The Introverted Detective: Parlor Tricks

We are no better than the Victorians. While our parlor tricks have turned into TV shows and ghost hunting, we are still doing them; the only difference now is we have paranormal science and gadgets, which are sometimes not even reliable. Lets get into it and dig deeper.

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If you asked Houdini (you can't, he's dead) where to find a non-fraud medium he'd tell you not to bother. Houdini put out a challenge way back when that stated any medium or psychic proving their power would win the grand prize of 10,000 dollars. Many tried, but none succeeded, and here we are still watching them on TV. What's wrong with us?

The Victorian era had a way of playing parlor games to contact the dead. Smart, no, but they sure thought it was fun. Not all these parlor games were about the dead (let's be real, some of them must have learned not to mess with it), but Halloween was all about the spooky. The innocent parlor games actually sound like boatloads of fun to play, including blind man's bluff, forfeit, lookabout, charades, the sculptor, Kim's game, pass the slipper, and dictionary. If you want to try these out -for they are far safer to play - click here for the descriptions. Be aware that there are more of these you shouldn't play that will leave you hurt, so do your own research before attempting any not listed here. From here on out, we'll be focusing on the dangerous ones that involve the supernatural. I will be talking about the Victorian era first, then our current time of 2023.

Victorian Spooky Games

I hate to break it to you, past Victorians, but your games were also witchcraft. Oops! The occult was a popular topic back then. It still is. I don't suggest traveling this path. Sceances, mediums, crystal balls, palmistry, cartomancy(future told in playing cards)...All games for pure entertainment in one's living room. All of that is witchcraft. Another thing that emerged in the Victorian era is the symbolism of flowers (language of flowers), which while fascinating has a loose connection to witchcraft. As suspected, the working class were not the ones going to seances out of curiosity on the daily, mostly because nobody's got time for that in poverty when you have a family to feed.

If you think Wica didn't exist then, you're wrong, they just didn't label it that. Halloween games included what sounds distinctly like Wica practices. Guessing your future marital status and husband was a common one. It sounds stupid to me. You walk into a dark room in front of a mirror, peel an apple, and maybe you'll see the face of someone you'll marry. I don't understand why this was entertaining. If you saw a skeleton you'd die alone, apparently.

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Another way to guess your marital status was to bake a dangerous cake. Bake a ring, needle, dime, and thimble into your cake. Needle and thimble indicated spinsterhood (no marriage), but a ring or dime indicated you'd marry. Tea anyone? Let's drip the tea; not spill, drip. Suspend a spoon on a teacup and drip tea onto it until it falls. Every drip is one year you have to wait until you marry. These people must have been high-class and bored out of their skulls.

To be fair to the Victorians, there was a lot of death around them. Why? Well, let's look at the arsenic makeup, child mortality, and other causes another day. History Connections has a whole series that I'll link right here. Medicines were not great, either. Medical care was not something you want me to talk about, and I don't care to. The occult was grief motivated for many who had lost loved ones one after another, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They seemed to be obsessed with death in some ways, such as visiting cemeteries for picnics and viewing curious bodies (posted by newspapers) at morgues.

We also have to address the charlatans in the room. Houdini liked to go undercover and expose them. They had many different ways to fake everything, including dimming the lights and making everyone close their eyes so a partner could do things unnoticed. They could tap on the floor with their feet, cold-read the people in the room, and make up crap on the spot that was so vague it couldn't be disputed. It made them money because there is a sucker born every minute. It was wrong on so many levels. It is also the base of some magic tricks modern magicians can do. The world of magicians did benefit from all the charlatans, which isn't so strange if you think about it.

Todays' Parlor Tricks

We're going to start with our own modern Charlatans - those faked ghost-hunting shows. Not every show is faked, I know, but they do slant the historical view of The Winchester Mystery House and The Stanley Hotel, as proven by these two links; Winchester Mystery House and Stanley Hotel. These two Youtubers mention that at least one ghost show or two is clearly faking stuff for views. I don't think it's a good idea to ghost hunt, but I despise those that fake it more. If you intend to ghost hunt do it for real or just say it is fiction straight out of the gate. You make a mockery of yourself if you are found to be a charlatan.

Courtesy of The Mirror -
a picture from the Winchester Mystery House

I confess, I have watched a few of these videos out of curiosity, despite my view that ghost hunting finds more demons than actual ghosts. I am a skeptic, but I also believe that some of them don't fake it. Kallmekris and Celina Spookyboo are not faking it in my opinion, nor are the Proper People (the few times they even attempted it). Honestly, I fear they are taking something supernatural home with them. The history of mental health in ghost hunters is not great. You risk taking a presence back home, where it can harm you. There are two viewers for these shows; one is watching because they want to make fun of the ghost hunters or disprove them, and the other genuinely might believe it. Let's be real. We've made ghost hunting a form of entertainment and we're no better than the Victorian Era population. It just so happens we stuff it into our TV shows and don't sit around peeling apples in front of mirrors.

The curiosity with death never left our society, ladies and gents. In fact, our bookstores now have Wica guides in them and crystals to be purchased. There is nothing new under the sun. I know a former Wica member and a current one. I flipped through the guide in a store and it literally sounds like I went back to the Victorian era. It mentioned peeling apples to bless a garden and moon water, which is water exposed to moonlight as far as I can tell. Our fiction also seems to be fascinated with the occult. And no, Harry Potter is not what I describe as the occult. Harry Potter is fantasy writing. Fantasy and the occult are not the same. No, I'm talking about the TV shows we see about covens and real occult practices. Have you noticed? Take a look around you.

Wicca, to explain, is modern witchcraft. It sounds vastly complicated. I'll let you read the article yourself, if you are so inclined to. What is Wicca? An expert on modern witchcraft explains. (theconversation.com)

Did the seances end? No. Did psychics and mediums end? No. Did the ouija boards disappear? No, they are sold among board games, where they don't belong. I firmly believe they need to be taken off shelves permanently. I had an experience in a house where someone had used one. There are places with dark supernatural beings due to the use of the ouija board by at least one or two people. They are dangerous. That's how you find demons. It turns out nobody learned from the victorian era. We're still playing parlor games we ought not to.

Conclusion

I will address magicians here, but I don't see harm in them. Houdini was one and he did not support the occult. He had Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's wife do a handwriting reading and it didn't match his mother's broken English, which spurred him to disbelieve psychics and mediums. There is no harm in a magic show. They already come with the implied nature of illusion. You suspend your disbelief like you are watching a movie. It isn't the occult.

Courtesy of davidhalperin.net

At the end of the day, Solomon was correct in stating nothing new is under the sun. The societal views of people before us trickle down to our modern-day era whether we look back to figure it out or not. Nothing truly disappears. We have new charlatans and old ones mixed in together, making money from the vulnerable and curious. I guess we'll always have a certain curiosity toward death and the afterlife, inevitably leading to an interest in witchcraft and divination. We want to know the future. I don't think we need to know the future, but we want to.

I believe God is in control. I don't think we need to be divining the future or talking to ghosts that could be demons. Jesus died and rose again to defeat Satan, thus we don't have fear if we are in Christ. He's got the supernatural covered. I don't have to try to keep guessing what happens next when He's taking care of me. If you don't agree with my faith view, we can agree to disagree.

I do think we should all be wary of chasing the supernatural to any degree, as we will never understand what we are truly doing and may stumble into a door that opens up more trouble than we bargained for.

Be careful. I care about my blog readers. I don't want you to welcome what you can't shove back into its opening.

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