SYMHC Classics: Charles Colchester

0:02Speaker 1:Happy Saturday and happy October. We are kicking off the month with our episode on spiritualist Charles Colchester, who was connected to Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln and to John Wilkes Booth, and who faced various allegations of fraud over the course of his career. This episode originally came out on September 20th, 2021. Enjoy! Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy B. Wilson.

0:43Speaker 1:It's not quite Halloween time yet, but like the rabies are here. Yeah. Yeah. I have it worse this year than any previous year, I think. But this isn't quite a Halloween episode. But periodically, particularly while I'm researching topics for Halloween, which I was kind of making my preliminary list, they often veer into discussion of fake mediums. Like, I'll just run into mentions of that or notes I've made about it. And a lot of the time, I come across this mention... of the alleged psychic who warned President Abraham Lincoln that he was going to be assassinated. If you do any sort of mediums during the 19th century in America research, you'll bump up against that mention. And I keep scribbling notes to myself to look it up.

1:32Speaker 1:So I finally did. And I will say this story took me to some places that I did not anticipate. Not in any sort of like, scary, creepy Halloweeny way, but just like there's some fascinating legal stuff that goes on. As well as just a person who manages to be kind of elusive in terms of hard details about their life. So today we are talking about Charles Colchester. That may or may not have even been his name, but he became an icon for spiritualism in the U.S. in the 19th century and only to ultimately be rejected by that same movement. Yeah, so as Holly just alluded to, Colchester's early life is entirely a mystery. There is a mention of him in the Detroit Free Press after most of the events that we're talking about today had already happened.

2:23Speaker 1:It is a column titled News Brevities, and that states that, quote, the real name of Colchester is Sealby or Sealbic. He is an English imposter, and the spiritualists declare that that he is a fraudulent trickster and not one of their number. So, spoiler alert, Colchester gained a significant following as a spiritualist with some very high-profile patrons, but he was so problematic that the whole spiritualist movement then tried to distance itself from him. Yeah, there was a lot of, not one of us, not one of us, we don't know this person.

2:58Speaker 1:I don't know her in the spiritualist meme of the 19th century. What we know, and we got to use air quotes there about Charles Colchester, is only what he told us rather than anything that he could substantially prove. He was English. He claimed that he was a Duke's son that was born out of wedlock. And he claimed that he could read sealed letters and also that he could summon apparitions. He also said that he could produce words on his body carved in blood by spirits and and he manifested all of these things in front of audiences.

3:36Speaker 1:Although it was not part of this personal story that he wove, Colchester also drank a lot, and he did use his alleged connection with the beyond to validate his drinking. He claimed that the spirits had authorized it, which is kind of funny to me. Yeah, apparently when people would ask him, do you want to go get a drink? He would be like, let me commune with the spirits. And then he would be like, yes, they say we should absolutely go have a drink. So after performing seances for clients in New York and Boston for a few years, that was really the start of his traceable movement. Colchester appeared in Washington, D.C. during the Civil War, and he drew just an impressive audience of the city's elite, including people like General Grant and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln.

4:25Speaker 1:We have talked about Mary Todd Lincoln's fascination with spiritualism and the afterlife before on the show. She came up when we covered spirit photographer William Mumler during our Halloween live show a couple of years back. She was his most famous client, Mumler's most famous client, hoping that he could capture her departed husband's ghost on film, and he, of course, obliged. That was, I mean, there were many spiritualists in her life, but we really haven't talked about how she became so very drawn to spiritualism. And the sad catalyst there was the death of the Lincolns' son, Willie, who died from typhoid fever at the age of 11 in 1862. The Lincolns each mourned in their own way.

5:09Speaker 1:The president spent time alone, was very withdrawn, and grew frustrated with the ways that people tried to console him by talking about Willie being in heaven. He eventually turned his energies to the needs of the country in turmoil. Mary, on the other hand, was swept up in the growing spiritualism movement, and it offered her the hope that she might somehow see or connect to her beloved son once more in just some form. She was hardly alone in this.

