Faking the dead to con the living

How the rise of the spiritualist movement benefitted con-women

The King of Bavaria’s Daughter, Part One.

The King of Bavaria’s Daughter

The third quarter of the nineteenth century saw a huge growth in the number of Americans trying to speak with the dead.

Possibly millions of Americans took up spiritualism as a cause. It’s estimated that over 800 cities and towns in America featured some sort of formal spiritualist activity during this period; that number would be even higher if informal activities like individual séances were included. What was behind this increase in the desire to communicate with the deceased?

There seems to have been a growing disillusionment with traditional western religions and their assurances about life after death. Information about religions from other parts of the world, and their beliefs, became more available. Immigrants arrived in the new world bringing with them their dogmas and doctrines. The idea that Heaven was the place where God lived was replaced with the notion that it was the location where families could be reunited after death.

Industrialisation brought more mobility, and with that came the spread of diseases. And as America industrialised, families had fewer children, putting more value on the individual child, and the concern over the death of children in these smaller families grew.

The invention of the telegraph and the telephone, allowing people to communicate over long distances, may have made the ability to communicate with the deceased seem relatively reasonable. No one was now out of reach, not even the dead. Additionally, talking with the dead was incredibly entertaining, and very theatrical. This theatricality was the main reason the pioneering psychologist, William James, said he attended séances.

Although there were spiritualist mediums of both sexes, women figured largely in the movement. The very first spiritualists were the Fox sisters, who started their table rapping in 1848. American women found freedom to speak in public through the spiritualist movement; that freedom was otherwise denied to them.

Of course, spiritualism was not a new religion, nor a way of putting bereaved relatives back in touch with their deceased love ones.

It was a con.

One of the Fox sisters later admitted as much, explaining how she and her sibling cracked their joints to make the sounds of the spirits rapping. Many other mediums were exposed as frauds, in spite of the number of notable figures who endorsed individuals, or the whole movement. The escapologist Houdini, who had started his career as a rather ham fisted sleight of hand magician, spent a large portion of his later career exposing mediums. Contemporary practitioners of spiritualism have been revealed as using basic techniques such as cold reading, or more sophisticated techniques, like intensively researching the individuals they invite to ‘get in touch with their loved ones who have gone on before’.

Curiously, the vast majority of fraudster, fakers, and con-artists are men. There’s a PhD for someone in that fact. There are women fraudsters and con-artists, but they are few and far between. And in general, female con-artists do not match the profile of their male counterparts. Just think of how male con-artists are portrayed in Hollywood films. In “Catch Me If You Can”, the con-man Frank Abagnale Jr. is played by the suave, handsome, heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio. Your average con-man, it seems, looks like DiCaprio, or George Clooney. How else can they con people if they aren’t charming and handsome?

You don’t see many films about women con-artists, although I predict we will see more soon. Someone has probably already optioned Josh Levin’s recent book, “The Queen”, about Linda Taylor, the con-woman who became infamous as Ronald Reagan’s Cadillac driving “welfare queen”. And there have been rumblings about a film of the life of Bertha Heyman, a notorious nineteenth century con-woman, who even conned her jailers in order to escape. “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”, a film about the literary forger Lee Israel, was released at the end of 2018. In real life Israel was a very unpleasant character, even more unpleasant when she was drunk (which was often). Co-workers found her impossible to deal with. The film softens her character, for the most part turning her into a lovable lush. But then, in her defense, the film’s director Marielle Heller went out of her way to say it was not a biopic, but a story about two lonely gay people in the New York of the ‘90s.

The thing that Lee Israel and Bertha Heyman have in common is that they were not particularly physically attractive women, nor were they sweet, or gentle. Yet they both managed to successfully con men — and women — out of their money. So what does it take to be a successful con-woman? Do they use different tactics? If they aren’t the kind of drop-dead gorgeous women that men might easily fall for, that Hollywood loves, how do they con people?

