The Rise and Fall of Charles Colchester

Colchester claimed to be psychic and probably did warn President Abraham Lincoln that he was going to be assassinated. He became an icon for Spiritualism in the U.S. in the 19th century, only to be rejected by that same movement. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. It's not
quite Halloween time yet, but like the rabies are here. Yeah,

(00:23):
I have it worse this year than any previous year,
I think, But uh, this isn't quite a Halloween episode.
But periodically, particularly while I'm researching topics for Halloween, which
I was kind of making my preliminary list, they often
veer into discussion of fake mediums, like I'll just run
into mentions of that or notes I've made about it,

(00:44):
And a lot of the time I come across this
mention of the alleged psychic who warned President Abraham Lincoln
that he was going to be assassinated. If you do
any sort of mediums during the nineteenth century in America research,
you'll you'll bump up against that mention. And I keep

(01:04):
scribbling notes to myself to look it up. So I
finally did, and I will say this story took me
to some places that I did not anticipate. Um, not
in any sort of like scary, creepy halloweeny way, but
just like there's some fascinating legal stuff that goes as well.
It's just a person who manages to be kind of

(01:27):
elusive in terms of hard details about their life. So
today we are talking about Charles Colchester. That may or
may not have even been his name, but he became
an icon for spiritualism in the US in the nineteenth century,
only to ultimately be rejected by that same movement. Yeah. So,
as Holly just alluded to Colchester's early life, it's entirely

(01:50):
a mystery. There's a mention of him in the Detroit
Free Press after most of the events that we're talking
about today had already happened. It is a column titled
News Brevities and that states that quote, the real name
of Colchester is Sealby or Sealbic. He is an English impostor,
and the Spiritualist declare that he is a fraudulent trickster

(02:12):
and not one of their number. Who uh spoiler alert.
Colchister gained a significant following as a spiritualist with some
very high profile patrons, but he was so problematic that
the whole spiritualist movement then tried to distance itself from him. Yeah,
there was a lot of not one of us, not
one of us. We don't know this person. I don't

(02:33):
know her. And in the spiritualist meme of the nineteenth century,
what we know and we got to use air quotes
there about Charles Colchester is only what he told us,
rather than anything that he could substantially prove he was English.
He claimed that he was a duke's son that was
born out of wedlock, and he claimed that he could

(02:55):
read sealed letters and also that he could summon apparitions.
He also said that he could produce words on his
body carved in blood by spirits, and he manifested all
of these things in front of audiences, although it was
not part of this personal story that he wove. Colchester
also drank a lot, and he did use his alleged

(03:19):
connection with the beyond to validate his drinking. He claimed
that the spirits had authorized it, which is kind of
funny to me. Yeah, Apparently when people would ask him
do you want to go get a drink, he would
be like, let me commune with the spirits, and then
he would be like, yes, they say, we should absolutely
go have a drink. So, after performing seances for clients

(03:43):
in New York and Boston for a few years. That
was really the start of his traceable movement. Colchester appeared
in Washington, d c. During the Civil War and he
drew just an impressive audience of the city's elite, including
people like General Grant and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln.
We have talked about Mary Todd Lincoln's fascination with spiritualism

(04:04):
and the afterlife before on the show. She came up
when we covered spirit photographer William Mummler during our Halloween
live show a couple of years back. She was his
most famous client, Mummler's most famous client, hoping that he
could capture her departed husband's ghost on film, and he
of course obliged. That was I mean, there were many
spiritualists in her life, but we really haven't talked about

(04:27):
how she became so very drawn to spiritualism and the
sad catalyst there was the death of the Lincoln's son, Willie,
who died from typhoid fever at the age of eleven
in eighteen sixty two. The Lincoln's each mourned in their
own way. The President spent time alone, was very withdrawn
and grew frustrated with the ways that people tried to

(04:49):
console him by talking about Willie being in heaven. He
eventually turned his energies to the needs of the country
and turmoil. Mary, on the other hand, was wept up
and the growing spiritualism movement, and it offered her the
hope that she might somehow see or connect to her
beloved son once more in just some form. She was

