All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 12, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:03:38
Edition 276 - The Bangs Sisters

US researcher N. Riley Heagerty on two very unusual medium-sisters...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Before I do anything, I just want to say I'm sorry for the delay in getting the last show out to you.
We should be more or less back on track now.
One or two things going on in my life at the moment that I won't bore you with, but they've tended to take the wind out of my sails very slightly and slow down the progress of a few things, including this show.
But as I say, I'm hoping that we're back on track now.
I'll keep you posted.
I'm going to do some shout-outs on this edition.
I've been catching up with those.
Had so many emails in both to the online show here and the radio show at Talk Radio.
If I don't get a chance to mention you this time, please know that I do see and read every email as it comes in.
And I either do a shout-out here or I'll reply to you personally.
But I see all of the emails if you don't hear your name here.
And thank you for getting in touch.
If you want to get in touch with me, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
And the way to do that is to go to the website designed by Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, the website theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link from there.
And if you can make a donation as we come to the end of this year, that would be great to help this work continue.
The guest on this show is somebody that I discovered totally by chance.
His name is N. Riley Haggerty.
And he is a terrific author.
He's going to tell you a tale about the Bangs sisters, who were legendary mediums in the Chicago area, and a number of other things as well.
I like him a lot.
I'd no idea who he was until very recently.
So thanks to John at White Crow Books for alerting me to N. Riley Haggerty.
Riley, he's on this edition.
I think you're going to love him.
Nice man.
Okay, shout outs.
Paul in Tasmania, thank you for your nice email.
Damien in Dorset, nice words on recent shows.
Thanks, Damien.
Michael in Dublin says, keep up the good work.
Thank you, Michael.
You know that I worked in Dublin on Radio Nova a long time ago.
Triona, Jeffrey Doherty, was on the radio show, Triona.
I'm going to try and put the recording of that on the podcast when I get a chance.
I've got a lot of stuff from the radio show I want to put out on here.
From Josh.
Josh has started listening to your show when you started on talk radio.
Now subscribe to the podcast and working my way through all of them.
Just to say thanks for a great show.
Thank you, Josh.
Your feedback, very important.
Bill Haidt in Georgia.
Do I know a good literary agent?
I'm sorry, Bill, I don't.
But I guess it's one of those things.
It's a combination of word of mouth, isn't it?
And checking on Google.
And if you find a good one, I've still got my life story, which I wrote a few years ago, all the people that I've met.
And I published it in a trade publication for radio, but I always wanted to write that book because I know the stories.
Well, quite a few of them anyway.
Aaron in Canada, the best of the radio show, Aaron, as I say, will appear here.
Sean Minor in San Jose, great suggestions.
Thank you for that.
Jay Palmer, nice to hear from you again.
Ivy Pine in Massachusetts.
Thanks for the email.
Liam in Chester, monitoring radar for UFOs and not finding any yet.
You might.
And if you do, please get in touch with me first.
James says, hello there, fellow Scouser Howard.
I'm going to be watching the Marilyn Monroe documentary.
You liked the show that I did with Paul Davids.
He was good, wasn't he?
And James, thank you very much.
As we say, in my home city.
Tim in Funk, Nebraska.
Nice to hear from you again.
Can you tell me the Twitter account for Talk Radio?
It's at Talk Radio.
Okay, the show is on Sunday nights.
Who else?
Eddie in Newcastle enjoyed the show with Eric von Daniken.
The only problem, says Eddie, I have with him, is his conclusions.
Why do these ancient advancements in human endeavor and knowledge have to be down to extraterrestrial intervention, says Eddie in Newcastle?
I don't know, Eddie.
But that is something that Eric von Daniken has been saying for 40 odd years, isn't it?
So, you know, that's his stock in trade, isn't it?
That's what he's been saying.
I think he's written 38 books, something like that now.
James, thank you for the story that you sent me, the true life story.
I'm going to try and do something more about that.
So watch this space.
Guest suggestion from Robert Dowd suggests Douglas Robinson, the writer of the Silently series storyline.
Stories about a modern-day vampiric girl named Mikan or Majken and their relationship with a young man who soon becomes vampiric because he was exposed to her blood.
Sounds like a hammer horror.
One of those hammer horror films.
Thank you for that.
And Stephen Worthing, nice to hear from you.
That's it.
If you want to get in touch, go to the website theunexplained.tv and you can get in touch with me through there.
Let's get to the guest now.
Very near Canada in the US, about as far in America as you can go without getting into Canada.
N. Riley Hegerty is his name.
And Riley, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
Hi, thank you for having me.
We've got a lot to talk about.
But first of all, I want to talk about your location, Riley, because you described it briefly before we started recording, and it sounds fabulous.
You are as close to Canada as you can possibly get without being in Canada.
That's correct.
We're in a little city called Oswigo.
It's only about 17,000 people.
We're situated right on Lake Ontario.
I can see the lake from my front lawn.
It's only about a mile away.
And it's 16 miles across the lake is Kingston, Canada.
You know, I've always wondered, I've got a fascination with that whole area, that whole area of the U.S. You know, it's a little cold for me, but I want to visit properly.
The nearest I've been is Portland, Maine.
That's about as far as I got.
I did the downeaster from Boston all the way up.
I know you're in a different part.
But I'm curious to know, what is the influence of Canada?
If you live and maybe have grown up in an area like that, and you have another country like Canada on your doorstep, does their media, their people, do they affect you?
Do they impact on you?
Do you feel a bit Canadian?
No, no.