They use the same techniques that con-men use, but they have one advantage over men. And that is the way that men think about women. The in-built sense of superiority that many men seem to have, making them think that women are their inferiors, is used by women con-artists against men, like a kind of psychological judo. Female con-artists use men’s sexist prejudices against them, to bring them down, and make them fall flat on their faces.

So spiritualism was a con, and women figured largely in the movement. One woman who successfully, and persistently, used her alleged spiritual powers to con people around the end of the nineteenth century was a small, rotund, hard-faced woman who operated under a bewildering variety of names. We’ll get to what might have been her real name later, but let’s start with what she called herself in the late 1880s. Editha Diss Debar.

Diss Debar was a serial, and one might say compulsive, con-woman. Nothing seemed to stop her. She was a brazen liar, constantly reinventing herself and her identity, denying her past. She often had men as partners in her cons, but the men were her tools. Intuitively, perhaps, she knew how to read other people and use her knowledge against them. In her life-long career as a con-woman, she used many of the techniques favoured by con-artists. She presented herself as an authority figure; she used her apparent high social standing to influence others; she persuaded her victims that they were special, superior to others (and too smart to be conned); she offered something rare and unique — the ability to talk to the dead; and she cleverly exploited the ‘sunk cost effect’ — once her victims had bought into her con, they stayed in, even when things didn’t match Diss Debar’s promises. There was always going to be some jam tomorrow, or the day after.

She pulled a myriad of cons over a wide range of people in her life. Let’s look at two of the major ones.

— — — — —

The Lawyer and The Spirit Paintings

It should be no surprise that a man who had recently lost his beloved wife might try to get in touch with her beyond the veil of darkness by using a medium.

But the editors and proprietors of the leading New York newspapers were very surprised when, in March 1888, they received an invitation from the prominent and wealthy lawyer, Luther R. Marsh, to call upon him on a particular evening at his mansion at 166 Madison Avenue.

There were two reasons for their surprise. The first was that Mr. Marsh, seventy-five and known as a particularly hard-headed member of the bar, was a fairly reclusive individual and rarely saw anyone socially. But the second surprise was the purpose of the invitation. Marsh, whose wife had died about a year before, wrote that by some strange mystical force, which he was convinced was a spirit power, he had, in the preceding ten months, been presented with seventy five oil paintings of great historical figures, all executed by the hand of Alexander the Great’s court painter, Apelles. Those depicted included a pharaoh’s daughter, many ancient philosophers, St. Peter, St. Luke, Homer, Petrarch, Rembrandt, and Robbie Burns. There was also a portrait of the noted Roman statesman, Appius Claudius Caecus, who, Marsh now believed, was his ancestor.

These paintings had all been produced from blank canvases in front of his very eyes by a medium, he told the editors. The medium’s name was Editha Diss Debar, and she told Marsh she was the daughter of King Ludwig of Bavaria and the dancer Lola Montez.

“As a lawyer, occupied in trying causes to hard facts for fifty two years,” he wrote to the editors, “I have no hesitation in saying that I have been unable to discover no other way in which these phenomena can be produced than by the way claimed. The theory of fraud or collusion is out of the question.”

Taken aback by the contents of the invitation, all of the editors and owners deferred the assignment to the most hard-bitten of their journalists. These newspapermen were stunned when they turned up at Marsh’s Madison Avenue address. They found the wealthy lawyer occupied only one room in his great mansion, surrounded by the spirit paintings, which crowded the high walls, filled shelves and took up every chair in the room. Marsh explained to the pressmen how the paintings had been created. Mrs. Diss Debar would hold a séance at which she would present him with a blank canvas, or a piece of blank Bristol board. If the canvas or board were small enough, it would be placed on his head. Diss Debar would make some moves with her hand across the surface and suddenly the blank canvas or board would reveal the face of a deceased loved one, or someone unknown to Marsh. There was no doubt they were freshly painted, insisted Marsh to his bewildered audience, since the canvas was always wet and sticky, and took a few days to dry.

