The Archive
What used to be premium-only is going public in weekly stages. Past posts are being updated regularly, so check in.
The Unseen Hand: A History and Working Theory of the PK Touch
September 24, 2026
I don't believe the dead have hands. I've never had a reason to. But I've stood in a dim room and watched a grown man...
Provenance as Performance: Writing the Backstory for a Haunted Object Without Lying Your Way Into Trouble
September 3, 2026
I don't tell audiences an object is haunted. I don't tell them it isn't. That gap is where the work happens, and most performers I've...
The Medium Who Was Never Caught: D.D. Home and the Limits of Séance Room Skepticism
February 12, 2026
Every Victorian medium of note got caught eventually. Eusapia Palladino was caught with a freed foot mid-levitation. The Davenport Brothers were exposed by a magician...
Part 2 of 2 · Designing the Seance Room
Part 2: The Nose Remembers, Scent as the Séance’s Overlooked Instrument
January 30, 2026
In Part 1: Lighting Design for the Séance Room: A Working Framework for Every Effect, I laid out how light shapes belief before a single...
The Séance That Sold Itself: How Newspaper Debunking Campaigns Accidentally Built Spiritualism’s Audience
December 28, 2025
Every performer fears the word "exposed." I used to fear it too, until I started reading what Victorian newspapers actually printed about mediums, and realized...
The Streaming Séance: Performing Bizarre Magic When the Room Is a Camera
December 6, 2025
The room used to tell me things. A shift in body weight, a held breath, the exact second attention started to wander toward a phone....
Holmes Living and Dead: The Prop That Makes Two Outcomes Feel Like Fate
November 10, 2025
A binary is the most dangerous structure in mentalism. Fifty-fifty odds sound like nothing, and any spectator with half a brain for math knows it....
The Callback: Structuring a Bizarre Magic Set So the Opening Pays Off the Close
September 12, 2025
A woman asked me, halfway through a private show in Okolona a few years back, why I'd mentioned her grandmother's ring at the start of...
Anna Eva Fay and the Business of Being Believed
August 25, 2025
Anna Eva Fay walked into a laboratory in London in 1874 and walked out with the endorsement of one of the most respected scientists in...
To Restore or Preserve? The Bizarre Magic Collector’s Dilemma With Damaged Antiques
July 28, 2025
A dealer once offered me a spirit trumpet with a crushed bell, the kind of damage that happens when a box gets thrown in a...
Three Raps in Hydesville: How the Fox Sisters Accidentally Built Modern Spiritualism
July 16, 2025
Every performer who works a séance room owes a debt to two girls who never meant to start anything. Margaret Fox was fourteen. Kate Fox...
Part 2 of 2 · The Convention Circuit
Part 2: How Online Communities Replaced the Convention Dealer Room
June 20, 2025
In Part 1: The Convention Circuit: How Magic Gatherings Built, and Gatekept, Bizarre Magic as a Genre, I wrote about the lecture hall and the...