Washington Irving Bishop
Washington Irving Bishop, also known as Wellington[1] (1855-1889) 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 the blindfold drive.[1]
In the early 1870s the Bishop was the manager of Anna Eva Fay's spiritualist acts, but in 1876 exposed her trick methods to the media. He became an anti-spiritualist performer and wrote a book exposing the trick methods used by psychics.[2] Bishop performed famous "thought reading" demonstrations. He claimed no supernatural powers and ascribed his powers to muscular sensitivity (reading thoughts from unconscious bodily cues).[3] Oliver Lodge reported[4] that Bishop came to Liverpool in 1883 and performed by having an audience member hide a pin, return to the blindfolded Bishop on the stage, and using "thought-transference" to guide the member back to the pin.
Bishop became unconscious in one of his demonstrations, he was taken upstairs to a bedroom where he died. His death certificate gave the cause of death as hysterocatalepsy.[5]
Publications
- Thought Reading, Second Sight & Spiritual Manifestations Explained: Showing How the Supposed Phenomena are Produced by Natural Means (1907)
- Second Sight Explained: A Complete Exposition of Clairvoyance or Second Sight (1880)
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Biography of Washington Irving Bishop
- ↑ Simon During. (2004). Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Harvard University Press. p. 161. ISBN 978-0674013711
- ↑ Roger Luckhurst. (2002). The Invention of Telepathy: 1870-1901. Oxford University Press. p. 63. ISBN 978-0199249626
- ↑ Oliver Lodge (1931) Past Years, page 273, Hodder & Stoughton
- ↑ Barry. H. Wiley. (2012). The Thought Reader Craze: Victorian Science at the Enchanted Boundary. McFarland. p. 130. ISBN 978-0786464708
Further reading
- The Strange Life & Death of Washington Irving Bishop
- Trevor H. Hall (1964). The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney. Duckworth. pp. 80–87.