(05:11):
hardly alone in this. The massive death toll of the
Civil War had created a whole nation of people who
were grieving for lost loved ones. And it was through
Mary's many connections and invitations to mediums and spiritualists that
Charles Colchester came into the lives of the Lincoln's and
once he did so, he took full advantage of that

(05:32):
proximity to power to bolster his name. As Mary became
ever more devoted to colchester seances, the President had felt
compelled to accompany her to visit this compelling spiritualist, not
because President Lincoln believed, but because he wanted to see
what exactly was taking place at these gatherings. Lincoln's relationship

(05:53):
with spiritualism has been written and remarked about many times.
A lot of people have theories and they try to
connect him to you know, mesmerism or spiritualism, and claimed
that he had this mysticism. But he seemed, above all,
if you really look at it, to want to protect
his wife. He never dissuaded her from this interest because
seeing spiritualists and going to seances seemed to offer her

(06:16):
some peace. But the president also did not want the
first Lady to be anyone's victim. So when he saw
Colchester's seance, he was mesmerized, but not in the sense
of just being taken in by it. It was totally
the opposite. Abraham Lincoln wanted to figure out exactly how
Colchester's tricks worked. The President got the Smithsonian Institutions Secretary

(06:41):
at the time, Joseph Henry, involved in the investigation. He
requested that Colchester submit to an examination by Henry, which
he agreed to. This is, yes, the same Joseph Henry
who introduced Eunice Newton Foot's papers in that episode. Yeah,
there's also an interest sting story between Henry and Lincoln,

(07:03):
and that they were very much on opposite ends of
the political spectrum but also respected each other a lot.
Uh And Henry's background was in science and he worked
a lot in in telegraph specifically, and so for this demonstration,
Henry had Colchester visit the Smithsonian so that this examination
could be conducted in a room that the medium had

(07:25):
not had prior access to. And after the encounter, Henry
came away entirely convinced that Colchester was a Charlatan, but
he couldn't prove it. He had very clearly discerned that
there was an otherworldly clicking sound. These were supposed to
be evidence of spirits being called by the man, but

(07:46):
that it was clear to him they were emanating from
Colchester's person and presumably some sort of device. But Colchester
would not consent to having his closed removed for examination,
and that was that and for them only though us
of Henry supposedly did uncover the origins of these sounds
totally by accident. Much later, he said to have met

(08:08):
a man on a train and started just idly talking
to him, and this marvelous bit of happenstance. This man
had engineered a telegraphic device that spiritualist used for exactly
this purpose. They weren't around their biceps, and so the
user would flex a muscle and that would produce this
clicking sound. Henry asked this young man if he had

(08:31):
sold such a device to Charles Colchester, and the guy
said yes. He reported this information back to the President,
who was apparently pleased to know about it, but he
did not put a stop to the First Ladies meetings
with Colchester. Something much darker ultimately took place to sever
that relationship. Yeah, Abraham Lincoln, I think just liked have

(08:54):
being in on the secret. But ultimately what happened was
that Colchester blackmailed Mary Todd Lincoln, or at least he
tried to. He wanted the War Department to issue him
a free railroad pass so he could travel to New
York easily. This might sound like a fairly benign request,
but at the time, the war had led to a
move on General Sherman's part to severely limit and regulate

(09:17):
civilian travel by rail, so that that mode of transport
could be dedicated to the movement of troops and material.
Even people with ticketed travel could board only if it
did not interfere with the needs of the Union Army. Initially,
in this whole system, train passes were fairly readily available.
People at all levels of the military would just write them,

(09:38):
even if those people were not really authorized to do so.
But this of course became a problem, and regulations got
tighter and tighter to try to curtail needless travel. So
by the time this all happened, in asking for a
pass issued by the War Department, Colchester was attempting this
sidestep a whole lot of regulations, and he almost got

(09:59):
what he wanted because he told the First Lady that
he would publicly share some of the privileged and presumably
embarrassing information that he had learned while working with her.
So that was how Noah Brooks was called upon to help.
The First Lady turned to Brooks for help over this
blackmail attempt, and Brooks was a close friend of the

