This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate De Mayo. 30 people in a pitch black room. They had lined up for hours along the brick wall as the sun cast its shifting shadows on Lower Manhattan, Summer

1855.

Some had jumped the cue, flashing money that proved too much to people who put in the work in waiting to refuse.

They'd offered as much as $200 to cut the line, which was outrageous then, and $8,000 now.

Others wouldn't budge. They wouldn't miss this for anything. Once inside, the eager women

and men were seated along the four walls of a windowless room. In the center on the floor lay musical instruments, strings

and brass, wind and percussion. And sat two teenagers, brothers, back to back in chairs and tied up in ropes.

All went black.

Then there was music, horns

scronking, a cow belt clanging with no regard to musical time, a bow

scraped across the strings of a violin, and otherworldly cacophil, and then silence.

Lamps were lit, and the audience blinked away the darkness to find that the instruments still lay before them, apparently undisturbed, and the two boys, they were still tied to the chairs, back to back just as they had been before the room went black and the racket

started. There could be only one explanation. The brothers Davenport,

16-year-old Ira and 18-year-old William, had done what they had promised.

They had contacted the Spirit Realm and summoned from its depths a symphony of the dead.

Or at least that was the explanation

that held the city in its thrall and drove the frenzy

for tickets to enter the pitch black room. The real explanation will likely not

surprise you. It was revealed one night when, as the ghost band banged away in the darkness,

a policeman lit a lamp.

And everyone saw the two brothers out of their chairs, playing the instruments themselves,

caught perhaps mid-cheek puff, poised to blow a trumpet, or maybe frozen in fear, knowing the

...