Canadians come over here once in a while and you can sort of they Seem to stand out, but not very much.
We don't have too much of an effect from Canada in our country, certainly not in Oswigo.
I know some of them come to here to go to the state university.
But that's about it.
We don't have any big influence from Canada.
They're quiet neighbors and they mind their own business.
Okay, well, there you are.
There goes my thoughts about that because I thought people were crossing the border and constantly in each other's pockets.
No, they're not.
Quick story to tell before we...
A lot of people do cross the border.
I mean, we've crossed the border several times to go to Canada.
But we have Niagara Falls in that section of Canada, and of course in Buffalo.
But anyways, Canada is an influence, but they seem to state it themselves.
All I know about that area is most of my life is referenced to radio.
There was a great radio station, I think it still exists, C-K-L-W.
You aware of that?
I remember it when I was younger.
Right.
Okay.
Okay.
One quick story to tell before we get into the fascinating tale that we're about to tell, and that is about your connection with the United Kingdom.
I know you love this country, and you proposed to your now wife, Caroline Wright, in Trafalgar Square in London.
That's great.
In 1999, because I had been to England in 1996 twice, and then Caroline and I went back in 1997, and then 1998.
And two of the previous times I had gone and lectured in England on the Bang sisters.
The Bang sisters are what we're about to talk about.
So it sounds to me as if a big portion of your life, including your personal life, is tied up with them and their story.
Yes, that's one of the subjects that I write about.
But England, of course, my father was a world history teacher for 50 years.
And he was also a World War II veteran.
And of course, you have the Beatles.
I was a professional musician for more than 20 years, signed to an agency in Philadelphia.
And the very start of my musical career was when the Beatles came out on the Ed Sullivan show.
Wow.
Back in 65, I think it was.
And I always said to myself, one day I will go to England.
I'll get off the plane and kiss the ground.
And I did.
Well, I'm glad you came.
I'm from Liverpool, so the Beatles ask me any question, but we'll do that when we're not recording.
Okay.
The Bang sisters.
I've done a little bit of reading about them.
This is a tale of mediumship on a quite extraordinary level from a different era.
I'm going to let you lead me through the story.
Who were they first off?
There were two sisters.
They were born in Chicago in the United States, Elizabeth and May.
Elizabeth was born in 1859.
May was born in 1862.
And this is the case where mediumship showed itself very early on.
And there's eyewitness accounts by the family members that even when they were toddlers, there was rappings throughout the house, voices from nowhere.
The furniture started to move.
And the father was a simple tinsmith.
The mother was just a homemaker.
And so as far as you're aware, Riley, there was no background to anything, you know, to anything like this.
The family weren't involved in seances and that sort of thing.
These girls literally just had this themselves.
They did.
But the family, the parents were sympathetic, thank goodness, and realized the manifestations happening early on and then helped to develop the girls.
Nobody else in the family demonstrated any other mediumistic gifts.
But I've said this before in other interviews, that thank goodness that the parents were sympathetic towards their mediumship, because you can just imagine how many children, mediums, probably thousands and thousands throughout historic spiritualism, showed gifts of mediumship early on.
and the parents with strict orthodox beliefs probably considered it the work of the devil.
In other words, how were they received where they were?
Well, from what I can gather, they did have a sympathetic neighborhood and friends, but of course, the critics were around every corner.
And one thing is that there's so little written about so many of the great mediums, it took a long, long time to unearth the material for the Bangs sisters.
I just happened to find in the book by Emma Harding Britton, 19th Century Miracles, a statement by the mother, Moreau Bangs, about the early days of the children.
But they were in an area of Chicago where there was no coal, coal mines of any kind.
In the early days, coal would drop from the ceiling onto the floor and come into the windows, supposedly, but the windows that were closed, big chunks of coal in the living room.
This is one of the early manifestations for the children.
And then from there, furniture started to move, and like I told you, all those little things started to happen.
It took many years before they started to demonstrate the precipitated portraits.
The precipitated portraits.
Correct.
Talk to me about those.
Well, as I said, May was born in 1862, Elizabeth 1859.
So throughout the childhood, the early manifestations, clairvoyance, clairaudience.
And what I'm assuming is that through their clairaudience and clairvoyance, they were instructed by the spirits eventually to start sitting for the portraits because the portraits didn't start manifesting until 1894.
That's quite a ways from the time they were born.
So, in the early stages, it took several sittings on a blank canvas, and sometimes the canvas would be enclosed in a curtained-off area of the room or nailed into a box.
Several sittings were required.
But as time went on, less and less time was involved, and enclosed in a box wasn't required.
And then the classic Bang Sisters sittings were, which is most evidential, that the sitters could bring their own canvases to the Bang Sisters' house in Chicago, or they held camps, they held cottages at the famous spiritualist community of Lilydale in New York and also Camp Chesterfield in Indiana.
But the blank canvases brought by the sitters is highly, highly evidential.
Explain to me the mechanics of how that works.
So I would go there and I would say, paint me a picture, and they would enclose my canvas that I would take there, and somehow a picture of me would appear.
Is that so?
Well, let's say, Howard, you had a deceased relative that you were interested in having a picture precipitated.
You could see the process from the beginning to end.
You could go to the store and buy your own canvas, 30 by 20, standard size, bring it to the Baying Sisters' house, and the Bang sisters would have a table set up by a window, small table.
They would lean the canvas against the window, and then they would pull the curtains along the side of the canvas so that the only light coming through the room would be through the canvas.
One sister would sit on one side of the canvas and one sister on the other.