(10:21):
Lincolns and also a journalist. He had dealings with Colchester before.
Because of his concerning influence over the First Lady, he
wrote about this in his book Washington in Lincoln's Time,
and the person that he's describing in this was named
Elizabeth Keckley. So quote, a seamstress employed in the White
House had induced Mrs Lincoln too listened to the artful

(10:45):
tales of a so called spiritual medium who masqueraded under
the name of Colchester, and who pretended to be the
illegitimate son of an English duke. The poor lady at
that time was well nigh distraught with grief at the
death of her son Willie. By playing on her motherly sorrows,
Colchester actually succeeded in inducing Mrs Lincoln to receive him

(11:08):
in the family residence at the Soldiers Home, where, in
a darkened room he pretended to produce messages from the
dead boy by means of scratches on the wayne, scotting
and taps in the walls and furniture. Mrs Lincoln's told
me of these so called manifestations and asked me to
be present in the White House when Colchester would give

(11:29):
an exhibition of his powers. Yeah, we're gonna quote a
lot from Noah Brooks, because his is one of the
few accounts by a contemporary that actually had direct dealings
with Colchester and was close enough to the Lincolns to
really understand kind of how this was playing out. And
initially he told the first Lady that he did not
want to go to this seance at the White House.

(11:50):
He doesn't say as much in his book, but it
kind of seems like he didn't want to embarrass her
because he did want to see what Colchester was all about,
and he got his chance shortly thereafter to attend a
paid sitting that one of Colchester's other wealthy followers was hosting,
so Brooks paid one dollar to go and see the

(12:11):
medium for himself. We'll talk about what happens when Noah
Brooks met Charles Colchester after we pause for a quick
sponsor break. In his Biography of Lincoln, Brooks detailed his

(12:32):
encounter with Colchester at the seance that he attended and
paid for writing Quote. After the company had been seated
around the table in the usual approved manner and the
lights were turned out, the silence was broken by the
thumping of a drum, the twanging of a banjo, and
the ringing of bells, all of which instruments had been
laid on the table ready for use by some hocus pocus.

(12:54):
It was evident the operator had freed his hands from
the hands of those who sat on each side of him,
and was himself making quote music in the air. Brooks,
who was obviously not the least bit taken in by
Colchester's theatricalities, decided to find the real source of the
noises he went on to say, quote, loosening my hands

(13:16):
from my neighbors who were unbelievers, I rose, and, grasping
in the direction of the drumbeat, grabbed a very solid
and fleshy hand, in which was a handbell that was
being thumped on a drumhead. I shouted, strike a light,
my friend. After what appeared to be an unconscionable length
of time, lighted a match. But meanwhile somebody had dealt

(13:37):
me a severe blow with the drum, the edge of
which cut a slight wound in my forehead. When the
gas was finally lighted, the singular spectacle was presented of
the son of the Duke, firmly grasped by a man
who was covered with blood, while the arrested scion of
nobility was glowering at the drum and bells which he

(13:59):
still held in his hands. Colchester ran from the room,
and he refused to return. The host of the whole
of him said that he was outraged at having been
so insulted. It was only a couple of days after
that that Colchester made his blackmail attempt on the first lady.
What unpleasant things that Colchester was planning to reveal? We

(14:21):
don't really know. Presumably he wanted to get out of Washington,
d C. In a hurry and to avoid any additional entanglements.
But when Mary Todd Lincoln brought the matter to Noah Brooks,
he decided to confront Charles Colchester and expose him as
a fraud to put an end to the blackmail and
hopefully also get him out of the White House for good.

(14:42):
And so to accomplish this, Brooks concocted a plan that
required Mrs Lincoln to invite the medium to the White
House once more. The idea here is that Colchester would
presume that she had his railroad pass and wanted him
to come and get it. And this plan kind of
seems like it all hinged on Colchester not having gotten
a good look at Brooks during the seance. As you recall,

(15:03):
they had been seated in the dark, and even once
the gas lamp was lighted, Brooks's face had been covered
in blood. But it is also possible that the hope
was that Colchester would just be too embarrassed when confronted
to run into Brooks in front of the first lady
to say like, oh, yes, you caught me faking at
my seyance the other night. So when the spiritualist arrived,

(15:26):
Mrs Lincoln introduced Colchester to her friend Noah Brooks and
then left the room as though she was going to
get the pass. Once she had gone, Brooks lifted up
the hair that had been swept over his forehead, and
that revealed the cut from the drum strike that had
happened at the seance. He asked, do you recognize this?

