Anna Eva Fay Pingree (March 31, 1851 – May 12, 1927) was a famous medium and stage mentalist of the twentieth century.

Biography

Fay was born Ann Eliza Heathman in Southington, Ohio. She married Henry Melville Cummings, a medium, who went by the name Henry Melville Fay. She adopted the stage name of Annie Fay and began to perform as a stage medium. She became famous for her

vaudeville Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment which began in France in the middle of the 19th century. A ''vaudeville'' was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a drama ...

and stage performances in the 1880s and 1890s, where she was billed as "The Indescribable Phenomenon". Through her career, Fay was exposed as a fraudulent medium. Fay was known for employing assistants including several who would dig up information about

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

sitters in the towns that she visited. In the early 1870s the American stage mentalist

Washington Irving Bishop Washington Irving Bishop, also known as Wellington (4 March 1855 – 13 May 1889) was an American stage mentalist. He started his career as an assistant under the muscle reader J. Randall Brown, but was most well known for his performance of ...

was the manager of Fay's spiritualist acts, but in 1876 exposed her trick methods to the media. In 1883 the ex-medium John W. Truesdell revealed her method of freeing her hands from cotton bandages. Her first husband died on May 29, 1889. Her second husband was stage manager David H. Pingree, who died in 1932. Her son John Fay also a magician, married to Anna Norman committed suicide in 1908. Fay applied for a membership to The Magic Circle and in 1913 during a tour in Britain, she was elected the first Honorary Lady Associate of The Magic Circle in London. Fay died on May 20, 1927. She is buried at Wyoming Cemetery in Melrose Massachusetts. In 1942, Harry Price of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research exposed the 'mechanical stool' trick of Fay.

Crookes experiment

In a series of experiments in

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

at the house of

William Crookes Sir William Crookes (; 17 June 1832 – 4 April 1919) was an English chemist and physicist who attended the Royal College of Chemistry, now part of Imperial College London, and worked on spectroscopy. He was a pioneer of vacuum tubes, inventing ...

in February 1875, Fay managed to fool Crookes into believing she had genuine

psychic A psychic is a person who claims to use powers rooted in parapsychology, such as extrasensory perception (ESP), to identify information hidden from the normal senses, particularly involving telepathy or clairvoyance; or who performs acts that a ...

powers. Crookes had Fay hold two

electrode An electrode is an electrical conductor used to make contact with a nonmetallic part of a circuit (e.g. a semiconductor, an electrolyte, a vacuum or a gas). In electrochemical cells, electrodes are essential parts that can consist of a varie ...

s in an electrical circuit connected with a

galvanometer A galvanometer is an electromechanical measuring instrument for electric current. Early galvanometers were uncalibrated, but improved versions, called ammeters, were calibrated and could measure the flow of current more precisely. Galvanomet ...

in an adjoining room. Movement of objects occurred in the room and a music instrument was played. Crookes was convinced that the electrical control had not been broken. Psychical researchers pointed out that Fay could have used other parts of her body or a resistance coil to maintain the electric current intact whilst her hands could be free to produce the phenomena during the experiment. Frank Podmore described the experiment in detail. Fay used magic tricks to accomplish her

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

feats. She confessed in 1913 to

Eric Dingwall Eric John Dingwall (1890–1986) was a British anthropologist, psychical researcher and librarian. Biography Born in British Ceylon, Dingwall moved to England where he was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge (M.A., 1912), and the Univ ...

that she had duped Crookes and other scientists. She was investigated by the magician

Harry Houdini Erik Weisz (March 24, 1874 – October 31, 1926), known professionally as Harry Houdini ( ), was a Hungarian-American escapologist, illusionist, and stunt performer noted for his escape acts. Houdini first attracted notice in vaudeville in ...

, to whom after her retirement in 1924 she confessed fraud and revealed the tricks that she had used. Fay told Houdini the trick she had used on the Crookes galvanometer test: she gripped one handle of the battery beneath her knee joint, keeping the circuit unbroken, leaving one hand free. Magic historian Barry Wiley suggested that Fay had beaten the

tests by working with a secret accomplice Charles Henry Gimingham (1853–90), an assistant of Crookes who had built the experimental apparatus.Barry H. Wiley. (2012). ''The Thought Reader Craze: Victorian Science at the Enchanted Boundary''. McFarland. p. 190.

Biography

Crookes experiment

References

Further reading