Tim Prasil's Blog, page 30

A Big Breakthrough in a Tiny Mystery

Last Sunday, I posted a request for help in narrowing down when, in 1923, Arthur Conan Doyle rode a train from Kansas City, Missouri, to Colorado Springs, Colorado. It was a silly request, but I thought maybe some fellow history nerd/fellow Sherlock Holmes fan might have an idea about where to find this information, an idea which was evading me.

Alas, no.

[image error]“Continue looking askance, Watson,” Holmes advised urgently. “Either two immense ghost hunters are peering in at us — or I miscalculated my usual seven-percent solution.”

Then I came across Brian W. Pugh‘s A Chronology of the Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Revised 2018 Edition and discovered there that Conan Doyle was scheduled to lecture in Kansas City’s Grand Theatre on May 5, 1923. I had already checked the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America newspaper archive — with no results — so I went to the archive of the Kansas City Star. I didn’t have to go beyond their free previews to see that, indeed, Conan Doyle had made an appearance at the Grand Theatre on May 5. All other signs suggest he took his long train trip to Colorado the following day.

I have now determined when the next novel in the Vera Van Slyke Ghostly Mysteries series is set. Writing a novel can be taxing. But curiously fun, too.

— Tim

Seeking Help to Solve a Railroad Mystery — a Real One!

I’m outlining the next novel in my Vera Van Slyke Ghostly Mysteries series. Those who have read either Help for the Haunted or Guilt Is a Ghost know that Vera and her “Dr. Watson,” Lida Bergson, occasionally cross paths with real people, from Harry Houdini to Dr. William James. In this upcoming story, the ghost-hunting, mystery-solving duo take a train trip from Kansas to Colorado with none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Indeed, Conan Doyle made that trip in spring of 1923. He had long abandoned writing Holmes adventures and was on his second tour of the United States, lecturing in major cities and promoting Spiritualism. On his first tour, the previous year, he only made it as far west as Chicago, but this time, he crossed the Rockies, reached the West Coast, turned north, and returned east through Canada.

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He chronicled the journey in Our Second American Adventure (1924), and I found a good deal on a used copy. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t provide spectific dates. It does say, though, that Conan Doyle’s family left Chicago to spend some time in Colorado Springs while the author stopped off for appearances in St. Louis and then Kansas City. After stating few general impressions of Kansas City, he mentions meeting with “a Mrs. Randall” to discuss her near-death/out-of-body/astral-projection experience.

Next, he discusses the train trip on which he met — or, I should say, will have met — Vera and Lida, who are in the region, working on a case that has strange parallels to The Hound of the Baskervilles. Conan Doyle writes: “It was a long journey now, a clear twenty-four hours, to Colorado Springs, and it marked the dividing line of my tour, for I was at last well over the border and in the real west of the States. Kansas is a beatiful dominion, and we rolled all day through a land of rich farms until the enclosures at last vanished and it was real prairie around us. . . .” This trip ends in Colorado Springs, where he rejoins his family, stays at the Antlers Hotel, gives a lecture that evening, and departs for Denver the next day (via motor-car).

Now, here’s the mystery: when did that train trip from Kansas City to Colorado Springs occur?

This is what I know: In Denver, Conan Doyle bumped into Harry Houdini. Apparently, it was an accidental meeting. There’s very little information about it in Our Second American Adventure other than Houdini had his wife with him and they were coming back from California. In an odd reversal, the famously sceptical magician “seemed to have been impressed by some photographs which he had himself taken in Los Angeles and which showed psychic effects,” Conan Doyle explains, adding, “I did not, however, find them very convincing.” The Conan Doyles went to Houdini’s show in the evening. That’s all we get.

Unless we turn to Houdini’s A Magician Among the Spirits (1924). Now, we have a date. While they were both in Denver, Conan Doyle wrote Houdini a note dated May 9, 1923, and the letterhead shows he had written it at the Brown Palace Hotel. Soon afterward, Houdini continued east as Conan Doyle continued west.