(15:47):
Colchester once again muttered about being insulted, before Brooks told him, quote,
you know that I know you are a swindler and
a humbug. Get out of the city at once. If
you were in Washington tomorrow afternoon at this time, you
be in the Old Capital prison. Interestingly, John Wilkes Booth
was drawn to Charles Colchester for the very same reason

(16:08):
that had brought Mary Todd Lincoln into the spiritualists orbit,
and that was personal loss. When Booth's sister in law,
Molly died, the actors started attending seances hosted by various
mediums in an effort to make contact with her, and
that eventually led him to Colchester. But then Colchester and
Booth became close friends outside of any mystical setting. According

(16:31):
to witnesses, they spent a lot of time together. They
were described as both friends and associates by people who
witnessed them, particularly as the two of them came and
went at the National Hotel, which is where Booth stayed
in the weeks leading up to the assassination of President Lincoln.
Historians Terry Alford, in his Booth biography Fortune's Full suggests

(16:53):
that Booth's attachment to Colchester may have been rooted in
the medium's claim to be able to see the future.
He may have been hoping for some sort of sign
or reassurance regarding his intentions toward the President. We have
no idea if Booth clearly disclosed those intentions to Colchester,
but Charles J. Colchester felt compelled to warn Abraham Lincoln

(17:14):
that something bad was going to happen. Lincoln is actually
said to have mentioned Colchester's warning to an associate, but
that is the only information we have regarding any actual
communication between the two of them. And this was actually
one of many warnings that various alleged psychics offered to
the President in the time when spiritualism was popular throughout

(17:36):
the US and within the White House thanks to the
First lady after the President was shot and died from
his wounds in April of eighteen sixty. Colchester's association with
Booth was something that was just at the forefront of
investigators minds. Yeah, they were looking for any accomplices, anyone
involved in what had happened. And Colonel Henry H. Wells

(17:59):
was a lawyer before joining the Union Army, and he
was investigating and attempted to meet with Charles Colchester as
part of that investigation. He had tracked him from the
National where he had been staying, to the Washington hotel
to which he had moved, but he wasn't there either.
If the medium had stayed in the city, he had
done a really good job of hiding. He was never

(18:20):
located for questioning in the official investigation. It's a little
unclear exactly when Colchester may have issued his warning to
the President in relation to when he had his run
in with Noah Brooks. So whether he did leave town
right after being exposed as a fraud, or if he
stuck around and then ran right after the assassination is
a little bit unclear. Even though Colchester left Washington, he

(18:44):
certainly did not banish off the face of the earth.
He was moving around and performing his seances and readings,
and then popped up in the papers again in the
second half of eighteen sixty five. We'll get to that
after we hear from the sponsors that keeps stephymiss in
history class and go wing. Colchester was arrested in New

(19:11):
York in August eighteen sixty five for what may seem
on the surface to be an odd charge. According to
a newspaper account quote, Charles J. Colchester, a leading medium
and only second to the famous human notoriety as a spiritualist,
has been arrested on complaint of the Collector of Internal
Revenue for the twenty District of New York on a
charge of practicing jugglery without a license. Okay, if that

(19:36):
made you giggle a little, and it did me when
I read it. Jugglery in this case does not mean
literal juggling, although that is certainly a way that word
can be used. It is referring to trickery or manipulation,
and in Colchester's case, sleight of hands specifically. So. Colchester
was taken in for tax evasion because he refused to
register his profession as a juggler Colchester had been practicing

(19:59):
in the Ratchet S area in the spring of eighteen
sixty five when the Assessor of Internal Revenue, William H. Rogers,
instructed him to take out a license as a juggler.
Colchester refused. Although he offered to take out a license
as a spiritual medium, there was no license for that,
and Rogers told him that, based on the information he had,

