Stanley LeFevre Krebs (January 14, 1864 – September 26, 1935) was an American psychologist and salesmanship lecturer.

Biography

In 1889, he received a Doctor of Psychology degree from the Chicago School of Psychology. Krebs was a one time president of the American University of Trade and Applied Commerce of Philadelphia and a pastor in the Reformed Church. He married the actress

Marjorie Main Mary Tomlinson (February 24, 1890 – April 10, 1975), professionally known as Marjorie Main, was an American character actress and singer of the Classical Hollywood period, best known as a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player in the 1940s and 1 ...

on November 2, 1921. He was the president of the American Institute of Mercantile Art, Philadelphia, where he worked as a salesmanship lecturer. Throughout his career, he exposed a number of fraudulent

mediums Mediumship is the practice of purportedly mediating communication between familiar spirits or spirits of the dead and living human beings. Practitioners are known as "mediums" or "spirit mediums". There are different types of mediumship or spir ...

. He employed a secret mirror and caught the medium

Henry Slade Henry Slade (1835–1905) was a famous fraudulent medium who lived and practiced in both Europe and North America. Biography Slade was most well known as a slate-writing medium. During his séances he would place a small slate with a piece ...

swapping

slates SLATES (Search, Links, Authorship, Tags, Extensions, Signalling) is an initialism that describes the business impacting capabilities, derived from the effective use of Web 2.0 technologies in and across enterprises. Origin of the term This acron ...

and hiding them in the back of his chair. Krebs exposed the

Bangs Sisters The Bangs Sisters, Mary "May" E. Bangs (1862–1917) and Elizabeth "Lizzie" Snow Bangs (1859–1920), were two fraudulent spiritualist mediums from Chicago, who made a career out of painting the dead or "Spirit Portraits". Career Elizabeth was ...

by using a secret mirror under the table, which caught them tampering with a sealed envelope. During the

séance A séance or seance (; ) is an attempt to communicate with spirits. The word ''séance'' comes from the French word for "session", from the Old French ''seoir'', "to sit". In French, the word's meaning is quite general: one may, for example, spea ...

, the sisters would open the envelope and write in it a reply which they would pretend a spirit had written. He also wrote the book ''Trick Methods of Eusapia Paladino'' (1910), which documented the tricks of the medium

Eusapia Palladino Eusapia Palladino (alternative spelling: ''Paladino''; 21 January 1854 – 16 May 1918) was an Italian Spiritualist physical medium. She claimed extraordinary powers such as the ability to levitate tables, communicate with the dead through ...

. His daughter was Anna Belle Columba Krebs Culverwell, an artist who developed the cartoon "Skuddabud". She wrote and illustrated "The Moon Is Inhabited". He died from cancer on September 27, 1935 in New York City.Nissen, Axel. (2011). ''Actresses of a Certain Character: Forty Familiar Faces from Hollywood from the Thirties to the Fifties''. McFarland. p. 111.

Publications

*''The Law of Suggestion'' (Chicago: Science Press, 1906) reprinted as ''The Fundamental Principles of Hypnosis'' (1957)
''A Description of Some Trick Methods Used By Miss Bangs of Chicago''
(Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 1901) *''The Frauds of Spiritualism'' (Suggestion Publishing Company, 1901)
''Trick-Methods of Eusapia Palladino: Major and Minor''
(Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 1910)
''Trick Methods of Eusapia Paladino''
(Philadelphia, 1910)

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Krebs, Stanley LeFevre 1864 births 1935 deaths 19th-century psychologists 20th-century American psychologists American skeptics Critics of Spiritualism Deaths from cancer in New York (state) People from Emmitsburg, Maryland Scientists from Maryland Scientists from New York City