini's own tricks and methods for fighting crime, especially in stories such as The Ghost Makers and Hidden Death. In the preface for the reprint Crime Oracle and The Teeth of the Dragon, Gibson writes:

“By combining Houdini's penchant for escapes with the hypnotic power of Tibetan mystics, plus the knowledge shared by Thurston and Blackstone in the creation of illusions, such a character would have unlimited scope when confronted by surprise situations, yet all could be brought within the range of credibility”

In The Shadow Scrapbook, Gibson describes that the name "Lamont Cranston" was taken straight from Houdini's notes, after he found the double-syllable name Baillie Cranston, belonging to a theater owner in Scotland. When Gibson created the main protagonist of the series, Harry Vincent, he would define his background as born in Michigan, known as "The Magical Capital of the World" since Harry Blackstone, another magician Gibson worked with directly, moved there. Blackstone even eventually adopted tricks from The Shadow into his own act

(Harry Vincent. Harry Houdini. Harry Blackstone. Harry Charlot, who coined the name "The Shadow". Harry sure seems like a significant name to The Shadow)

Tim King, a career counterintelligence officer and fan of The Shadow who regularly posts on the Facebook groups, did a whole lecture on the subject of spycraft on The Shadow Magazine, and in it, he names at several points extensive similarities between The Shadow's agents and the real people who were a part of Houdini's network.

"Let’s play some Shadow Jeopardy. Who am I describing: Working in various disguises, a female, undercover agent reports back on criminal gangs and fiends that prey on her fellow men. She communicates with her master via cryptic chalk marks. Who is she? Myra Reldon, or Rose Mackenberg?

Mary Sullivan was a special deputee in the New York police who worked alongside Houdini. What is the Irish version of Mary? Myra"

"Newspaper reporter who gets recruited to serve a shadowy master battling villainous scum. Clyde Burke, or Walter Gibson?

Did I mention the central conceit of The Shadow is that the adventures are real? That Maxwell Grant has exclusive access to the annals and that he’s simply reporting what actually happened? Guess who else had extensive access to the Master's archives."

"The public knows him as a famous and wealthy globe-trotting adventurer. He disguised himself in the field and has a shadowy history with U.S counter-intelligence services. From a New York sanctum he hunts down and exposes crime via clandestine agent networks. Harry who has brilliant blue eyes, described as burning coals, and a hawklike nose.

"My favorite of all the agents was Burbank. What was the inspiration for Burbank? Burbank is the cut-out man, the contact. No one should speak to The Shadow directly. As part of a network, we go through someone else to get to The Shadow. There was someone who did that for Houdini. Houdini had a barber trained to serve as a communication man.

The very first time Gibson and Houdini met, the barber wrote a note that said “What is said here can be heard”. And Gibson, being a smart guy, realizes something is up. The conversation revolves around fraudulent spiritualism, cause Houdini is testing the young Gibson’s reputation."

Additionally, Gibson wrote the final issues of The Shadow Magazine in an apartment at 12 Gay Street in Greenwich Village. Gibson lived there during this period. After Gibson moved out, there were many reports that the home was haunted, by a strange man in evening wear with bright blue eyes and a hawk-like nose. 

The Ghost of Gay Street is a subject for an entirely different post, but it’s interesting to note that, in the place where Gibson continually crafted The Shadow novels, it was also the site of a number of annual seances to contact Houdini (who promised Gibson that if he died, he would attempt to come back to life), hosted by Gibson himself. 

Houdini’s complicated relationship with spiritual matters arose not merely out of a deep distaste for fraudulent magicians taking advantage of innocents, but of his own grief. The loss of his mother deeply affected Houdini, and he was driven to continually seek out mediums and expose them in the hopes that, eventually, he’d find the real deal, with the certainty that, if the dead could communicate to the living, surely his mother would have reached her doting son in at least one of his endless attempts. Sadly, he never achieved what he was looking for until his death, and his wife took up a similar cause after his death, with Gibson helping her. 

It’s unknown if they ever succeeded in finding what they were looking for, before the two passed away. 

[womanwednesday]

In the 1920s, the magician Harry Houdini began investigating and exposing so-called mediums who profited off of peoples’ grief. He hired private detective Rose Mackenberg to help him.  

She was a master of disguise, and she often attended séances dressed as a character of her own creation. Sometimes she was a widow, sometimes she was a mother who lost her baby. She was never suspected. 

The pseudonyms she used while undercover were often puns, such as F. Raud (fraud).

She said: “I never married, but I have received messages from 1,000 husbands and twice as many children in the world to come. Invariably they told me they were happy where they were, which was not entirely flattering to me.”

She attended approximately 300 séances. 

She wrote but never published an autobiography titled “So You Want to Attend a Seance?”

[damienthepious]

oh! whats your idea for your original writing if you dont mind me asking?

lsfkjas;dkfa yeah sure i mean, just like with my fanfic i basically always have like eight ideas going on concurrently, but NaNo is like... a whole other beast? Because i need an idea that a) I am fairly confident that i can carry through to 50k words at least, and b) i have not written a word for, yet

CURRENTLY, the thing i’ve been thinking about is something to do with houdini’s debunkers? specifically the detective Rose Mackenberg?? which would theoretically require just....... SO much research but mostly i just want to write about a fucking badass lady detective and friends going around demolishing mediums. that sounds Fun to me.

[houdinifan]

HARRY HOUDINI ↳ comic // © Hocus Pocus / Richard Wiseman, Rik Worth & Jordan Collver

Hocus Pocus Issue 2 - ft. Houdini

Richard Wiseman's best-selling Hocus Pocus is back and this time we delve into the strange world of spirit communication! Join Houdini’s chief investigator, Rose Mackenberg, as she uncovers the secrets of the seance room. Travel through time to discover the trickery used by Fox sisters and the Davenport brothers to fool the world. Uncover the scientists and scoundrels behind the strange history of the Ouija Board. Beautifully illustrated, printed in full colour on heavy card stock, and limited edition.

Order here on TravellingMan.com! / Order here on PropDog.co.uk! / Download a free (pay-what-you-want/can) digital copy here!

Check out this cool comic book featuring Houdini by Richard Wiseman, Rik Worth & Jordan Collver! If you like what you see, be sure to sign up on their site for updates on future issues! (Images were kindly used with permission. Watermarks were added by me and are not on the actual product.)

[izayoi1242]

Overlooked No More: Rose Mackenberg, Houdini’s Secret ‘Ghost-Buster’

By BY GAVIN EDWARDS Working undercover for the illusionist, Mackenberg exposed phony psychics who claimed they could connect people to their dead loved ones. Published: December 7, 2019 at 03:23AM from NYT Obituaries https://ift.tt/2LuvhKe via IFTTT