We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
SHE FIGHTS FAKES
287
picture before the parent s very eyes. Only then were they convinced that they had been duped.
DAUGHTER of a famous magician and ghost breaker, Joan knows every trick in the fake medium's book. Wherever she travels, she visits local mediums, posing as a convert, disguised so that she won't be recognized. Her brother, Jack Brandon, a husky young man who is her agent, is her only bodyguard. Despite threats of violence, she has exposed hundreds of fake mediums all over the world.
Levitation, spirit photography, ' blind-fold reading, materializations, trumpet blowing and all the rest of the medium's flim-flam are just oldfashioned magic, according to Joan Brandon. Being an accomplished magician herself, she can perform I these stunts easily. About the only 1 thing she can't do is produce a materialization— or ectoplasm, as the mediums call it — because it is necessary to regurgitate a piece of gauze : and Joan confesses she has a weak stomach. But all the spectral effects, ; table raisings, voices-from-the-beyond, I mysterious rappings and other tricks ! in the fraudulent medium's repertoire can be duplicated by this magician ' who has made a specialty of debunking the medium's magic.
Some time ago a survey showed that there were eight million people in the United States who were convinced that spiritualism, as demonstrated by mediums, was the real thing. A recent estimate put the number of mediums in the country at 6,000, and they [ were reaping possibly $25,000,000 a year from well-meaning but gullible
persons. These facts are a constant challenge to ghost breaker Joan Brandon. Unscrupulous practitioners of the magician's art, she claims, prey upon the heart-aches and sorrows of bereaved persons as well as offering advice, often misleading or insidious, at a price.
One medium, for instance, told one of her followers not to have an operation. When the woman protested that her doctor had advised the operation, the medium replied: "I don't care what your doctor said. The spirits tell me you should not have an operation."
Another medium told a woman to put her property in someone else's name because her son-in-law was scheming to take it away from her. The son-in-law was completely innocent, of course. The medium would have succeeded in creating a rift in the family had it not been for Joan Brandon's intervention.
Many messages-from-the-beyond delivered by mediums result in dire consequences. People have been known to commit suicide after receiving such messages. They also have made bad investments, bought or sold property willy-nilly, done other senseless things merely on some fake medium's say-so.
MISS BRANDON is not attacking a religion, nor the many sincere people who believe in spiritualism. Instead, she fights the mediums who use lies and trickery to convince people of their powers. In lectures before civic groups, clubs and colleges, she has endeavored to bring her message to the public. Going into the medium's temples and meeting places, she has exposed their sorcery during