His house, he told them, was now consecrated to ‘The Temple of the Spirits’, and the High Priestess of the temple was Editha Diss Debar. While Marsh lived in one room, Diss Debar and her husband, children, and a few of her friends occupied the rest of the large home, at Marsh’s expense. Not only was Marsh funding this large retinue, but he had deeded the mansion to Diss Debar, and she had mortgaged it at almost its full value. Marsh had also given over to her the majority of the rest of his property.

When news of Marsh’s generosity to Diss Debar was published, his friends urged him to regain control of his home and property. Rejecting their advice, Marsh went so far as to hire a hall so that Diss Debar could publicly demonstrate her supernatural powers before a large audience. The auspicious date for this performance was April 1st.

The thousands who turned up expected to see some sleek, svelte beauty, much like her mother Lola Montez, the dancer whose beauty so fascinated King Ludwig of Bavaria that he abdicated in order to be with her. But the woman who took to the stage of the hall was quite different in appearance. Looking much older than she was, with an unprepossessing face, she was a plump, short woman, wrapped in yards of pale fabric.

The display of her spiritual abilities brought little other than laughter from the audience. The famed spirit paintings brought the most laughter, since the audience thought them amateurish daubs.

Marsh was unperturbed. But a group of members of the New York Bar association brought a private prosecution against Diss Debar for fraud.

Diss Debar was no stranger to court appearances. She’d been summoned plenty of times before to answer charges. Her usual tactic was to proclaim her spiritual supremacy, via the many guides she claimed to have, and bombastically, and repeatedly, lie.

But this time she was up against William F. Howe and Abraham Hummel, two of the most ruthless prosecutors in New York. On the first day of the trial, in a courtroom full of the so-called ‘spirit paintings’, the attorneys called a star witness — George Salomon. And what made his testimony so vital? He was Diss Debar’s brother. Only she wasn’t, as he went on to testify, Editha Diss Debar.

Her real name, he said, was Anne O’Delia Salomon. All other names and titles she had gone by, including the Countess of Langfeldt, Princess Editha, and Lolita Montez, were phony. She was not the child of a king and a famed dancer, nor any of the other things she claimed, but had been born in rural Kentucky. She had been a troublesome child, behaved like a young demon, driven her parents and siblings mad, had disappeared when about fifteen, and then claimed in a letter that she had married a Frenchman (whom she casually declined to name) and was living in New York. Shortly after this, she was back in her Kentucky home, declaring her anonymous husband dead. Dead husbands would be a common thread in Anne O’Delia’s life.

In 1870 she left home again, for the last time. She went back to New York where two things happened. First she met someone calling himself General Joseph Diss Debar. He was a Philadelphian hack artist, and had a wife and children in that city. But Anne and he began to present themselves as man and wife. ‘General’ Diss Debar is not to be confused (as he occasionally is) with the Frenchman of the same name who designed the seal and the coat of arms for the state of West Virginia. Our Joseph Diss Debar had no design skills, and few painterly ones.

The other thing that happened was that the lawyer who was handling the estate of the late Lola Montez was besieged by someone claiming to be the daughter Lola had adopted. This young woman insisted on her right to the estate of the dancer. It was true that Lola had adopted a young girl, who she had placed in a convent and had hardly seen. But was this persistent nuisance who plagued Montez’s lawyer really the adopted daughter?

No. She was Anne O’Delia Salomon. Still, the lawyer was so desperate to get this creature off his back, he paid her several hundred dollars to leave him alone and never bother him again. Anne took the money, and used the connection to establish herself as the daughter of Lola, changing her age to match the real daughter’s details and, from then on, insisting that she was of royal birth.