A ship called the Olympic had delivered the great author to New York on April 3, and the Adriatic would carry him back to Britain on August 4. But when did that long train ride from Kansas City to Colorado Springs occur? Late April? Early May? Is it possible to pinpoint the actual day?

[image error]From the Idaho Republican, Feb. 2, 1923

I’ve done my best detective work with the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America, finding several articles about Conan Doyle making some rather provokative pronouncements, presumably to draw attention to his Spiritualist cause. (Really, Sir Arthur? Radio contact with the dead within in four years?) But I haven’t found anything helpful in solving the railway mystery noted above.

Any help would be very much appreciated. The game’s afoot!

— Tim

A Chilly Touch of Ghost Envy

As I begin to put the final touches on The Victorian Ghost Hunter’s Casebook, I’ve become envious of Charles G. Harper’s Haunted Houses: Tales of the Supernatural (1907) and especially John H. Ingram’s The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain (1897). These books are both compendiums of haunted houses — both charmingly illustrated — and both very, very British. Well, the houses in them are British. And there are a lot of haunted houses there!

Where’s the stateside equivalent? To be sure, there are books that catalog ghosts in the U.S., from Amityville to Winchester. Plenty of them. But — since I’m stuck in the 19th century — I want a book that focuses only on haunted houses from before 1900, roughly the nation’s first dozen decades. Spectral Edition: Ghost Reports from U.S. Newspapers, 1865-1917 comes pretty close, I guess. Should I create another book that reviews pre-1900 haunted houses in the U.S.?

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s enough material for such a thing. While researching material for the Casebook over the last several years, I only managed to find two interesting chronicles of ghost hunts held in the U.S. during the Victorian era. Only two. All of the other chronicles — twelve of them — discuss investigations conducted within the realm of Queen Victoria, which certainly fits the title. I guess The Casebook of Ghost Hunters from the Victorian, Jacksonian, Civil War, Reconstruction Eras, and the Gilded Age would have been a bit cumbersome title-wise.

I decided to put those two American ghost hunts into the Casebook’s Appendix. One of them is about Clermont Academy, which stood outside of Philadelphia once upon a time. The chronicle provides very thorough details on that haunting.

[image error]An illustration of Clermont Academy in The Casket (April 1830)

Nonetheless, it’s really hard to find information similar to that. After a few hours of preliminary research, I had located only one article about a few New York residences said to be haunted. Only one. Granted, it has nice illustrations, and I’m a sucker for old illustrations. But two sources do not a well-researched book make.

Who knows? If I find more than a handful of sources, maybe I’ll start a new feature in “For Fun and Edification” sections of this website that will be my small, stateside version of Harper’s and Ingram’s books. In the meantime, I’ll continue to polish The Victorian Ghost Hunter’s Casebook — and look across the Atlantic to the UK with a chilly touch of ghost envy.

And then I’ll re-read Spectral Edition, if only to keep myself from becoming too jealous.

— Tim

Unless you live in or near Philadelphia, this part might bore you a lot.

I spent some time obsessing over where Clermont Academy would have been on today’s maps. I took an 1843 map of Philadelphia, which shows the school’s location at the corner of Nicetown and Heart Lanes. Those streets are no longer there, so I marked the Academy’s western and southern borders with a black “check mark.” To position and scale this against a modern map, I also drew a line from the corner of Church and Leiper Streets in nearby Frankford, streets that still exit, to the western point of Petty Island. I did the same on a modern map.[image error]

Then I overlaid them, and here’s what I came up with:

[image error]Using Petty Island as a marker might have been a mistake, given 180 years of erosion. But that reversed S section of Tacony Creek seems to still fit pretty well (which itself is surprising seeing as how the creek has been straightened closer to the Delaware River). I’m no cartographer, but it looks like Clermont Academy would have sat on the property now edged by Whitaker Avenue, East Luzern Street, D Street, and East Erie. The site is where Hoffman Hall Prison and Correctional Facility currently stands.

