Famous magician and escapologist Harry Houdini was a vociferous and very outspoken critic of clairvoyance and mediums in his day.

He spent years and years investigating them and masking them for their fraudulent activities,

and he wrote a book about them, detailing all of his investigations.

He came to the conclusion that the mediums he looked into were all frauds, and he was incredibly angry about it, because he believed they were preying on and exploiting extremely vulnerable people, who were grieving for their lost loved ones.

In 1919 alone, Houdini attended at least a hundred seances, and rather impressively, he also claimed

to have accumulated one of the largest libraries in the world on all aspects of spirituality and

occultism, including hauntings, witchcraft demons, with some of the texts going back as far as

the year 1489.

As for the claims of these clairvoyance abilities to speak to the dead, Houdini wrote,

I have not found one incident that savoured of the genuine. Everything, he said, has been

the result of deluded brains or those which were too actively and intensely willing to believe.

As a result, he called spiritualism monstrous fiction,

and he failed to understand how people could still support some of the mediums.

He'd uncovered as frauds, when they'd been caught cheating time and time again.

He illustrates some of the fraud by describing the confession of one of the fox sisters catherine and margarita

who were the first celebrity mediums and toured america in the eighteen fifties giving demonstrations to packed audiences and making a princely sum of about $150 a night, which in those days

was a huge amount of money. However, many years after their time in the spotlight, one of the

sisters came out and confessed that the rapping sounds which would be heard at their seances

had simply been the result of, she said, a perfect

control of the muscles of the leg below the knee which governs the tendons of the foot, and allow

action of the toe and ankle bones that is not commonly known. The sisters were only young

when they were giving their demonstrations, and Margaret Fox points out that, if it is started when a person is young, they can train their muscles to work in this way.

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