The Archive
What used to be premium-only is going public in weekly stages. Past posts are being updated regularly, so check in.
Pricing the Impossible: What a Private Bizarre Magic Booking Should Actually Cost
March 5, 2025
A client called me once wanting a "quick séance thing" for a dinner party. Twelve people, ninety minutes, candles already on the table. When I...
The Performer’s Guide to Pendulum Divination: History, Science, and the Art of the Swing Revisited
February 26, 2025
A woman in the third row stopped breathing. I know because I was watching for it. The pendulum, a vintage brass bob on a twelve-inch...
The Bell Stand Reconsidered: How a Séance Instrument Found Its Way Back to the Table
February 5, 2025
A bell rings in an unlit room with no hand near it. Nobody moves. Nobody breathes right. That single sound, unexplained and unaccompanied, has done...
Talking Tables: The Séance Phenomenon That Predates the Ouija Board
December 9, 2024
Before the little wooden planchette ever slid across a board spelling out names of the dead, there was a table. A whole table, sometimes seating...
The Cabinet Before Houdini: How Séance Room Furniture Became Escapology’s First Stage
October 30, 2024
Every escape artist owes a debt to a piece of furniture nobody remembers by name. Not a trunk, not a milk can, not the water...
Reading a Room That’s Already Turned: Performing Bizarre Magic to a Hostile Audience
September 23, 2024
A hostile room doesn't announce itself with heckling. It announces itself with silence, the wrong kind of silence, arms crossed, phones half up, a table...
Part 1 of 2 · The Convention Circuit
The Convention Circuit: How Magic Gatherings Built, and Gatekept, Bizarre Magic as a Genre
September 10, 2024
Bizarre magic did not grow up on television. It did not grow up in glossy trade magazines or viral clips. It grew up in windowless...
The Moving Hand: Automatic Writing as a Performance Tool, From Spiritualist Parlors to the Contemporary Seance
August 17, 2024
Nobody hands you their hand and asks you to write with it. That's the wall automatic writing breaks through, and it's why the effect still...
Talking to the Board: Collecting Ouija Boards, Planchettes, and Spirit Communication Devices
July 23, 2024
My father-in-law once handed me a talking board that had been in his family's attic since the 1930s, wrapped in a pillowcase, "just in case."...
Part 1 of 2 · Designing the Seance Room
Lighting Design for the Séance Room: A Working Framework for Every Effect
April 8, 2024
Most performers think about lighting once, on the day of the show, when they walk into the room and realize the overheads are fluorescent and...
The Performer’s Guide to Pendulum Divination: History, Science, and the Art of the Swing
April 1, 2024
No card trick does this. A small weight hangs from a chain between your fingers. Cold brass, maybe, or polished crystal. Dead still. Then, without...
The Hand That Writes Itself: A History of Automatic Writing in Séance and Stage Work
February 1, 2024
A woman's hand starts moving before she tells it to. She isn't trying to write anything, she says so herself, but the pen keeps dragging...