5:38Speaker 1:The massive death toll of the Civil War had created a whole nation of people who were grieving for lost loved ones. And it was through Mary's many connections and invitations to mediums and spiritualists that Charles Colchester... came into the lives of the Lincolns. And once he did so, he took full advantage of that proximity to power to bolster his name. As Mary became ever more devoted to Colchester seances, the president had felt compelled to accompany her to visit this compelling spiritualist, not because President Lincoln believed, but because he wanted to see what exactly was taking place at these gatherings. Lincoln's relationship with spiritualism has been written and remarked about many times. A lot of people have theories and they try to connect him to, you know, mesmerism or spiritualism and claim that he had this mysticism.

6:29Speaker 1:But he seemed above all, if you really look at it, to want to protect his wife. He never dissuaded her from this interest because seeing spiritualists and going to seances seemed to offer her some peace. But the president also did not want the first lady to be anyone's victim. So when he saw Colchester's seance, he was mesmerized, but not in the sense of just being taken in by it. It was totally the opposite. Abraham Lincoln wanted to figure out exactly how Colchester's tricks worked. The president got the Smithsonian Institution's secretary at the time, Joseph Henry, involved in the investigation. He requested that Colchester submit to an examination by Henry, which he agreed to. This is, yes, the same Joseph Henry who introduced Eunice Newton Foote's papers in that episode. Yeah, there's also an interesting story between Henry and Lincoln in that they were very much on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but also respected each other a lot. And Henry's background was in science, and he worked a lot in telegraphs specifically. And so for this demonstration, Henry had Colchester visit the Smithsonian so that this examination

7:48Speaker 1:could be conducted in a room that the medium had not had prior access to. And after the encounter, Henry came away entirely convinced that Colchester was a charlatan. But he couldn't prove it. He had very clearly discerned that there was an otherworldly clicking sound. These were supposed to be evidence of spirits being called by the man, but that it was clear to him they were emanating from Colchester's person and presumably some sort of device. But Colchester would not consent to having his clothes removed for examination.

8:22Speaker 1:And that was that. Incidentally, though, Joseph Henry supposedly did uncover the origins of these sounds totally by accident much later. He's said to have met a man on a train and started just idly talking to him. In this marvelous bit of happenstance, this man had engineered a telegraphic device that spiritualists used for exactly this purpose. They wore it around their biceps, and so the user would flex a muscle, and that would produce this clicking sound. Henry asked this young man if he had sold such a device to Charles Colchester, and the guy said yes. He reported this information back to the president, who was apparently pleased to know about it, but he did not put a stop to the First Lady's meetings with Colchester. Something much darker ultimately took place to sever that relationship. Yeah, Abraham Lincoln, I think, just liked being in on the secret. But ultimately, what happened was that Colchester blackmailed Mary Todd Lincoln, or at least he tried to. He wanted the War Department to issue him a free railroad pass so he could travel to New York easily. This might sound like a

9:35Speaker 1:fairly benign request, but at the time, the war had led to a move on General Sherman's part to severely limit and regulate civilian travel by rail and so that that mode of transport could be dedicated to the movement of troops and material. Even people with ticketed travel could board only if it did not interfere with the needs of the Union Army. Initially, in this whole system, train passes were fairly readily available. People at all levels of the military would just write them, even if those people were not really authorized to do so. But this, of course, became a problem, and regulations got tighter and tighter to try to curtail needless travel. So by the time this all happened, in asking for a pass issued by the War Department, Colchester was attempting to sidestep a whole lot of regulations. And he almost got what he wanted because he told the First Lady that he would publicly share some of the privileged and presumably embarrassing information that he had learned while working with her. So that was how Noah Brooks was called upon to help. The First Lady turned to Brooks for help over this blackmail attempt, and

10:44Speaker 1:Brooks was a close friend of the Lincolns and also a journalist. He had dealings with Colchester before because of his concerning influence over the First Lady. He wrote about this in his book, Washington in Lincoln's Time. And the person that he's describing in this was named Elizabeth Keckley. So, quote, A seamstress employed in the White House had induced Mrs. Lincoln to listen to the artful tales of a so-called spiritual medium who masqueraded under the name of Colchester and who pretended to be the illegitimate son of an English duke.