(20:20):
Colchester was indeed a juggler. Colchester was arrested and a
complaint was filed with the U S Commissioner. The medium
appeared before a grand jury and was indicted, and the
case was sent to trial. His defense was that he
was not in any way a magician or juggler, but
a legitimate spiritualist, and so he should not have to
register as something he was not. This really kind of

(20:44):
turned the trial into an instance where spiritualism itself was
being debated as the same right up put it quote.
As a result of the trial will be a legal
decision as to whether the phenomena of spiritualism are supernatural
or mere feats of juggler. It will be a very
interesting one and strongly contested. The prosecutor's planned on calling

(21:06):
a range of presidigitators to confirm that Colchester was indeed
a sleight of handman, and the defense planned to bring
in spiritualists to testify to Colchester's legitimate abilities. Colchester's claim
was mainly that he was closer to being a member
of the clergy than a trickster. When the case began
on August eighteen sixty five, the district attorney opened by

(21:29):
laying out the question of whether Colchester should or shouldn't
be registered as a juggler, and made it clear that
in his mind, spiritualism itself was not on trial. He
also managed to get in a dig at the press
for suggesting that this was the case. He said, quote,
the performance of singular and extraordinary feats of wrappings, answering

(21:50):
questions enclosed in envelopes and the like publicly and for
fee and reward, will not be seriously contested, perhaps admitted
the pecure elier defense of the prisoner I can only
gather from newspaper reports and public rumor, which assert that
the prisoner will prove or attempt to prove, that, in
the performance of those feats of apparent legidmain he is

(22:13):
the mere instrument of spiritual control and that he does
not practice slight of hand. While I can see the
inestimable value of the press, I cannot forbear the remark
that it has been made the instrument of magnifying the
case into undue proportions, and to cause the public to
believe that it is a contest between the United States

(22:34):
and a large body of citizens calling themselves spiritualists, and
endeavor on the part of the former to crush out
a religious sect and to expose its heresies, if it
has any, And that the result of this trial will
establish the fact whether spiritualism is true or false. Nothing
can be further from the truth. The result of this

(22:54):
trial can accomplish no such thing. It is a simple
inquiry whether Charles J. Colchester is practicing sleight of hand
under the guy's spiritual control, and if he is, it
is quite as important to profess spiritualist that he should
be exposed as it is to the public whom he
is deluding into the government which he is defrauding. Over

(23:16):
the course of the trial, many of Colchester's high profile clients,
a lot of them politicians, testified that they believed entirely
in his abilities as a medium. But the damning testimony
came from people who knew magic, including from a man
named James Rogers, a magician's assistant who had worked with
Colchester briefly. He told the court that he had seen

(23:39):
Colchester using his foot to create a rapping sound by
striking the legs of tables, but he also said that
Colchester himself had told him it was in the parlance
of the day humbug. According to Roger's account, Colchester was
holding eight to ten seances a day, making one or
two dollars for each one, and restricting attendance to own

(24:00):
one or two people per sitting, presumably so they would
be unable to detect his first Another witness, James Connolly,
testified that he had as a client, witnessed Colchester switching
out envelopes that contained questions for him, and we're supposed
to remain sealed and surreptitiously opening the original questions we
could answer and appear psychic. Another witness, which is a

(24:23):
physician named Walter M. Fleming, saw Colchester on several occasions, witnessing,
among other things, the blood writing upon his arm. The
witness at one point presented Colchester with questions sealed up
in cans to see if he could answer them, but Colchester,
on consecutive days of trying, told Fleming that spiritual conditions
were not favorable for answering them. The case proceeded on

(24:47):
in this way, with character witnesses for Colchester and detractors
describing his trickery for what it was. On August twenty three,
the jury, after hearing the case, returned their verdict. They
found that Charles Colchester was a juggler, and this verdict
actually kicked off a lot of fear in the spiritualism community,

(25:07):
even though the district attorney had said that was not
the intent at all, but a lot of practitioners worried
that they too would be tried by the government over
taxes and discredited in the process. There were queries as
well as to whether Colchester had been given a fair
trial or if the whole thing had been framed in
bias from the beginning. Despite those remarks to the contrary