— — — — —

The trial in New York did not got go well for Diss Debar. Ever eager to make as much money as quickly as she could, Diss Debar had foolishly discussed with a theatrical agent the idea of her performing publicly for profit. The agent reported to the court not only how much she told him she could get out of Marsh in total (the then vast sum of $150,000) but that she also showed him the tiny upstairs room in Marsh’s house where ‘General’ Diss Debar was churning out all the spirit paintings. (The ‘General’ had not been amused at being disturbed in his work.) Mrs. Diss Debar had then tried to seduce the agent, and he was so taken aback by her approaches (the details of which were only whispered to the judge, who declared them unfit to be heard in open court) that he refused to join her in the robbing of the old lawyer.

The prosecution next brought in a well-known magician, Carl Hertz, ‘The King of Cards’. He claimed he could reproduce the supposedly mystical occurrences Diss Debar had performed. Just as sensitive to the theatrical nature of this revelation, the prosecutors insisted that the poor dupe, Luther Marsh, be forced to take part in the exposé.

Hertz plainly (and for Marsh, painfully) showed the court how Ms. Diss Debar had instantly produced reams of ‘spirit writing’ on previously blank pages. Diss Debar, clearly aware of the fundamentals of the trick, tried to warn Marsh from her position in the dock. But Hertz, as a conjuror used to performing with the public, was easily able to continue and successfully carry out the trick. The audience in the court room erupted. Marsh looked resolutely unimpressed.

And Diss Debar went “as red as a peony”, as one newspaper reported.

Continuing with their theatrical approach to the prosecution, the two attorneys next called an art expert to evaluate the spirit paintings. The expert, Augustus Friedlander, could have come straight from central casting. He had a high forehead, a Vandyke beard, and rested his pince nez on his fine nose. He wasted no time in pronouncing all of the spirit paintings as the worst art he had even seen. The nicest thing he could say about any of them was that they were “vile”. The anatomy was appalling, he said; the paintings were absolutely worthless.

Marsh was fuming at this disrespect to his sacred collection. He challenged the prosecution to produce someone else who could make paintings appear instantaneously. This was rather foolish of him, for the very next day, the prosecution did just that.

David Carvalho was a librarian, and an expert on photography. He took the stand holding a large, rolled up piece of paper. The paper was unrolled and handed round for people to examine. All declared it to be blank. The prosecution returned the paper to Carvalho and asked him if it was possible to instantaneously produce an image on it. Carvalho said it was, since it was a simple matter of chemistry. The prosecution asked the judge if he would allow it to have a glass of water to demonstrate. The judge agreed.

Dipping a sponge into the water, Carvalho wiped it across the surface of the paper, and immediately a portrait of the actress Adelaide Neilson appeared. Members of the public in the court burst into applause, while the defendants scowled. The prosecution had chosen the subject of the painting well. Marsh had been an ardent admire of the actress and was distressed by her early death. Early on in their relationship Diss Debar had also produced a painting of Neilson for Marsh, confirming her ability to connect with the dead.

The defense did what it could to make a case for the genuine nature of Diss Debar’s powers and the authenticity of the paintings. But the defendants hardly helped. The ‘General’ had to admit that he was not a general, that he had a wife and children in Philadelphia, that he was not married to Editha, and that yes, he had bought paints and canvas, and was an amateur artist.

Editha took the stand and shouted at the judge, her own lawyer, called everyone involved in the case a liar, and insisted on her royal birth. Even when the prosecution brought out the Salomon family bible with her name and date of birth in it, she denied she was Anne O’Delia Salomon. She maintained she had a direct line to the spirit world and told the court that one of her guides­ — Cicero, the famed Roman orator — had ordered her to hand back Marsh’s properties to him. But it was too late.

The judge took little time to declare the ‘General’ and his partner guilty. He sent them off to prison while they awaited trial by Grand Jury.

Marsh, horrified that he had been giving shelter to an adulterous couple, cut all contact with Diss Debar. But not from spiritualism. He was later conned by another female medium.