11:21Speaker 1:The poor lady at that time was well-nigh distraught with grief at the death of her son, Willie. By playing on her motherly sorrows, Colchester actually succeeded in inducing Mrs. Lincoln to receive him in the family residence at the soldier's home, where, in a darkened room, he pretended to produce messages from the dead boy by means of scratches on the wainscoting and taps in the walls and furniture. Mrs. Lincoln told me of these so-called manifestations and asked me to be present in the White House when Colchester would give an exhibition of his powers. Yeah, we're going to quote a lot from Noah Brooks because his is one of the few accounts by a contemporary that actually had direct dealings with Colchester and was close enough to the Lingans to really understand kind of how this was playing out.

12:11Speaker 1:And initially he told the First Lady that he did not want to go to this seance at the White House. He doesn't say as much in his book, but it kind of seems like he didn't want to embarrass her because he did want to see what Colchester was all about. And he got his chance shortly thereafter to attend a paid sitting that one of Colchester's other wealthy followers was hosting. So Brooks paid $ 1 to go and see the medium for himself. We'll talk about what happened when Noah Brooks met Charles Colchester after we pause for a quick sponsor break.

12:45Speaker 1:Music In his biography of Lincoln, Brooks detailed his encounter with Colchester at the seance that he attended and paid for, writing, after the company had been seated around the table in the usual approved manner and the lights were turned out, the silence was broken by the thumping of a drum, the twanging of a banjo, and the ringing of bells, all of which instruments had been laid on the table ready for use. Brooks, who was obviously not the least bit taken in by Colchester's theatricalities, decided to find the real source of the noises. He went on to say, quote, Loosening my hands from my neighbors who were unbelievers, I rose and, grasping in the direction of the drumbeat, grabbed a very solid and fleshy hand in which was a handbell that was being thumped on a drumhead. I shouted, strike a light. My friend, after what appeared to be an unconscionable length of time, lighted a match, but meanwhile, somebody had dealt me a severe blow with the drum, the edge of which cut a slight wound in my forehead.

14:09Speaker 1:When the gas was finally lighted, the singular spectacle was presented of the son of the Duke firmly grasped by a man who was covered with blood, while the arrested scion of nobility was glowering at the drum and bells which he still held in his hands. Colchester ran from the room and he refused to return. The host of the whole event, said that he was outraged at having been so insulted. It was only a couple of days after that that Colchester made his blackmail attempt on the First Lady. What unpleasant things that Colchester was planning to reveal, we don't really know. Presumably, he wanted to get out of Washington, D.C. in a hurry and to avoid any additional entanglements. But when Mary Todd Lincoln brought the matter to Noah Brooks, he decided to confront Charles Colchester and expose him as a fraud to put an end to the blackmail and hopefully also get him out of the White House for good. And so to accomplish this, Brooks concocted a plan that required Mrs. Lincoln to invite the medium to the White House once more. The idea here is that Colchester would presume that she had his railroad

15:18Speaker 1:pass and wanted him to come and get it. And this plan kind of seems like it all hinged on Colchester not having gotten a good look at Brooks during the seance. As you recall, they had been seated in the dark and even once the gas lamp was lighted, Brooks's face had been covered in blood. But it is also possible that the hope was that Colchester would just be too embarrassed when confronted to run into Brooks in front of the First Lady to say like, oh yes, you caught me faking at my seance the other night.

15:49Speaker 1:So when the spiritualist arrived, Mrs. Lincoln introduced Colchester to her friend, Noah Brooks, and then left the room as though she was going to get the pass. Once she had gone, Brooks lifted up the hair that had been swept over his forehead, and that revealed the cut from the drum strike that had happened at the seance. He asked, do you recognize this? Colchester once again muttered about being insulted before Brooks told him, quote, you know that I know.