They would take and pinch the canvas with their index finger and thumb, and the sitter would sit at the end of the table, literally a few feet away, with no photograph and no discussion of anything.
Before the astonished eyes of the sitter, a portrait would slowly precipitate onto the canvas.
In most cases, the spirit artist would make preliminary sketches first, and then it would disappear, and then back again it would come and then disappear.
Slowly, in the standard bang sitting, slowly a bust would appear and the head, eyes would be closed, and then slowly there in front of the sitter would be the very person precipitated from the spirit world, and the eyes in most cases would suddenly open.
I can't imagine sitting there and experiencing such a thing.
And how many independent accounts of that are you aware of?
Have you seen?
Once again, because of the dreadfully small amount of material written about the Bang sisters, I would imagine there was thousands and thousands of portraits done because their heyday, I want to say, was 25, 30 years.
In one instance, in 1905, in Kansas City, they exhibited 100 precipitated portraits were exhibited on easels.
And they sat for probably hundreds every year of portraits.
Now, of course, we didn't in those days have the investigative techniques that we have today, and there wasn't even the desire, perhaps, to investigate quite as there is today.
And it was seen as being a black art and black magic and a bad thing by many people, especially religious people.
Were they investigated at all?
Did anybody, perhaps from a newspaper, make any attempt to check them out?
They were the most vilified of all mediums.
Back in the day, turn of the century, the conjuring fraternity, magicians, illusionists.
In those days, they were like rock stars.
They would put on these very dramatic exhibitions in front of audiences and thrill the audience with their illusions.
When the bang sisters started manifesting their portraits, this drove the conjuring fraternity crazy.
And they would do anything to replicate the bang sisters' portraits.
Numerous attempts were made to duplicate the bangs.
And they were attacked viciously in the newspapers.
And it was never-ending, the hate that was sent their way.
Well, you know, in this era, we think about the work of James Randy, who's done a lot of good work exposing fake mediums and fakes of various kinds over the years.
It sounds to me as if they were being put under the same sort of scrutiny as he and people like him would put today's questionable mediums, psychics, whatever under.
On a daily basis, it seems they were attacked because the conjuring fraternity, I don't think they cared about whether it was true or not with the Bank Sisters.
I think that they were all searching for a new version of some illusion which they could present on the stage.
And many attempts were made.
I understand.
So it was a completely different process then, Riley.
Sorry to interrupt.
It wasn't a question of necessarily debunking them.
The magicians, and magic was a big, big thing back then, wanted to find out how they were doing it so that they could go and take it around the country themselves.
The magicians, that's right.
That's exactly right.
It was a burlesque version of what the bank sisters were really doing.
But back in the day, once again, because of their star power, they had a bully pulpit.
They could sway the public and they could sway the press.
And the basic theory by the conjurers was if they could duplicate anything that any medium did, that conclusively would prove that the mediums were fraud, frauds.
And of course, this is ridiculous.
Because in my book, all of these conjurers, including David Abbott, who was a very well-known exposer of mediums, and he was an amateur magician, none of these people ever took the time to sit with the Bank Sisters, but they declared from the rooftops the Bank Sisters were frauds.
But to expose a medium back in the heyday of spiritualism was a big deal.
It would add a lot of notoriety to someone's name if you could expose a medium.
But I've said it in the beginning, and I'll say it again, that nobody, none of these people sat with the Bank Sisters.
And that's outrageous as far as I'm concerned.
And of course, I suppose it was a little easier in those days to have your say because people were not as aware of the law, of defamation and all the rest of it.
So I guess it really was a free-for-all, and free speech meant you could say whatever you wanted.
That's correct.
You could say whatever you wanted, and the mediums were blindsided by a lot of this because the people would be swayed.
If someone declared that the ancestors were fraud, in most cases, except for the spiritualists, the public would believe it.
If someone said, aha, like David Abbott mentioned earlier, he published a book, The Spirit Portrait Mystery, Its Final Solution.
And he has a little booklet.
And an inordinate amount of time was spent by this man to try to figure out the exact method of what the Bang Sisters he said used, which was portraits prepared beforehand, the Bang Sisters securing a photograph of the deceased person beforehand.
None of this was true, but he published his findings without ever having sat with the Bang Sisters.
That's outrageous.
You're very passionate about them.
I can hear that.
And it's been a great preoccupation of yours.
You say that their reputation was reduced and they were attacked at every turn.
Can you be absolutely sure that they hadn't found some elaborate way?
Don't forget, we're talking about a pair of sisters here, obviously very close.
If anybody's going to perpetrate a fake, if anybody's going to pull off a trick, then two very close people can do that, working in collusion.
Anything is possible, Howard, but in every profession there's frauds, even now.
But I've always said this about physical mediums.
Why would they put themselves through the hatred, the public abuse, which was never ending with the Bang sisters?
Why would they put themselves through this unless they were true mediums?
Why wouldn't they just declare themselves as Lizzie and May Bangs, the great illusionists, and make millions of dollars?
No, they held their ground and they withstood the public abuse.
And that to me is very evidential.
Why wouldn't they just declare themselves illusionists?
How did they chance upon this, I say chance, how did they come upon this thing of portraits?
You know, some mediums materialized trumpets.
Some mediums will give you an in-depth description of your dead uncle Frank.
Some mediums will do automatic writing.
Why were they doing portraits?
I think because they were developed as clairvoyants early in their lives, that they were instructed by their spirit controls, because there's no definitive explanation of how this came about.