(25:29):
at the opening of the arguments. To be clear, spiritualists
were not aggrieved at Colchester being called a fraud. They
were just worried that the manner in which his trial
was conducted could similarly find any of them frauds, whether
that had any basis or not. Their own examination of
the matter came to the conclusion, however, that he was

(25:50):
undeniably and truly a juggler. After all of that, the
sentence was just a financial one. Colchester had to pay
a forty dollar fine and the court costs of four
hundred seventy three dollars. Those sums were paid by his supporters,
and that matter was then concluded. The trial results dinged
Colchester's confidence at all. It was not for long. Soon

(26:13):
he was on tour, touting his skills and looking for clients.
In an ad that appeared in the Cleveland Daily Leader
in December of eighteen sixty five, said Colchester, the wonderful Colchester,
the incomprehensible Colchester, the medium can be consulted at his
rooms American House for a few days only. But even

(26:33):
though he kept working from the moment the trial ended.
There were then people constantly looking for proof that Colchester
was a fraud, and stories kept popping up in the
papers about it. One particularly charming one from the Boston
Evening Transcript on October eighteen sixty five reads quote a
correspondent of the Hartford Times says, that Colchester, the juggling medium,

(26:57):
was detected by him at a circle in Hartford in
a feat of jugglery where a number sitting in the
dark with joint hands were touched by spirit hands on
their faces when one sees to the hand with his
teeth and discovered that it was a tallow candle which
Colchester had blown out when the circle was arranged. He
was once again in hot water with the U. S

(27:19):
Commissioner in April of eighteen sixty six, this time in Louisville, Kentucky,
for the same charge, this time just pertaining to the
performance of jugglery without a license in the state of Kentucky.
This time Colchester did not really argue the matter. There
was once against testimony, which, according to an article in

(27:39):
the Buffalo Commercial on April six, quote a confederate of
Colchester admitted on the examination that the manifestations were produced
by mechanical agencies, and this was not denied by the former.
In that case, Colchester was allowed by the commissioner to
file his license as a juggler. In late May eight
sixty six, a story ran in papers across the country

(28:02):
titled Spiritualism Done for and it had the subheader Colchester
thoroughly exposed his spirit manifestations shown to be tricks, deceptions,
and the vileist impositions. And this article was an open
letter written by a man named D. A. McCord, who
had briefly been Colchester's agent. While Colchester had been widely

(28:23):
exposed already, This particular missive was penned, according to McCord,
quote from a sense of justice, seeming in some ways
to need to unburden himself for his part in any
of it, He writes, quote, I was his agent for
a few weeks and was compelled to leave him, detecting
his deceptions with his drunkenness, disorderly conduct, and other vices.

(28:44):
The confessional states that McCord witnessed Colchester using his foot
against the table leg to produce a rapping sound and
read billets through trickery. But the one component of Colchester's
act which had continued to befuddle even detractors, was the
purported spirit writing on his arm, and McCord spilled the
beans on that to quote. He uses a short lead

(29:07):
pencil number two. He prefers the corner of a room
in the evening time, a light sitting by him in
the daytime a window behind him. He chooses thin printing
paper because easily and noiselessly opened, the investigators write questions
and names of deceased friends upon billets. He manipulates them,

(29:28):
having his blank previously prepared, which he holds in the
hollow of his hand by the third and fourth fingers.
This he exchanges for one of the written billets. Then
perhaps he may request all to write another question or name,
during which he dexterously reads the billet by holding it
in his lap behind the table spread. Yeah. Basically he

(29:51):
has them write those questions so they'll be occupied and
then he can do his other stuff without them noticing.
McCord further explained that even though there was the illusion
of randomness in which Colchester had someone select a billet
from a hat, he always used sleight of hand to
ensure that he knew which one was going to be selected,
And then, as he employed various theatrical tricks of dramatic misdirection,

(30:14):
he would use the pencil to write on his arm.
According to McCord, he then quote bears his arm, rubs
it slightly with dampened fingers, causing the blood to rush
into the pencil indentations, producing the wonderful blood red writing
under the cuticle. Anybody can do this with little practice.
McCord concludes with a list of eight rules to employ