16:18Speaker 1:You are a swindler and a humbug. Get out of the city at once. If you are in Washington tomorrow afternoon at this time, you will be in the old Capitol prison. Interestingly, John Wilkes Booth was drawn to Charles Colchester for the very same reason that had brought Mary Todd Lincoln into the spiritualist's orbit, and that was personal loss. When Booth's sister-in-law Molly died, the actor started attending seances hosted by various mediums in an effort to make contact with her. And that eventually led him to Colchester. But then Colchester and Booth became close friends outside of any mystical setting. According to witnesses, they spent a lot of time together. They were described as both friends and associates by people who witnessed them. particularly as the two of them came and went at the National Hotel, which is where Booth stayed in the weeks leading up to the assassination of President Lincoln. Historian Terry Alford, in his Booth biography, Fortune's Fool, suggests that Booth's attachment to Colchester may have been rooted in the medium's claim to be able to see the future. He may have been hoping for some

17:25Speaker 1:sort of sign or reassurance regarding his intentions toward the president. We have no idea. if Booth clearly disclosed those intentions to Colchester. But Charles J. Colchester felt compelled to warn Abraham Lincoln that something bad was going to happen. Lincoln is actually said to have mentioned Colchester's warning to an associate, but that is the only information we have regarding any actual communication between the two of them. And this was actually one of many warnings that various alleged psychics offered to the president in the time when spiritualism was popular throughout the U.S. and within the White House, thanks to the First Lady. After the president was shot and died from his wounds in April of 1865, Colchester's association with Booth was something that was just at the forefront of investigators' minds. Yeah, they were looking for any accomplices, anyone involved involved. in what had happened, and Colonel Henry H. Wells was a lawyer before joining the Union Army, and he was investigating and attempted to meet with Charles Colchester as part of that investigation. He had tracked him from the National, where

18:35Speaker 1:he had been staying, to the Washington Hotel, to which he had moved, but he wasn't there either. If the medium had stayed in the city, he had done a really good job of hiding. He was never located for questioning in the official investigation. It's a little unclear exactly when Colchester may have issued his warning to the president in relation to when he had his run in with Noah Brooks. So whether he did leave town right after being exposed as a fraud or if he stuck around and then ran right after the assassination is a little bit unclear. Even though Colchester left Washington, he certainly did not banish off the face of the earth. He was moving around and performing his seances and readings and then popped up in the papers again in the second half of 1865. We'll get to that after we hear from the sponsors that keep Stuff You Missed in History Class going.

19:25Speaker 1:Colchester was arrested in New York in August 1865 for what may seem on the surface to be an odd charge. According to a newspaper account, quote, Charles J. Colchester, a leading medium and only second to the famous Hume in notoriety as a spiritualist, has been arrested on complaint of the collector of internal revenue for the 28th District of New York on a charge of practicing jugglery without a license. Okay, if that made you giggle a little, and it did me when I read it, jugglery in this case does not mean literal juggling, although that is certainly a way that word can be used. It is referring to trickery or manipulation, and in Colchester's case, sleight of hand specifically.

20:16Speaker 1:So Colchester was taken in for tax evasion because he refused to register his profession as a juggler. Colchester had been practicing in the Rochester area in the spring of 1865 when the Assessor of Internal Revenue, William H. Rogers, instructed him to take out a license as a juggler. Colchester refused, although he offered to take out a license as a spiritual medium. There was no license for that, and Rogers told him that based on the information he had, Colchester was indeed a juggler. Colchester was arrested, and a complaint was filed with the U.S. Commissioner. The medium appeared before a grand jury and was indicted, and the case was sent to trial. His defense was that he was not in any way a magician or juggler, but a legitimate spiritualist, and so he should not have to register as something he was not. This really kind of turned the trial into an instance where spiritualism itself was being debated.

21:15Speaker 1:As the same write-up put it, quote, as a result of the trial... will be a legal decision as to whether the phenomena of spiritualism are supernatural or mere feats of juggler, it will be a very interesting one and strongly contested. The prosecutors planned on calling a range of presidigitators to confirm that Colchester was indeed a sleight of hand man, and the defense planned to bring in spiritualists to testify to Colchester's legitimate abilities. Colchester's claim was mainly that he was closer to being a member of the clergy than a trickster. When the case began on August 19, 1865, the district attorney opened by laying out the question of whether Colchester should or shouldn't be registered as a juggler and made it clear that in his mind, spiritualism itself was not on trial. He also managed to get in a dig at the press for suggesting that this was the case. He said, quote, The performance of singular and extraordinary feats of wrappings, answering questions enclosed in envelopes and the like publicly and for fee and reward, will not be seriously contested, perhaps admitted, The peculiar defense of the

