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]

Early days

Bishop was born in 1855. In the early 1870s, the Bishop was the manager of Anna Eva Fay's spiritualist acts, but in 1876, he 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] In 1880, he published a one shilling book called Second Sight Explained.

Performances

Bishop performed famous "thought reading" demonstrations all over the world. 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, England 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.

Death

On May 12, 1889, Bishop became unconscious for the second time in one of his demonstrations while performing at the theatrical society known as Lambs Club[5] in Manhattan, New York,[6] he was taken upstairs to a bedroom, where he died. A physician who knew of Bishop's rare coma condition by the name of Dr. John A. Irwin,[7] who (according to an episode of Mysteries at the Monument) was known as the "scientific Jack the Ripper", kept silent because, for years, he wanted to study Bishop's brain with an autopsy. Bishop's death certificate gave the cause of death as hysterocatalepsy.[8]

Burial

Bishop is buried in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. As a tribute to the son she believed was murdered, Eleanor Fletcher Bishop has the inscription "The Martyr" carved above his name on his headstone, an eerie post script to a famed mentalist's last and most tragic illusion.

Publications

References

  1. 1 2 Biography of Washington Irving Bishop
  2. ↑ Simon During. (2004). Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Harvard University Press. p. 161. ISBN 978-0674013711
  3. ↑ Roger Luckhurst. (2002). The Invention of Telepathy: 1870-1901. Oxford University Press. p. 63. ISBN 978-0199249626
  4. ↑ Oliver Lodge (1931) Past Years, page 273, Hodder & Stoughton
  5. ↑ http://www.themagicdetective.com/2011/03/strange-life-death-of-washington-irving.html
  6. ↑ http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/morbid-monday-the-magician-killed-by-an-autopsy
  7. ↑ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B04E4D71538E233A2575AC2A9609C94639ED7CF
  8. ↑ Barry. H. Wiley. (2012). The Thought Reader Craze: Victorian Science at the Enchanted Boundary. McFarland. p. 130. ISBN 978-0786464708

Further reading

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