(30:37):
if you want to visit Colchester to ensure that you
see all that he does, and concludes with quote, I
make this exposure not to injure him, but to keep
others from being injured and defrauded by villainous impostures. He
then lists his address and invites anyone to visit if
they have more questions. What a quaint practice. Here's all

(31:00):
my dress, here's my home address printed in papers across
the country. Uh. Yeah, those eight rules I didn't list
out because they're pretty, um, they're pretty common sense. E.
It's kind of like, make sure that you sit in
a place where you can see his hands the whole time.
Make sure that you like mark you're like. They're very

(31:20):
very simple things. Another agent, J. M. Mabbott, also wrote
an open letter that stated that he had been acting
in good faith while working with Colchester as a true
believer in spiritualism, and that once the deception was detected,
he took his leave of the fraud. These letters were
often printed together. He stated in his letter quote, and

(31:41):
yet how the spirits can control a man so immoral,
so given to drunkenness, deception, and a non payment of
board and printing bills, to say nothing of other vices
still lower, is to me a mystery. Colchester continued to
roam after this, plying his trade, but really not for
very long. In early May of eighteen sixty seven, a

(32:03):
year after his two former agents had debunked his last
wisps of credibility, Charles Colchester died in Kyakuk, Iowa. He
had sat in the White House just a few years
earlier and had influence over the First Family, and his
trial for jugglery had been widely reported in detail, but
by that time his death ran in papers. Is just

(32:24):
a one liner, that's sort of an aggregated columns of
miscellaneous stuff. Yeah, it was kind of like Charles Colchester
medium died in kia Kuk. That was like it's that
was it. Uh. Some had a few additional, you know,
sentences about who he was, but it was it was
very low key at that point. Um. I did not

(32:48):
anticipate when starting this that I would end up in
the middle of the jugglery trial, which is pretty interesting
to me. I have listener mail that's not about meat
hims or jugglery at all. It goes back to our
episode on Adolph Lorenz. Actually it is from our listener Caitlin,
and they write as a disability study student. I was

(33:09):
thrilled to see that Monday's episode was about some orthopedic
history because it's really interesting. I really appreciated how carefully
all were with your disclaimers about changing language and treatment
of disabled people in both the episode and the behind
the scenes. When you began describing the hip dislocation and
treatment process, it sounded very familiar. My aunt Cathy was
born with spina bifida and the associated hip displasia and

(33:31):
had corrective surgery and casting. As a toddler, with her
legs casted sticking out from her sides a straddle type
position if you can't picture it, she could not fit
in her stroller. My grandmother wasn't about to leave the
baby home while she took my dad an uncle around
town doing daily activities, so she asked my grandfather to
do something. He went to his hobby wood shop and

(33:52):
built the Cathy Car, a very basic adaptive wheelchair that
let her sit safe and supported as she was toted
around upstate New York. My grandmother says that nearly every
time they went out, someone would stop them and ask
about the stroller. This was the early seventies, so it
was very unusual to see a disabled child out and
about with adaptive gear. My pop would send them the
plans or build them their own. To hear my grandfather

(34:15):
tell it, a whole fleet of Kathy cars took over
the region. Thank you for all the work you do.
I love hearing the new episodes and listening to past
favorites on repeat. Caitlin, I love this note. I love
anybody's ingenuity. I love the idea that someone created an
adaptive mobility device before that was even a phrase we knew.
Uh so cool, I hope, Caitlin, if you have pictures

(34:37):
of this, please send me one because I want to
see what it looks like. Um. It's just a fascinating
My husband worked in that field a little bit, um
so he's always very interested in those as well, so
we would love to see it. But I just love it,
and it's a nice coda to how um you know,
not always would families have been like yes, we'll solve

(34:59):
this problem, and so I love that it's a very positive,
cool way to do it. Uh. If you would like
to write to us about anything you've heard on the show,
or just any piece of history you're interested in, you
can do that at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
You can find us everywhere on social media as Missed
in History, and if you have not subscribed to the show,
you can do that as quick as a wink on

(35:20):
the I heart Radio app or anywhere you listen to
your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
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