An Addition to the Ghost Hunter Hall of Fame

Yesterday, I inducted Ada Goodrich-Freer into the Ghost Hunter Hall of Fame. She was kind of overdue, seeing as her investigations include important haunted sites such as Hampton Court Palace, Clandon Park, and Ballechin House. Goodrich-Freer is often considered something of a fraud, though, and indeed she always seems to have encountered something ghostly on her investigations, even if it wasn’t the target ghost. At Hampton Court Palace, for instance, she met a spirit who wasn’t among the more famous ghosts there.

[image error]Ada Goodrich-Freer (1857-1930) a.k.a. Miss X or simply X

She’s probably best remembered for her involvement in the investigation of Ballechin House, which spanned about three months with various interested ghost hunters coming and going. Goodrich-Freer remained there to serve as coordinator. Things turned sour when one of the visiting investigators wrote a London Times article about how the investigation was all much ado about water pipes. What was meant to be a discreet operation became very, very public, and Goodrich-Freer was made to look rather foolish. Her membership with the Society of Psychical Research was revoked, and her ghost-hunting career seems to have come to an end.

You can read all the details — and find links to online scans of relevant Victorian publications — on this page. Wander down the Ghost Hunter Hall of Fame here, and read about the soon-to-be-release book that got me thinking about Goodrich-Freer here.

— Tim

A Clue of Vera Van Slyke’s Stay in Europe?

The title of Help for the Haunted: A Decade of Vera Van Slyke Ghostly Mysteries comes from an advertisement that Vera Van Slyke, the great ghost hunter, ran in newspapers across the U.S. around the year 1902. The ad said this:

HELP FOR THE HAUNTED

Ghostly visitations occur when emotional distress ruptures the membrane between the corporeal and ethereal realms. Such ruptures can be confirmed through a technique involving harmonic resonance. V. Van Slyke specializes in the investigation and resolution of supernatural disturbances. Send a full description of the situation to the Hotel Manitou, Chicago, Ills. Will travel. References provided upon request.

That book ends at 1909. Vera has accepted an opportunity to travel to Europe — spending most of her time in Britain — to test her theory that strong feelings of guilt are a prerequiste for the presence of ghosts. But I have no records of what she encountered after she arrived there. I have no reports written for the “psychical research” organization that funded her. I have no letters sent to the dear friend she left behind, my great-grandaunt, Lida Bergson, née Prášilová. I have nothing.

However, I might have stumbled upon something. I’m currently working on The Victorian Ghost Hunter’s Handbook, an anthology of authentic chronicles written by paranormal researchers in the 1800s and early 1900s. (It should be available in early December.) I looked at Violet Tweedale’s autobiographical work Ghosts I Have Seen (1919), and in it, Tweedale describes a ghost hunt she shared with her husband at “Castel a Mare,” a villa in Torquay, England, alleged to be haunted. To conclude her account with a look at the state of ghost hunting, Tweedale refers to an advertisement run in the February 27, 1919 issue of the London Morning Post:

HAUNTED OR DISTURBED PROPERTIES

A lady who has deeply studied this subject and possesses unusual powers will find out the history of the trouble and undertake to remedy it. Houses with persistent bad luck can often be freed from the influence. Strictest confidence. Social references asked and offered.

While I haven’t managed to find the ad itself in the archive for the Morning Post (and I sure would love to get a screen cap or some other copy of it!), I did see that it was also copied and commented upon in a 1920 issue of a journal called The Survey. In other words, the ad seems legit.

[image error]

Now, Vera never claimed have “unusual powers” in the sense of, say, clairvoyance or mediumship — in fact, she would have bristled at anyone making such a boast. However, she certainly had extraordinary skills at unearthing the history of a given haunted property and using that to remedy the problem. Is the lady in the Morning Post ad none other than Vera Van Slyke?

It’s tough to tell at this point, but at least I have a starting point for tracing Vera’s adventures shortly after Help for the Haunted ends. I will certainly be trying to discover more about this chapter of her life. In the meantime, those interested can learn more about what I do know at The Life and Ghosts of Vera Van Slyke page, which is drawn from both Help for the Haunted and Guilt Is a Ghost: A Vera Van Slyke Ghostly Mystery. Click here for more information about the forthcoming book The Victorian Ghost Hunter’s Casebook.

