Vanderbilt's Fortune Teller

Who knew that Cornelius Vanderbilt relied on a fortune teller to guide him? All was revealed at the reading of his will.

In his opening statement over the dispute of railroad tycoon “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt’s will, attorney Scott Lord proclaimed that Vanderbilt was “a believer in spiritualism” and “clairvoyance and was governed by its revelations.” Lord argued that these beliefs, among other “impairments,” rendered Vanderbilt susceptible to undue influence towards the end of his life while drafting his will. The will allocated the majority of Vanderbilt’s massive fortune to his eldest son, William Henry Vanderbilt, with comparatively modest sums going to the rest of the heirs. The claims of supernatural intervention brought the name of a well-known 19th-century fortune teller, Madame Morrow, into the contentious court battle between William and his siblings.

Read all about it in the book Mortimer and the Witches

Under the pseudonym Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P. B., humor writer Mortimer Thomson went undercover to investigate and report on the fortune tellers of New York City’s tenements and slums. When his articles were published in book form in 1858, they catalyzed a series of arrests that both scandalized and delighted the public. But Mortimer was guarding some secrets of his own, and in many ways, his own life paralleled the lives of the women he both visited and vilified. In Mortimer and the Witches, author Marie Carter examines the lives of these marginalized fortune tellers while also detailing Mortimer Thomson’s peculiar and complicated biography.