Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/16/the-ghost-busting-duo-harry-houdini-and-rose-mackenbergs-crusade-against-fake-psychics-and-spiritualists.html
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Or “psychics” for short.
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Unfortunately, it’s a never-ending battle against woo peddlers. Members of the brotherhood and sisterhood of stage magicians remain in the vanguard of that fight.
See also the Reagans and Joan Quigley.
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One of the rerun cable channels in LA has been running commercials for “California Psychics.” Watching them is like revisiting 80s late-night TV. People are shown wandering around with their heads hidden in ridiculously bad CG clouds. The clouds dispel as the narrator assures us a California Psychic can provide them Guidance and Clarity. True to the 80s tradition you gain that clarity by dialing a pay-per-minute phone number. It’s downright nostalgic (except in the old days they didn’t have CG clouds).
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Jeez; Houdini was ripped.
@anon76551318 I hope that the advert’s soundtrack is “California Dreamin’”
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Adverts?
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He was well known for his physique (and wouldn’t have been able to do a lot of his stunts without being in such a great shape). Sadly, this may have contributed to his early death.
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Also: that’s ice on the river. Brrrrrrrrr
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My sisters goes Winter Swimming; she is so much tougher than me. 
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Me too. Good on her!
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It’s also well known that Harry ended up resenting Arthur Conan Doyle because he believed the guy who wrote the super analytical Sherlock Holmes should not have fallen for that bs.
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I like how Doyle’s shifting beliefs are reflected in the character of Prof. Challenger; with him turning from a Scientific Rationalist in to a Spiritualist in “Land of Mist”. It gives a bit of a window in to how badly WW1 affected Doyle.
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“Fake psychics.” As opposed to what kind of psychics?
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Fakir Psychics?
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I belong to a group called the Center for Inquiry Investigations Group. We basically do the same thing Houdini did but in a different way. We offer $500,000 to anyone who can prove a paranormal power under scientific testing conditions. We’ve accepted challenges from psychics, telepaths, people claiming telekinetic powers, and folks who say they can see ghosts, among many others. We’ve been doing this for over twenty years, and no one has come close to getting paid. If that’s not proof positive that the paranormal is nonsense, I don’t know what is.
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There’s a great 1920s seance debunking scene as the beginning of “The Awakening”:
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I knew you were going to post this.
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Welcome! The world needs people like you and your team to debunk the neverending stream of grifters and charlatans that are out there.
You might get some whining that you’re making it hard for people to continue to make money “investigating” such “phenomena”, but ignore them and keep fighting the good fight.
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