Everyone remembers their first passion. For many people that might be sports, or theater, or whatever the pop culture obsession was at the time. For me, growing up as a kid in the 80s, there were two similar things that I was absolutely fascinated with.

The first was a holdover from the Cold War, something that always seemed to have a Russia versus the CIA vibe to it.

I think my first glimpse of it was actually on an old episode of unsolved mysteries, grainy, black and white video footage of people doing something extraordinary, moving objects with their minds.

It didn't take long for terms like ESP and telekinesis to embed themselves firmly in my young impressionable brain. And I became one of what must have been a million great school kids trying to guess what card my brother was holding in his hand. Honestly, there was just something overwhelmingly attractive about that sort of power.

And then there was magic. Right from my living room, I had a front row seat to all of the David Copperfield television specials, and I was hooked. I mean, come on, the guy made the statue of Liberty disappear in 1983 for crying out loud. He walked through the Great Wall of China, and escaped from Alcatraz. How could a kid not become obsessed with magic?

To me, the 1980s felt like the perfect mix of security from a safer, more modern world, but with these vestiges of old superstitions and beliefs still alive and active around me. That's probably a big reason for who I am today.

But what I know now, decades later, is that I was only seeing the tip of a very big, very old iceberg.

For a glimpse of the truly bizarre and unusual world that the intersection of the stage and the supernatural, we need to go deeper into the past.

So if you're ready, I want to take you on a tour of the wild and fascinating world of celebrity mediums.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore. Every generation has had a few stars. I mentioned David Copperfield a moment ago, but perhaps he was a bit before your time. Today there's people like Darren Brown, Pen and Teller and Justin Wilman.

Decades earlier, there was Ricky J and Doug Henning, and of course if you go back far enough, you'll bump into the granddaddy of the mall, Harry Houdini.

But while each of them brought their own style and bag of tricks to the stage, one thing united all of them. Their audiences knew they were being tricked.

I mean, that's sort of the point when you see a man claim to make the statue of liberty disappear, right? The fun is in the spectacle, not that it's actually happening.

But when it came to the mediums of the second half of the 19th century, things were very different. Their careers were built on the idea that the audience was witnessing something real and supernatural, and a great example of this was William John Warner, who toured and performed under the name Cairo.

Warner was born just outside of Dublin, Ireland in 1866, and was already deep into the occult by his teen years. But when most students were preparing for university, Warner headed east to India, where he studied ancient texts on of all things, palmistry.

And after two years of soaking it all in, he returned and set up shop as a palm reader.

And Warner was really into hands. You can see it in his stage name, Cairo, taken from the technical term for palm reading, Cairo Nancy.

He himself claimed to have studied thousands of hands, cast in plaster, impressions and clay, and even printed on paper with ink, and the public loved him.

Now, you might not have heard of William Warner before, but you've certainly heard of a few of his clients, Thomas Edison, Mark Twain, President Grover Cleveland, Oscar Wilde, and even the Prince of Wales. All of them paid Warner a visit, looking for the sort of guidance only he could glean from looking at their hands.

By the end of his life, he had set up shop in Hollywood, where he sold upwards of 20 palm readings a day, for as much as a thousand bucks a pop. And when he died, no one seemed to question his talents.

After all, this was a man who predicted in early 1912 that ship builder William Peary would be in for the fight of his life, a short while later, one of Peary's ships sank in the North Atlantic, putting his career into a tailspin. That ship, the Titanic.

William Stanton Moses was another star of the stage in the world of mediums. His talent wasn't palm reading though, though he was known across England for his talent with automatic writing. Although, unlike William Warner, Moses would have a tougher path.

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