— Tim

Tim’s Recipe for Toasted Pumpkin Seeds

[image error]I’m not young. I’ve been toasting pumpkin seeds for, well, decades. And I’ve often been disappointed by the results.

But I think I’ve finally figured it out. The secret is to sauté the seeds in melted butter (or oil) before roasting them. It keeps them from drying out, and the butter adds some nice flavor. Ergo:

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.
Clean the seeds. There’s a lot of heated and heartfelt debate over how clean to clean one’s pumpkin seeds. Leave bits of the pumpkin meat on them? Make them spotless? That’s something I’ll leave between you and your seeds.


Melt some butter in a frying or sauté pan. Low to medium heat. I tried olive oil once, since it’s supposed to be all healthy and stuff. It worked fine, but the final taste was more “delicate.” No clear rules on how much butter or oil. Enough to cover the seeds, I guess. No rules on how long to sauté them. I ususally go for about three minutes, stirring the seeds a lot. They seem to enjoy it.
This is when you sprinkle on the salt or cinnamon or whatever you fancy. Stir them again. The butter/oil is your friend here. Again, the seeds are having fun.
Spread those happy seeds on a cookie sheet and slide them into the oven. The middle rack is probably wise. Here’s where timing becomes important. It seems like every recipe I’ve found leaves them undercooked, but maybe I’m overcooking them. Anyway, I roast them for 15 minutes, take them out and flip them with a spatula as best I can, and put them in for another 15 minutes. Use your best judgment. Be mindful of your seeds. They only want to make you as happy as they are.
Let them cool. Eat them. Try not to eat too many at once — make them last. Fail at this goal buhcause they’re yummy!

Feel free to add your tweaks or tell me about your results in the comments below. (Oh yeah, and buy my books!)

— Tim

Hold Your Own Ghost-Stories Party this Halloween — I’ll Supply the Scripts, and You Supply the Fireside!

My Spectral Edition project has lived more than one life. This project involves my collection of actual reports about ghosts from U.S. newspapers, all of them published between Civil War and World War I. Once I had located about 150 of these, I figured I needed a way to share them. That’s when I recorded select articles and they became a short feature on The Big Séance Podcast. Once my collection topped 300, I knew I had a book. I organized the scariest, the funniest, and the most intriguing into chapters on haunted houses, haunted roads, haunted people, and so forth. Spectral Edition: Ghost Reports from U.S. Newspapers, 1865-1917 became the very first book published by the Brom Bones Books imprint.

This Halloween, Spectral Edition will take on yet another life. Four of my actor friends and I will be doing dramatic readings of many of these reports. We have two shows lined up: one at our community theater, and one beside the fire in the backroom at the local wine bar. In the latter case, we’re combining spirits with spirits, so we’re calling ourselves the Toast and Ghost Theater.

[image error]Your Halloween ghost-story party might appear slightly different.

I created five scripts, formatted for easy reading. And I figured, hey, why not post these scripts online? Maybe others can use them — if not for their own shows — then simply at a gathering of friends. Some of the articles are scary, some are silly, some are just plain odd. Many are family friendly, but two or three might be rated PG-13 for grisliness. Share these spooky stories responsibly! Altogether, there are over 60 reports to pick and choose from and to use however you wish. Download away!

Actor-1

Actor-2

Actor-3

Actor-4

Actor-5

If anyone takes me up on this, I’d love to hear about it below in the comments. If you’re more interested in quietly reading the full set of republished ghost reports, you’ll find details, sample ghost reports, and more by clicking here: Spectral Edition: Ghost Reports from U.S. Newspapers, 1865-1917. If you’d rather listen to my golden throat, I put ten of my old podcast features on the Shall I Read You a Story? page and on the Brom Bones Books YouTube channel.

— Tim

Ghostly Clients & Demonic Culprits: The Roots of Occult Detective Fiction Is Now Available!

I’ve been researching the history of occult detective fiction for well over a decade, and I’ve made some curious discoveries. When I started, the general consensus of critics who discussed the origins of this cross-genre was that “real” occult detective characters didn’t appear until the 1890s, after Sherlock Holmes became a smash hit. Either L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace’s serial ghost-debunker John Bell from 1897 or E. and H. Heron’s serial ghost-believer Flaxman Low from 1898 led the pack. Any earlier characters, such as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr. Hesselius from 1869, were worthy precedents, but not the real thing.