The Grand Jury trial was pedestrian by comparison to the earlier hearing, but the jury found the defendants guilty of conspiracy to defraud, and they were sent to prison for six months.

— — — — —

Someone as brazen and as determined a shyster as Diss Debar wasn’t going to be daunted by six months in a New York prison. Early on in her sentence she told visiting reporters that on her release she would pass on what wisdom the mighty Socrates and Plato (two of her many spirit guides) had given her while she carried out her prison work duties — sewing shrouds for the dead of the city. Even while in prison it seems, her work still connected her with those who had passed on before.

Diss Debar’s constant allusions to the classical world (Cicero, Appius, Socrates, Plato, etc.) served her well, initially. Luther Marsh (a colleague of the famed lawyer and statesman Daniel Webster) was steeped in the classics and would have reveled in the intimacy Diss Debar claimed to have with the great and the good of ancient Rome and Greece.

But she leant too heavily on them as time went on over the period of the trials, and occasionally could not tell her Sophocles from her Socrates. How the bad tempered little rascal of rural Kentucky, with her rudimentary schooling, got to know as much as she did about the classics is just one more of the many mysteries about the woman who had so many names, and who seemed so incapable of telling the truth.

On her release from prison, Diss Debar did not immediately pass her on her Platonic or Socratic knowledge. She had a brief, and painful, attempt at a stage career playing Cupid, her considerable girth squeezed into unflattering tights. Shortly after this she announced in a letter to New York newspapers her intention to commit suicide by jumping off the Staten Island ferry. While journalists scoured the morgues and the river for signs of her body, the police and even her own attorneys were much more relaxed. Chief Murphy at the Jersey City Police Headquarters said he would be making no effort to find the mortal remains of the con-woman. “Do I believe she has jumped into the bay?” he said in response to a question from a reporter, “No sir. She has just concluded to seek new pastures.” Her attorneys were even less concerned. Diss Debar had registered in a Jersey City hotel as Baroness Rosenthal (Rosenthal was the surname of one her attorneys). They dismissed their client as a crank and said it was more likely that she was trying to avoid paying her hotel bill than trying to kill herself.

It was believed by some that Diss Debar may have committed suicide, for no sign of her was seen for many months. But there was a more straightforward explanation. She had been in prison for a year, again for her spiritualist cons. This time, after being released, Diss Debar didn’t stick around in America. She travelled to Europe, where, in 1892, she was deported from Italy for a large scale spiritualist con of expatriate Americans in Rome. By 1893 Diss Debar, then calling herself Vera Ava, or A-Deeva Veed-Ya, was sentenced in Illinois to two years in jail for theft. At her trial she denied being Diss Debar, but was not believed.

Diss Debar was very familiar with court appearances, jail residencies, and aliases. Before the Marsh case, in 1871, she was in court for stabbing a doctor who was treating her in a hospital. After a spell in an asylum, she was released, and married a colleague of the doctor she had stabbed. That husband, Paul Massant, died shortly afterwards. The man she married on her release from prison in Illinois, a wealthy Chicagoan named William McGowan, also died shortly after their wedding. It seems it was quite risky to wed the woman with multiple identities, if you fell for one of her outrageous narratives about who she was.

Diss Debar told many different tales about herself. She used a traditional con trick of presenting herself, with all the trappings of wealth, in new towns to new groups of people, befriending them, then disclosing that she was temporarily short of funds. Once she had persuaded her new friends to loan her some cash, she would move on to the next bunch of suckers. She faked her death several times, usually to avoid debts or prison. On one occasion she was roused from her apparent deathbed by a suspicious priest — brought in to give her the last rites — who talked loudly of placing a hot iron close to her face. Diss Debar suddenly made a miraculous recovery, fought off the priest and two attendant nuns who tried to restrain her, and made her escape.

Next: In part two of The King of Bavaria’s Daughter: The Order Of The Crystal Sea, and The Return Of Christ