So one has to assume that through their clairvoyance, they were instructed by their spirit guides to start doing portraits.
And the only other people to have accomplished this were the Campbell brothers, who also resided at Lilydale Portraits.
But the chemistry of the whole thing in these modern days, there has never been an explanation of really what the material, the media used by the spirits is.
I've examined almost 40 of these portraits up close, and it resembles to me as if you took the dry cigar ash and put it in your palm of your hand, then crushed it.
That fine, fine dust is what the portraits look like.
But one of the most beautiful descriptions is that it resembles the fine dust of a butterfly's wings.
Howard, there's no brushstrokes on these portraits.
It looks as if they're precipitated yesterday, and most of them are 120 years old or more.
It's truly astounding.
And in my book, there's a section that deals with minutely the description of these beautiful portraits.
But the media has never been discovered what it is.
It's not pastel, crayon, charcoal.
No one knows what it is, even to this day.
And has any modern-day scientist attempted to analyze the material on any of those canvases?
Yes, but they still can't explain really what it is.
They can only say it resembles certain substances, but no one knows.
You've talked a lot about what they can do and what they were able to do and what they were able to demonstrate.
You haven't said a lot about them as people.
Were they quite often, you know, sisters, brothers and brothers and sisters and sisters can be very different from each other.
What sort of people were they?
I don't really know.
There's not much written about their personalities.
But the impression I get is that because of the outlandish hatred sent their way by the press and many people in the public and the Orthodox, the church, that Lizzie Banks was a rattlesnake in defense of Banks.
You seem to be getting some SMS texts through.
Someone just tested my phone.
Sorry.
I can tell them it works.
Unfortunately, there's not much written about them.
But what I can gather from they were very generous And they were hurt by the public abuse, but they stood their ground.
But I got the impression that Lizzie Bangs was a rattlesnake who would stand up for them, the Bangs sisters.
But there's not much about how they got along themselves.
And how the family coped with the pressure.
There's not much written about that either.
The mother just said that they did the best they could and developed the girls in their house, but the word got out.
I mean, the word was everywhere about, especially the children.
So people flocked to their house.
But the neighbors were sympathetic towards the Bang sisters, thank goodness, because can you imagine if they weren't surrounded by sympathetic people, they would have been consigned to a mental institution because they would say diabolical happenings at the Bangs house.
But they seemed to be protected by the family and their friends and the spiritualists, thank goodness for that.
How did they live?
Did they make a lot of money out of the appearances that they gave, you know, the number of sitters they had?
I think so, because back in the turn of the century, it was said that they would charge up to $30 for a portrait.
And they held, they were famous at the spiritualist communities of Camp Chesterfield, Indiana, and Lilydale.
And Lilydale, and back in 1992, I want to say, that is where I first discovered the bank's portraits.
That's what got me started.
But some of the portraits, Howard, were enormous.
There's one of Queen Victoria exhibited at the Hett Memorial Art Gallery in Indiana, Camp Chesterfield.
It's almost six feet tall by three feet wide.
It's truly astounding.
I can't imagine that experience.
So the way that you describe the appearance of these things, the way the picture appears, is almost like the way a brass rubbing appears.
You know that there are people in this country who go to cathedrals and they put a piece of paper over a tomb and then they take a rubbing of what's beneath there.
It almost sounds like the image appeared in that way.
I'm going to read from you a little excerpt.
Is that okay?
Absolutely great.
This is made by Mr. John Payne.
He was the director of the Citizens Bank in Indiana.
He's talking about his portrait.
It was made in the daytime in an ordinary room that was not darkened.
The frame containing the canvas sat on a stand before the window.
Mrs. Charles Payne and Mr. John Wiesner, who do not believe in spiritualism, were with me, and we sat within five feet of the picture.
The two bang sisters, the mediums through whom the likeness was produced, sat at either side of the table and supported the frame, each with one hand.
No brushes, paint, crayon, or other substance of any kind was used, as far as we could tell, and it was light enough to have seen a pin on the table.
The sisters had never seen or heard of my father, nor a photograph or likeness of him.
All they asked was that I fix his features in my mind.
The picture was not made in spots or a little at a time.
At first it was a faint shadow, then a wave appeared to sweep across the canvas, and the likeness became plainer.
It was a good deal like a sunrise, got brighter until it was perfectly plain and every feature visible.
Until the picture was completed, the eyes were closed, and then they opened all at once, like a person awakening.
It did not take more than a half hour, and is the best picture of my father we ever had.
I do not pretend to say how it was done, simply that the picture was produced before our eyes without the mediums having ever seen a photograph or other copy.
Well, that's an astonishing account.
Of course, we know that people, although the skeptics would have taken a hard line and not even bothered to go and investigate, but we do know that through the years, it has been possible to pull the wool over people's eyes.
I mean, even quite recently in the UK, there was a case of somebody being outed, I think, by a newspaper, doing seance sessions and, you know, the whole thing about the floating trumpet and all the rest of it.
And they used a night vision camera to prove that it was all complete fakery.
Back then, there were no night vision cameras and there were no scientific techniques.
But from that account that you've just given me and from what you've said about other people's accounts, it seems that they were all absolutely convinced.
Oh, positively.
You know, I approach all of this first as a skeptic, and then I spend years in the research.
And I've always said that my findings are based on my own research.
I do not say that this is the be-all to end-all, but from what I have gathered over years, that it's hard to discount people's eyewitness accounts of people that were of unimpeachable characters.
And there is several, several in the book.