22:26Speaker 1:prisoner I can only gather from newspaper reports and public rumor which assert that the prisoner will prove or attempt to prove that in the performance of those feats of apparent legerdemain he is the mere instrument of spiritual control and that he does not practice sleight of hand. While I concede the inestimable value of the press, I cannot forbear the remark that that it has been made the instrument of magnifying the case into undue proportions and to cause the public to believe that it is a contest between the United States and a large body of citizens calling themselves spiritualists and an endeavor on the part of the former to crush out a religious sect and to expose its heresies if it has any, and that the result of this trial will establish the fact whether spiritualism is true or false. Nothing can be further from the truth.

23:19Speaker 1:The result of this trial can accomplish no such thing. It is a simple inquiry whether Charles J. Colchester is practicing sleight of hand under the guise of spiritual control, and if he is, it is quite as important to profess spiritualist that he should be exposed as it is to the public whom he is deluding and to the government which he is defrauding. Over the course of the trial, many of Colchester's high-profile clients, a lot of them politicians, testified that they believed entirely in his abilities as a medium.

23:52Speaker 1:But the damning testimony came from people who knew magic, including from a man named James Rogers, a magician's assistant who had worked with Colchester briefly. He told the court that he had seen Colchester using his foot to create a rapping sound by striking the legs of tables. But he also said that Colchester himself had told him it was, in the parlance of the day, humbug. According to Rogers' account, Colchester was holding eight to ten seances a day, making one or two dollars for each one, and restricting attendance to only one or two people per sitting, presumably so they would be unable to detect his farce. Another witness, James Connolly, testified that he had, as a client, witnessed Colchester switching out envelopes that contained questions for him and were supposed to remain sealed. and surreptitiously opening the original question so he could answer and appear psychic. Another witness, which is a physician named Walter M. Fleming, saw Colchester on several occasions, witnessing, among other things, the blood writing upon his arm. The witness at one point presented Colchester

24:59Speaker 1:with questions sealed up in cans to see if he could answer them, but Colchester, on consecutive days of trying, told Fleming that spiritual conditions were not favorable for answering them. The case proceeded on in this way, with character witnesses for Colchester and detractors describing his trickery for what it was. On August 23rd, the jury, after hearing the case, returned their verdict. They found that Charles Colchester was a juggler. And this verdict actually kicked off a lot of fear in the spiritualism community, even though the district attorney had said that was not the intent at all. But a lot of practitioners worried that they too would be tried by the government over taxes and discredited in the process.

25:44Speaker 1:There were queries as well as to whether Colchester had been given a fair trial or if the whole thing had been framed in bias from the beginning, despite those remarks to the contrary at the opening of the arguments. To be clear, spiritualists were not aggrieved at Colchester being called a fraud. They were just worried that the manner in which his trial was conducted could similarly find any of them frauds, whether that had any basis or not. Their own examination of the matter came to the conclusion, however, that he was undeniably and truly a juggler. After all of that, the sentence was just a financial one. Colchester had to pay a $ 40 fine. and the court costs of $ 473. Those sums were paid by his supporters, and that matter was then concluded. If the trial results dinged Colchester's confidence at all, it was not for long. Soon he was on tour touting his skills and looking for clients.

26:43Speaker 1:In an ad that appeared in the Cleveland Daily Leader in December of 1865, it said,' Colchester, the wonderful Colchester,' the incomprehensible Colchester, the medium.' can be consulted at his room's American house for a few days only. But even though he kept working, from the moment the trial ended, there were then people constantly looking for proof that Colchester was a fraud. And stories kept popping up in the papers about it. One particularly charming one from the Boston Evening Transcript on October 10, 1865, reads, quote, A correspondent of the Hartford Times says that Colchester, the juggling medium, was detected by him at a circle in Hartford in a feat of jugglery, where a number sitting in the dark with joined hands were touched by spirit hands on their faces. When one seized the hand with his teeth and discovered that it was a tallow candle, which Colchester had blown out when the circle was arranged. He was once again in hot water with the U.S. Commissioner in April of 1866, this time in Louisville, Kentucky, for the same charge, this time just pertaining to the performance of

