The Ghost-Busting ‘Girl Detective’ Who Awed Houdini

This fascinating article from Atlas Obscura should be a warning to any fake psychics. Let's keep it honest, people! Here is an excerpt from the full article.

As an undercover investigator, Rose Mackenberg unmasked hundreds of America’s fake psychics. by Nina Strochlic

Rose Mackenberg started as a believer: In the early 20th century, the American public seemed to be in a state of continuous mourning. In just a few years, World War I and the Great Flu of 1918 had claimed nearly 800,000 American lives. The environment of grief provided a fertile ground for the movement known as Spiritualism, and its practitioners gained huge followings by claiming they could communicate with the dead.

In the early 1920s, Brooklyn-born Mackenberg was working at a detective agency in New York when she was assigned a case about a psychic who had recommended worthless stock to a local banker. A mutual friend introduced her to magician Harry Houdini, who was then waging his own crusade against Spiritualists. At the peak of his career, Houdini had decided to use his spotlight to denounce a practice he just couldn’t stomach: psychics who preyed on the bereaved. He’d recently announced a $10,000 reward to any medium who performed a feat he could not replicate with various well-known tricks.

Impressed by Mackenberg’s detective skills, he offered her a job as an investigator helping him unmask Spiritualist con artists. She hesitated: Personally, she believed communication with the world beyond was possible. This job, Houdini replied, would be a great way to test that.

Houdini himself had sought solace in Spiritualism after losing his beloved mother, Cecelia Weisz, a decade earlier. In one seance he listened as the medium relayed a long and dramatic letter allegedly written by his mother—in English, a language she never spoke.

Here’s how it worked: Mackenberg traveled ahead of Houdini’s tour, scouting local mediums and con artists for the magician to later unmask on stage. She lingered at department stores and read through the local papers to suss out the town’s psychic-types. She then selected a new identity and ventured into their seance rooms.

Read the full article here.