I don't know how anybody can deny someone bringing their own canvas to the Bang Sisters and the Bang Sisters never having seen a photograph or anything.
And there before the astonished sitter is the life-size portrait of their deceased loved one.
There's one instance in the book of a Dr. Doherty who went to the Bang Sisters at Lilydale.
It was either Lilydale or Chicago.
A blank canvas.
The doctor was going there in the hopes of receiving a portrait of his deceased wife.
The Bang sisters conducted the sitting.
They put the picture up by the window and there slowly precipitated onto the canvas his wife.
So Dr. Dougherty puts the canvas down by the table after it was finished and was carrying on a discourse with the Bang sisters before taking his leave.
In the meantime, while it was sitting on the floor by the table, the spirit artist precipitated onto the canvas, unbeknownst to him, his two deceased daughters and him.
So when he picked up the portrait to get ready to go, it was himself, his wife, and two daughters on their canvas.
And this canvas is The picture of it's in the book, and I've seen it up close in Camp Chesterfield.
It is truly astonishing.
How could any skeptic explain that one?
Isn't it odd, though?
Unless, of course, you tell me different, that whatever, if we assume there was some kind of agency doing this through them or around them, that that agency, spirit, whatever you want to call it, did not make its presence felt in any other way.
I mean, on a very basic level, didn't sign the canvas or didn't make any noise or shift any objects in the room or do anything else, unless you tell me that that did happen.
Well, this is only a theory put forth by spirits, but there's no conclusive proof.
But it was said by the spirit artists that Raphael and Rembrandt were partially responsible for some of these portraits, but that can't be proved.
Well, I wonder if it's possible to research whether some of them are after either of those artists' styles.
That would be a fascinating line of research, wouldn't it?
I'm told that it's a remarkable likeness to the style used by Rembrandt and Raphael.
But once again, you know, we have no definitive proof of this.
All I know is that it's highly evidential to me as a researcher that someone could bring a blank canvas to the sisters or pick one out of dozens that they usually had at their house and examine it in the light.
And a lot of the sitters, they put a mark on the canvas themselves or signed it themselves to be sure it was the same canvas.
It does sound remarkable.
As kids, I should have asked this at the beginning.
Did they display any artistic ability?
No, no.
I had a researcher from Lilydale look into that, and because once again, of the scant amount of information on the Bang sisters, it appears as though they had ordinary education.
There's no mention of art.
And to reproduce something this beautiful and elaborate, you would have to have gone to an art school.
This is not something that you can make up in your bedroom.
The assistors exhibited no signs of artistic ability and their upbringing.
They became, as you said.
Sorry, you were saying?
Once again, any researcher will tell you when you go to document the great mediums, it's unfortunate there's so little information.
You have to really, really stay with it for a long time.
And the Bang sisters, they had a normal education at the elementary schools in Chicago, but there's no mention of art of any kind in their lives.
Nothing.
And what about them?
How did their lives and career progress as they got older?
Did they continue doing just the same stuff?
Did they become more adventurous?
Did they lose interest in it?
How did they, you said they did it, what, three decades or more?
How did they develop?
Well, they were also two of the finest mediums in the world, in my opinion, for what is called independent writing.
This is precipitated writing, usually done essentially, they would have slates, two slates that are hinged together, your ordinary early school slates.
And the sitter, in most of the astounding cases, could bring blank sheets of paper to the bank sister's house.
Or they could, before entering the bank's house, they could write down questions on blank sheets of paper, fold them in an envelope, stamp their seal on it, and bring that to the sitting.
The bank sisters would invariably put the envelope in between the slates.
The sitter could put their hand on top of the slates.
One or both bank sisters could be there.
And then after minutes, a tap, tap, tap would happen onto the slates.
The sitter could take their envelope and go into another room and read four to five filled responses from the spirits on these blank sheets, which were formerly blank, now filled with writing from the spirit.
It's almost equally as astonishing as the portraits themselves.
And unless I've got this wrong, both the portraiture and this, these things were not done in darkened rooms.
You know, darkened rooms, we get very skeptical about darkened rooms because you can do anything in a darkened room.
Is that so?
Full light.
It's no darkness involved whatsoever.
Because if we look back at some of the great fakes, and I had the great pleasure of interviewing a woman who'd investigated mediumship in Liverpool in the 1930s and 40s.
She was a deputy headmistress of a school in Liverpool and a very educated, very well-spoken woman.
She told me some stories of the great age of mediumship in Liverpool, like in the 1940s in wartime, and everybody flocked to a woman called Mrs. French.
Now, from what I understood about Mrs. French, and I would be interested if anybody knows any more about Mrs. French, but I was told this story more than 25 years ago when I was just a kid starting to research all of this.
But the way that Lola McNaught, this deputy head teacher, told the story, people would go to this place in Liverpool and the lights would be turned out and they would be touched on the arm by a small child in instances, the spirit of a child who passed and a trumpet would hang in the air.
Now, all of that done in the dark.
But if the Bang sisters were doing what they were doing in the light, much harder to fake that, isn't it?
Of course.
I mean, it adds a lot to the evidential weight of the case that they worked in the light.
And I say, you know, the mediums that were exposed, all the better for it, then and now.
Like I said, there's frauds around every Corner.
And spiritualism is no exception.
These days, sorry, you were saying the ones that worked in the dark that were frauds and they were caught, all the better for it.
I'm all for it.
There's frauds everywhere.
True enough.
These days, fame means X Factor.
America's Got Talent.
The voice, those sorts of things.
In their era, they were kind of famous from what you say.
