Houdini was well known for exposing Spiritualist mediums in the early twentieth century. But he wasn’t alone in his efforts. Another magician, Joseph Dunninger, also battled against charlatans claiming to speak with the dead. In August 1926, he wrote about a particularly unique way in which a Boston medium channeled musically gifted spirits.
A friend of Dunninger’s had arranged a private séance for him and six friends at Madame Vesta’s hotel. Upon arriving, the group was led upstairs to a room with about ten chairs and a large cabinet opposite them. The cabinet had a curtain tossed over the top, and a single chair inside. Surrounding it, Dunninger saw a saxophone, a cornet, clarinet, bass drum, a large bell, and a violin without a bow.
“I looked for the bow, but from where we were, I could see none,” he said. “This was odd. Who ever heard of a violin without a bow?”
As the magician continued to inspect the room, he found nothing unusual. “There isn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that had there been a trap, no matter how carefully camouflaged, I would have seen it.”
Soon Madame Vesta entered the room and sat in her cabinet. She explained that she had control of several musical spirit guides who would play for the party that evening. Perhaps another time they would even materialize for them. One of Dunninger’s friends was invited to blindfold her with his own handkerchief. The magician then took on the task of inspecting a piece of rope and tying Vesta’s hands to the chair.
“It gave me an opportunity of examining the cabinet at close range,” he noted. “I was satisfied that everything looked ship-shape.”
Based on Dunninger’s description, the séance was similar to that of the Davenport Brothers, who invented the spirit cabinet, allowed themselves to be tied up, then seemingly brought forth spirits to play a variety of instruments. The brothers were escape artists, allowing them to play the role of ghostly musicians in the dark. But Madame Vesta’s show proved to be a little different.
Once secured, the medium asked the group to sing softly—any song would do—as she fell into a trance and the cabinet’s curtain was closed. Then the spirit concert began.
“Several sharp notes were blown on the clarinet, immediately followed by several hard blows on the bass drum,” Dunninger recalled. “On the air floating from the top of the cabinet came the sweetest bit of violin playing I have ever had the pleasure of hearing. And from a violin without a bow!”
The show continued with bangs from the bass drum, blasts from the bugle, and sharp toots from the clarinet. Then suddenly there was a crash, perhaps from an instrument hitting the floor, and the curtain reopened. Madame Vesta sat with her head to the side, looking as if she had fainted in her chair. Her assistant removed her blindfold and administered smelling salts to awaken her.
As she came to, she smiled, and said groggily, “I trust you have enjoyed the spirit world music.”
Dunninger approached the cabinet and examined the rope ties. They hadn’t changed. “The truth was that the medium’s hands throughout the séance were never unbound,” he said.
So did spirits truly play the instruments? How was the music actually played? According to Dunninger, a dwarf no more than two-and-a-half feet tall had been hiding inside the bass drum.
“He had a violin bow also concealed in the drum and this he used in playing the violin,” the magician explained. “[He] was well trained and a clever little musician by the way.”
Read more about Spiritualism, séances, and miraculous mediums in Chasing Ghosts: A Tour of Our Fascination with Spirits and the Supernatural (Quirk Books), by your Weird Historian, Marc Hartzman.