As I did my digging, I started finding several Dr. Hesseliuses or, more correctly, characters who solved supernatural mysteries with detective methods that were comparible to fictional criminal detectives of their era. I had to really think about what qualifies an occult detective to be an occult detective. Surely, the characters didn’t need to be in a series. And requiring them to be professional detectives specializing in occult cases seemed a bit unfair and unrealistic. (Are Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin or Christie’s Miss Marple not detectives because they don’t solve crimes job for a living?) Eventually, I began publicizing my findings on the Chronological Bibliography of Early Occult Detectives, and hopefully I’ve inspired at least a few folks to re-think how these characters evolved. Indeed, they seem to have been around since the earliest glimmers of mystery fiction and contributed the development of this tradition.

At long last, I’ve compiled my findings into Ghostly Clients & and Demonic Culprits: The Roots of Occult Detective Fiction. It’s now available at the Amazons in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and I suspect elsewhere.[image error]

Readers should not expect a standard anthology of clearly recognizable occult detective stories, however — at least, not as they took shape in the twentieth century. In the hopes of clarifying what to expect, let me post the Table of Contents:

Introduction — Tim Prasil

Part One: Ghostly Clients

“To Sura” (transcribed c. 100) ─ Pliny the Younger

“A Remarkable Passage of an Apparition” (transcribed 1720) ─ Anonymous

“The Haunted Homstead” (1840) ─ Henry William Herbert

“The Ghost of Stanton Hall” (1868) ─ Anonymous

“A Needle in a Bottle” (1874) ─ Anonymous

“The Open Door” (1885) ─ Charlotte Riddell

“Sister Maddelena” (1895) ─ Ralph Adams Cram

“The Brown Hand” (1899) ─ Arthur Conan Doyle

Part Two: Demonic Culprits

“From The Lie-Fancier; or, The Unbeliever” (c. 150) ─ Lucian of Samosata

“The Spectral Coach” (transcribed 1865) ─ Thomas Q. Couch

“The Mystery of the Deserted House” (1817) ─ E.T.A. Hoffmann

“The Haunted Shanty” (1861) ─ Bayard Taylor

“Wanted—An Explanation” (1881) ─ Anonymous

“The Mark of the Beast” (1890) ─ Rudyard Kipling

“The Shining Pyramid” (1895) ─ Arthur Machen

“The Mystery of Djara Singh” (1897) ─ Alexander M. Reynolds

Appendix: The Strange Case of the Drummer of Tedworth (1700) ─ Joseph Glanvill

Those works are mostly creative fiction, but the three marked “transcribed” are folktales. This reflects the fact that this books explores the deep roots of occult detective fiction. Readers are encouraged to spot signs of things to come. Each of the book’s lead characters grapples with a supernatural mystery — most of them successfully — but it’s how they do so that’s intriguing. Conducting surveillance and tracking suspects? Plenty of that. Interrogating witnesses and consulting historical records? You’ll certainly find this. Carefully reading physical clues? That’s there! Remaining obective and applying logic? Uh-huh. You’ll find writers drawing on a range of these investigative methods in this anthology.

And you’ll find two “supplemental” stories — a couple of relevant and historically interesting tales that I felt simply aren’t strong enough to include in the book — on the Ghostly Clients & Demonic Culprits page of this site. Purchasing details are there, too.

Remember, if you wind up enjoying the book, please post a review at Amazon.

— Tim

Unlike Linus: My Flagging Faith in the Lost Limericks of Edgar Allan Poe

Linus is my hero. I mean the character from the Peanuts comic strip and television cartoons. In It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, Linus reveals himself to be a steadfast believer in an obscure doctrine holding that the Great Pumpkin will appear before and reward the individual with the most sincere pumpkin patch. (I’m tempted to describe the Great Pumpkin as having the powers of a demi-gourd, but even amateur botanists would quickly squash that pun.) Each year, Linus observes this ritual. Each year, he maintains his faith, despite the ridicule of friends and family. Each year, he ends up disappointed, but he finds renewed strength in the promise that next year will prove him right.