What was the peak of their fame?
How did that manifest itself?
Oh, through large audiences.
They had huge followings for the seasons at Lilydale and Camp Chesterfield.
They would have a cottage, and people would come from all over the world.
And then independent writing in their portraits.
I mean, their fame was world famous.
And especially at Lilydale and Camp Chesterfield.
Camp Chesterfield has the Hett Memorial Art Gallery.
And exhibited in the gallery are 26 incredible Bank Sisters portraits.
They resided there at Heedrick Cottage at Camp Chesterfield.
The seasons usually lasted from two to three months.
And people came from all over the world.
And then they would spend a season at Lilydale or spend a season at Camp Chesterfield.
And then they would have their house in Chicago.
So people came from everywhere, everywhere.
Talk to me about their later life, because obviously they, well, I say obviously, I may be wrong in assuming that.
They didn't live to identical ages, so one of them must have died before the other.
And I'm just curious to know what happened around that time as they got older.
There's not much about their lives when they got older.
The deplorable amount of information doesn't say much about their later lives.
I think, well, the one sister, Elizabeth, she passed away in 1920 and May passed away in 1917.
So I think that they just, I think the attacks became so aggressive towards them and the older they got, they slowly just faded away.
That's what I think happened.
And there's not much about their later lives.
I wish I could tell you all about them, but I just don't know because there's so little written about them.
Have you tried or would you like to do some genealogy on them to find out who or their ancestry and who perhaps might be around today who might be able to fill you in a bit more?
The genealogy aspect doesn't interest me that much because you could spend, I could spend my whole life on the Bang sisters.
And the fact that there's probably still hundreds, perhaps thousands of their portraits out there somewhere sitting in someone's attics, basements, some unfortunately consigned to the trash heap.
I could spend my whole life searching out and trying to find portraits and genealogy.
But I'm more interested in having what I think cleared their name of fraud with my book and restored their names to its rightful place in historic spiritualism.
And then moving on to other mediums.
I've got other projects in mind besides the Bangs.
Okay, well, can you give me a flavor of those?
Well, I have a book published before the Bang Sisters.
It's called The French Revelation.
That's about the medium, Emily S. French, from Rochester, who passed away in 1912.
Isn't that strange that the medium in Liverpool, I'm sorry for interrupting with what might be a trivial reflection on this, but the medium in Liverpool that I told you about was called Mrs. French.
How strange.
I know.
I noticed that when you said that.
But Mrs. French was one of the finest independent voice mediums in all of spiritualism.
And I think that my first book is a must-read for all enthusiasts of this subject.
Not because it's my book, but because of the work that was done by Emily French and the famous attorney who investigated her, their entire documented evidence in the sittings they carried on were 22 consecutive years.
It's unprecedented in all of psychic research.
When you say she was investigated by an attorney, is this somebody who was doing it just for his own interest and to hopefully verify the claims, or was this somebody looking to debunk her?
Edward C. Randall was the attorney from Buffalo, New York.
And he was approached by his associates in 1890, and they said there's a magician of the highest class living in Rochester, New York, and she's the cleverest fraud in America.
But none of these people had ever sat with Mrs. French.
So Everett Randall went off from Buffalo to Rochester to visit Mrs. French, and he attended a seance, but he wasn't convinced because he was an agnostic in the beginning of his search.
They sat in a seance, and he heard whispers that were male voices.
He wasn't convinced.
He thought it's too incredible to be true.
So he thought that Mrs. French might be a ventriloquist.
But what worked in her favor was the fact that she was very old and she was extremely hard of hearing.
Edward Randall invited her to come to his house in Buffalo.
And Mrs. French said, nothing would give me more pleasure.
So they went off to his house under his own conditions, and he was completely, completely convinced of her phenomena and became a champion for the cause of spiritualism and spiritual truth.
And they said for 22 consecutive years, he had the mental wherewithal to bring stenographers into the seance room to take down rapid fire in the dark that the spirits were saying.
So the French Revelation, Randall published between 1906 and 1926, five books, which are all extremely rare now and out of print, the exception of a few.
And over the years, I collected all of his work and edited it into one body of work, the French Revelation.
So all of the stenographic records of what the spirits said are in the French Revelation.
But Randall, bringing his legal mind to bear, attracted not only high-level spirits, but he had many, many questions to ask the spirits.
So the book is filled with these stenographic reports.
It's thrilling.
I think it's one of the most important bodies of work that's ever been produced.
It sounds utterly riveting and fascinating.
of all of the evidence within those books, what is, what has been the most startling for you?
What is, what's been the most, What is the most evidential?
Well, many people came through who Ebert Randall knew.
And he, being a master of interrogation of witnesses and sifting of evidence, he was conclusively convinced of who was talking to him.
And he attracted Talmadge, Beecher, Robert Ingersoll, the Indian chief Sagawatha.
And one of his main speakers was a spirit who claimed to be a Dr. Hossack, David Hossack, who was the attending physician of Alexander Hamilton on that fateful day when him and Aaron Burr had the duel, and Aaron Burr shot and killed Hamilton on the banks of New Jersey.
The doctor who claimed to have attended Hamilton was one of Edward Randall's main speakers in the stance room.
But the high level of discourse and, according to Edward Randall, the oratory unmatched that he has ever heard by these spirits.
When you read the book, you can just see the elevating messages and the drama, especially of the subject of the immediate passing of a spirit, which I am greatly interested in, what a spirit sees the moment of death.
The book is filled with drama of that kind.