27:53Speaker 1:jugglery without a license in the state of Kentucky. This time, Colchester did not really argue the matter. There was, once again, testimony, which according to an article in the Buffalo Commercial on April 6th, quote, A confederate of Colchester admitted on the examination that the manifestations were produced by mechanical agencies, and this was not denied by the former. In that case, Colchester was allowed by the commissioner to file his license as a juggler. In late May 1866, a story ran in papers across the country titled Spiritualism Done For, and it had the subheader, Colchester Thoroughly Exposed, His Spirit Manifestations Shown to be Tricks, deceptions and the vilest impositions. And this article was an open letter written by a man named D.A. McCord, who had briefly been Colchester's agent. While Colchester had been widely exposed already, this particular missive was penned, according to McCord, quote, from a sense of justice, seeming in some ways to need to unburden himself for his part in any of it. He writes, quote, I was his agent for a few weeks and was compelled to leave him, detecting his deceptions with his drunkenness, disorderly conduct,

29:08Speaker 1:and other vices. The confessional states that McCord witnessed Colchester using his foot against a table leg to produce a rapping sound and read billets through trickery. But the one component of Colchester's act which had continued to befuddle even detractors was the, quote, purported spirit writing on his armpits. And McCord spilled the beans on that, too. Quote, he uses a short lead pencil, number two. He prefers the corner of a room. In the evening time, a light sitting by him. In the day, a window behind him.

29:42Speaker 1:He chooses thin printing paper because easily and noiselessly opened. The investigators write questions and names of deceased friends upon billets. He manipulates them, having his blank previously prepared. which he holds in the hollow of his hand by the third and fourth fingers. This he exchanges for one of the written billets. Then perhaps he may request all to write another question or name, during which he dexterously reads the billet by holding it in his lap behind the table spread. Yeah, basically he has them write those questions so they'll be occupied, and then he can do his other stuff without them noticing. Yeah.

30:22Speaker 1:McCord further explained that even though there was the illusion of randomness in which Colchester had someone select a billet from a hat, he always used sleight of hand to ensure that he knew which one was going to be selected. And then, as he employed various theatrical tricks of dramatic misdirection, he would use the pencil to write on his arm. According to McCord, he then, quote, bears his arm, rubs it slightly with dampened fingers, causing the blood to rush into the pencil indentations, producing the wonderful blood-red writing under the cuticle. Anybody can do this with little practice. McCord concludes with a list of eight rules to employ if you want to visit Colchester to ensure that you see all that he does. and concludes with, quote, I make this exposure not to injure him, but to keep others from being injured and defrauded by villainous impostors. He then lists his address and invites anyone to visit if they have more questions. What a quaint practice. Here's my home address.

31:26Speaker 1:Here's my home address printed in papers across the country. Yeah, those eight rules I didn't list out because they're pretty, they're pretty common sense-y. It's kind of like, Make sure that you sit in a place where you can see his hands the whole time. Make sure that you, like, mark your... Like, they're very, very simple things. Another agent, J.M. Mabbitt, also wrote an open letter that stated that he had been acting in good faith while working with Colchester... as a true believer in spiritualism, and that once the deception was detected, he took his leave of the fraud. These letters were often printed together. He stated in his letter, quote, and yet how the spirits can control a man so immoral, so given to drunkenness, deception, and a non-payment of board and printing bills to say nothing of other vices still lower is to me a mystery. Colchester continued to roam after this, plying his trade, but really not for very long.

32:26Speaker 1:In early May of 1867, a year after his two former agents had debunked his last wisps of credibility, Charles Colchester died in Keokuk, Iowa. He had sat in the White House just a few years earlier and had influence over the first family, and his trial for jugglery had been widely reported in detail. But by that time, his death ran in papers as just a one-liner. Sort of in aggregated columns of miscellaneous stuff. Yeah, it was kind of like, Charles Colchester, medium, died in Keokuk. That was like it. That was it? Some had a few additional, you know, sentences about who he was, but it was very low-key at that point. I did not anticipate when starting this that I would end up in the middle of the jugglery trial. Yeah! Yeah! which is pretty interesting to me. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.

33:30Speaker 1:If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is historypodcast at iheartradio.com. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.