And remember that Linus — this martyr for what might well be called a pagan belief* — is the same character who, a couple of months later, reminds the apparently Christian community that surrounds him of the original reason why they celebrate the birth of their Savior. He even quotes Scripture by memory! Not just a verse or two — a passage of considerable length!†

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Of course, Linus hasn’t aged since several years before 1966, when Great Pumpkin was first aired. Perhaps this begins to explain why he’s so steadily devoted to his marginalized, squash-based belief system. I, on the other hand, waver much more in my convictions as time passes. In fact, I’m starting to lose faith that my purchase of a manuscript purported to be 100 limericks written by Edgar Allan Poe was a wise decision. That manuscript — sold to me by a man calling himself Bertram Lucius Zachery Bubb, who signed our payment contract: B.L.Z. Bubb — cost me the equivalent of three years’ salary! Bubb explained that it wasn’t the sum total that mattered to him so much as the commitment of the buyer. He wanted someone truly invested in the manuscript.

And I signed the contract. I believed that — maybe, just maybe — evidence that Poe truly had written the limericks would arise and reward me. It was my Great Pumpkin.

However, it’s been over a year-and-a-half since I put The Lost Limericks of Edgar Allan Poe before the public. I have come no closer to discovering if these often silly, sometimes spooky, occasionally serious poems were actually penned by Poe. And I haven’t heard from anyone better qualified than myself to make that determination. Lamentably, the question of authorship lingers unanswered.

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Nonetheless, I am pleased that putting those same limericks into publishable form prompted me to study Poe himself. The not-infrequent footnotes that I added to the limericks serve as a nice overview of the famous author’s lesser known works, the highlights and oddities of his life, and some curious aspects of the world in which he lived.‡

But did Poe write the limericks? Ultimately, I simply don’t know. Decide for yourself. For more information and some samples limericks, click here: The Lost Limericks of Edgar Allan Poe.

— Tim

*I mean pagan, not in the sense of a particular religion, say, one tracing its roots to pre-Christian Celtic culture, but in the sense of any non-mainstream religion (much as the Yiddish word goyum means non-Jewish), which can apply to a wide diversity of faiths.

†There’s a clear sense of theatricality given to Linus’s recitation when he calls for a spotlight. From this, I conclude that Linus is probably not Christian himself, yet he’s familiar enough with the Bible to assume the role needed to remind the Christian community of its own core creed. You gotta love Linus!

‡In addition, in the book’s Introduction, I give a more detailed account of my experience with Bubb and then present arguments both in favor and against the claim that Poe wrote the limericks. There are also a few drawings, which are very nice.

A New Inductee to the Ghost Hunter Hall of Fame!

On Thursday, I posted an article on the Ghost Hunter Hall of Fame’s newest inductee: Francis Smith. In 1804, this overzealous man was tried for murder after shooting an innocent man, having taken him for the Hammersmith Ghost. Or, I should say, having taken that poor victim for the culprit who was causing serious trouble by pretending to be the Hammersmith Ghost.

I had announced the new inductee on Facebook and Twitter, and on Friday, my visitor count shot up. (It’s always an honor being re-tweeted by the Society for Psychical Research!) However, I’ve since tinkered with and enlarged that page by adding a few more historical sources along with some nifty nineteenth-century illustrations of the incident. If you’ve already seen the article, you might take another look.

[image error]“Shooting a Ghost”

There’s a very good chance that Smith will be duly noted in the Introduction of The Victorian Ghost Hunter’s Casebook. 1804 precedes the Victorian era by over thirty years, but the case remained in the public eye for decades. The tragedy surrounding Smith served as a stark example of how not to go about ghost hunting to the paranormal investigators whose chronicled cases are spotlighted in that book.

You can get to the article about Smith by clicking here and The Ghost Hunter Hall of Fame here. Learn more about The Victorian Ghost Hunter’s Casebook — which will be available in mid-December — by clicking here.

— Tim