Can you give me some examples?
I mean, we're all fascinated by that.
I certainly am.
Well, I'll read you first what the spirits had to say.
When Edward Randall asked the control, how do you produce the voices?
The spirit says to Randall, there are in our group seven people, all expert in the handling of the electric and magnetic forces.
And when you and the psychic Mrs. French meet, the vital force that emanates from her personality is gathered up.
We also take physical emanations, substances, from you and the others with you, while we contribute to the mass a certain spirit force.
Now that force, which we gather and distribute, is just as material as any substance that you would gather for any purpose.
It is simply higher in vibration.
We clothe the organs of respiration of the spirit who is to speak, so that his voice will sound in your atmosphere.
And when this condition is brought about, it is just as natural for a spirit as it is for you.
You then have what is known as a direct or independent voice.
That is the voice of a spirit speaking in earth life.
Isn't that incredible?
Not only is it incredible, it's a beautiful piece of prose, isn't it?
Oh, I know.
I know.
I'm looking for the book here.
I mean, just as, you know, even if these were not real people, they're marvelous stories.
Listen to this one.
This is in the Independent Voice taken down by the stenographers.
So you can have the picture of Mrs. French and Everett Randall sitting in the dark.
A spirit comes through, a young lady.
And this is one of the most beautiful I've ever read.
Matter of fact, this little paragraph here I had on the back of my first edition of the French Revelation because it was so beautiful.
She says, sometimes a spirit gravitates as mine did to some lonely church-like hall, a quiet place of inner rest and contemplation where the past resolves itself into shadowy pictures which come and go, mapping out the minutest event, thought, or word of past earthly life.
I saw that ineffaceable record which every soul must read again and again as the past returned with its appropriate judgment.
Listen to these words, Howard.
Many events for which at the time of their occurrence I felt regret I found now as inevitable results of previous acts without which my life would have been incomplete.
Deeds and actions on which I had prided myself now showed the littleness from which they sprang.
Sorrows which had wrung my spirit now appeared as blessings, and thoughts which I had once lamented I find to have been inevitable effects.
I saw myself to be, as it were, a chemical compound, made up of what I have been or what I had done, said, or thought.
All things appeared in judgment, and stranger yet, all that I had and all that I possessed, enjoyed, or saw, the very air I breathed was tinctured by myself, so that I saw, felt, heard, and enjoyed only as my inner nature colored my surroundings.
So that sounds to me like a lot of contemporary accounts of people who pass, and the claim is that it's almost like a great balance sheet for a business.
You're putting everything into balance at the end.
From what I can gather, and this is one of the greatest truths that I have derived from almost 30 years of research, is that there is no orthodox judgment, there is none of this.
The fires of hell, none of it exists.
That who you were, every single thought, Howard, has meaning.
Every thought, word, action, deed is a force of energy that creates a condition that you yourself will inherit at the moment of death.
So that great truth, if it had been distributed throughout the world back in those days, I really think the world would be different right now, especially right now, because it just breeds conscience.
You know, when you know that every thought has meaning and will confront you at the moment of death, I find that to be the great arbiter of truth.
But without a kind of punishment aspect to it, by the sounds of what you just said, what happens is a bringing into balance.
Yeah, the literal.
You know, you could say that hell, quote, you would bring that hell onto yourself.
Or you would bring heaven onto yourself.
They're just terms.
And even Satan or the devil, they're just terms.
You know, there's many so-called Satans walking the earth right now.
But I've always admired that you are your own judge.
You're your own.
Your destiny is through your own actions.
Cause and effect rules the universe.
That's how I've always believed it, and I certainly do now.
Your cases that you've looked at here, the French case and the Bang sisters, they're from history.
Are you not tempted to look at something more contemporary, perhaps next time around?
Contemporary mediums?
Yeah.
Certainly.
I've sat with four of the most internationally known British mediums, actually.
I've sat with them all, the physical mediums.
And it would take some work to get to know all these mediums personally.
One of them has since passed away, the well-known medium Colin Fry from your country.
I know Colin.
Well, I knew Colin.
Yeah, we knew him well.
We went to England twice to see him, and he came back to the States here at our house for Caroline and our wedding.
He was here for more than two weeks, and he spoke at our wedding, and he was a good friend.
He'll be missed.
But we had several sittings.
You know, he used to come on my radio show when The Unexplained was on a national radio station in its first incarnation about 12 years ago.
He would travel up from Sussex about 50 miles or so, and it was evening time that I was on the air.
He would do it at his own expense, and he would appear on the air.
And I'll tell you one thing about him.
I'll always remember him for being, and I'm sure he was like this with you.
Off the air, he was very, I still think of him as being here, but he was very funny.
Oh, extremely so.
I stayed at his house the first time, first actually two times I went to England.
I slept in one of the side rooms at his house, and he was hilarious.
We'd have a few drinks, and of course he changed smoked cigarettes, which was a little bit of a, I had to navigate through that one, but we had a wonderful time.
He took me to Brighton, and we went all over the place.
And when my wife and I visited, he took us on a, we went to see the tour, and we went another trip through Brighton, and we had a wonderful time.
Gone Too Young, I think.
He told me a great story about a traffic warden.
You know, the bane of our lives here, anywhere around London.
You know, the traffic wardens issuing parking tickets right, left, and centre.
And if you're 30 seconds over, they're going to ticket you.
You know, if you're five seconds over, they'll get you and you'll have to pay the fine.
