Excerpt from The Spirit Portrait Mystery, Its Final Solution
We are greatly pleased to be able to make public a secret of mediumship which has puzzled the world of believers and unbelievers in spiritualism for many years. We are especially interested in its publication because we have been a party, albeit in a passive character, to its gradual disclosure.
Mr. David P. Abbott of Omaha, Nebraska, a genius in mediumistic lore, the author of the remarkable book Behind the Scenes with the Mediums, was for a long time puzzled at the marvel of some well-known mediums, two sisters, who made the pictures of dead relatives appear in colored painting before the eyes of their sitters. We need not repeat reports of spiritualists who were often overwhelmed at the spectacle, and even skeptics became convinced that here was true evidence of spirit life which would prove the immortality of the soul. From time to time Mr. Abbott communicated to us the gradual progress of his work including his disappointments when his theories proved incorrect, but he never lost the conviction that the mystery could not be a miracle and that because the trick was so effective it must be very simple.
Any one who is acquainted with Mr. Abbott"s great work Behind the Scenes with the Mediums will grant that there is no one more familiar than he with the subtle methods of deception by which telling effects are produced upon believers in spiritualism - effects which will frequently remain a puzzle for the staunchest skeptics.
We may here mention that Mr. Abbott is also the inventor of a mystic teakettle which can be carried all around the room in ones hand and is without connection either by pipes or wires with any external object, and yet its mysterious little spout will intelligently answer questions to the inquirer while he holds it in his hands. The ghost whom he makes inhabit the teakettle speaks in a tiny whisper, not unlike the voice of the famous nun of Lubeck who has dwindled away to nothingness and is preserved in a bottle hung up in the cathedral of her native city.
We congratulate Mr. Abbott on the great success he has achieved in solving the great mediumistic mystery, although we regret that it was not he who reaped the pecuniary rewards.
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