Colin was caught like this, and the way that he told it, the guy wrote the ticket out, and he he was going to, I think he was going to try and resist the temptation, but he didn't resist the temptation.
He told the guy a few things about himself that he couldn't have known.
That was Colin's retort to the guy who just issued him with a parking ticket.
I'll never forget him telling that story.
So I'm delighted that you knew Colin Fry, and I certainly hope that his memory is preserved by people like you.
Oh, absolutely.
He was a good friend.
We were very sad to find out of his passing.
I want to say it was probably due to his smoking, but he lived quite a life.
And I can remember clearly when we first went to England, Caroline and I, to see him, the hotel where we were staying at wanted to charge us an extra day.
And Cowen found that out.
And you should have, he just ripped it up and down with these people.
Antonio, he had no problem standing up for what he thought was right.
Colin was feisty.
He had his critics here, and he had his debunkers here.
He had a TV series, I think was it called Crossing Over on television here in the UK.
And I used to love that show.
I watched that show before I knew him.
And, you know, I thought he was brilliant as a performer.
And certainly he would move, as you know, he would move the people in the audience to tears with the things that he said.
But he had his critics.
I never knew him that well enough to find out how he handled that.
Did you get a sense of that?
I think he had a very solid personality and he didn't care.
He knew the difference between right and wrong and he knew honesty and dishonesty.
He had a very high level of honor about him.
And he was also a very powerful physical medium, you know.
I didn't know that.
Oh, yeah.
We have several, several sittings, dark sances with Cowen, spirits of materialize, independent voice, very powerful physical medium.
I think his clairvoyance is actually more developed than his physical mediumship.
But, you know, all these mediums, I've sat with Cowen, Stuart Alexander, David Thompson, and Warren Taylor.
And, you know, all of them have been attacked by the press.
And that's the way it's always going to be.
Of course, the one thing that the popular press and critics and people who like to laugh and think they're clever like to say, and I know it was said, and Colin would have taken these people on, but when Colin died, there were people who were saying, well, you know, why doesn't he, now that he's crossed over, why doesn't he bring himself back?
Well, I think he will in time.
I mean, time doesn't exist in the spirit world.
So why should he do that?
He'll come back when he wants to.
I mean, that's how I see it.
I mean, he must, it must be, I mean, it's easy for someone to say in the earth plane, why doesn't someone come back, even like my own mother?
But there's one statement here from the French Revelation.
It says this.
The Spirit says, the realities of the spirit world are beyond description.
I might spend hours telling you of it and not reach your minds with any conception of its glory, its greatness, its grandeur.
It is so vast in extent, so marvelous, that any attempt to give you more than a faint idea would be futile.
So I think that the spirits, when they cross over, including our day will come too, Howard, I think it's so incredible that spirits tend to forget about the earth.
They don't, they're so overwhelmed.
I can completely understand how someone would not come back because we, in our little finite world, you know, our expectations of a spirit coming back is nothing compared to the reality of what they must be experiencing.
Jen, I never thought we'd have this conversation, but, you know, my mother and father, I've lost both of them.
And listeners to this show will have followed that process because at the beginning of this show online, I'd just lost my mother and more recently, I lost my dad.
And I've often thought, why don't you come back?
Why don't you show me any signs?
And I've often had this thought, and this is nothing to do with our conversation, and I'll say it really quickly, that there is no concept, as you say, of time in wherever there might be.
And so they will see me and the remains of my life here as being the snap of a finger, the blink of an eye.
And, you know, we'll all, you know, we'll all inevitably go to where we have to go and experience what we have to experience beyond this.
And look, I know I've got listeners who are very skeptical about this stuff.
Perhaps I am less so, but still skeptical because I'm a journalist.
But that's how I feel about it.
What a fascinating man you are to talk to, Riley.
You're a great teller of tales, a great recounter of information and stories.
My advice to you is I think you should get yourself on national public radio doing readings of that stuff in the U.S. And if you haven't contacted them, I think you should.
Oh, that's a great idea.
Well, I've just had that thought.
I don't know if you have an outlet there locally, but get in touch with them.
And I think you will find, because you're very good at reading it.
You're very credible reading the material that you've written, if I may say so.
So please do it and tell me what happens.
I certainly will.
And these interviews are, there's a learning curve with these.
I mean, anybody in my situation would say the same thing, that you could talk about so many different aspects of this kind of research.
But I really want you to know, I appreciate that you had me.
And I want to put out a good word to John Beecher, White Crow Books, for his patience and endurance with helping me see the Bang Sisters work through to the end.
I really, really want to put out a blessing and thanks to John, White Crow.
And Howard, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for having me.
Well, you've been a great guest.
I knew nothing about you.
I just had a feeling.
And sometimes I just do get a feeling.
And I'm glad I had that feeling.
Riley, thank you very much indeed.
Please keep in touch.
If you want to come on again, if there's something else you want to talk about, we can do that.
Okay, Howard, thank you, my friend.
Oh, and do you have a website?
Because plug it now if you want to.
I have www.thefrancerevelation.wordpress.com.
That'll do me N. Riley-Hegarty in the far north of the United States, very close to Canada.
Thank you very much, and please take care.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Well, a great guest, I thought.
Be very keen to get your thoughts, though.
They're much more important than mine.
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv, and tell me what you thought of N. Riley-Hagarty and the story of the Bangs sisters and the other material that he shared with us here.
More great guests coming soon here on The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for being part of all of this as we get into the winter here in the northern hemisphere.
So until next we meet here on the online version of The Unexplained at theunexplained.tv.
Please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thanks very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection