Anna Eva Fay

Anna Eva Fay was among the most successful mediums and stage mentalists of her age, a headline act who could make audiences believe she reached into the spirit world to touch their dearly departed, and into their minds to read their very thoughts. She fooled some of the finest minds of the era, counted Houdini as a friend, and was described by her great rival J N Maskelyne, not without admiration, as "a fascinating little blonde."

Performing in gowns and diamonds across the best theatres of America and Europe, vivacious and enchanting yet in total command of any room, she sustained a career of some forty years. The author and magic historian David Price judged her, simply, the most successful act of her kind ever to appear on a stage.

A Backwoods Childhood

She was born Ann Eliza Heathman at Southington, Ohio, on 3 February 1851, only three years after the Fox sisters had set the spiritualist movement alight. The daughter of a shoemaker, she lost her mother young and was fostered out to a spiritualist family as a servant, living in the barn and enduring a hard youth of backwoods farm toil. Told from childhood that she was a medium for the spirits of the dead, and encouraged to pursue it, she gave her first exhibition in an old schoolhouse, and may, according to David Price, have begun performing as early as eleven. When her father remarried she took the name Anna Eva, and in 1869 held her first seance, for a profit of ten cents. It was the beginning of a new life.

Melville and the Making of a Medium

Her gift for convincing audiences brought her to the attention of H Melville Cummings, a fraudulent medium who also made a living exposing fraudulent mediums, depending on who was paying him more at the time. Performing as Henry Melville Fay, itself a borrowed name, he became her manager and in time her common-law husband, and taught her the whole craft of the fake medium, including the rope-tie act. Under his guidance she conquered first America and then Europe, and became Anna Eva Fay. The early show paired his magic and ventriloquism with her Light and Dark Seances; in the Light Seance she presented the dancing handkerchief, the very effect later made famous by Harry Blackstone Sr, though it is generally agreed that Fay invented it.

The Spirit Cabinet

The heart of the act was her spirit cabinet, which was no cabinet at all but a simple pipe-and-drape enclosure. For her Cotton Bandage Test she had audience members tie her to a wooden post with strips of cotton bandage, sew the bandages together with thread, and bind her feet with a rope whose end was held by spectators outside the curtain. The moment the curtain closed, the manifestations began: her head would appear floating above it; nails left with a board were found hammered in; paper and scissors emerged cut into a string of paper dolls; tambourines flew. One of the most convincing was an accordion that played while she was bound, achieved, in truth, by an ingenious trifle, a small tube slipped into the instrument's valve through which she could breathe and blow. Every time the curtain reopened, Fay sat tied fast and seemingly in a trance.

Fooling Sir William Crookes

For a time the American mentalist Washington Irving Bishop served as her manager, until he turned and became the source of a damaging exposure in the New York Daily Graphic in 1876. Fay was, in fact, exposed as a fraud many times, her assistants known to dig up details about sitters in the towns she visited, yet nothing dented her success; told once that the spirits did little for her, she shot back that they procured her a handsome income. Her greatest coup came in February 1875 at the London home of Sir William Crookes, one of the most respected scientists of the age. Crookes had her grip two electrodes completing an electrical circuit linked to a galvanometer in the next room; objects moved and an instrument played, yet the circuit appeared unbroken, and Crookes declared himself satisfied that no trickery was involved. How she beat the test is still debated: Houdini claimed she told him she had gripped a battery handle behind her knee to keep the circuit closed and free a hand, while the historian Barry Wiley argues she worked with a secret accomplice, Crookes's own assistant Charles Gimingham, who had built the apparatus.

From Spirits to Mind Reading

In 1877 Fay and Melville had a son, John Truesdell Fay, who would grow up to assist his mother, hidden beneath her dress to help work the manifestations. After the marriage faltered she wed David Pingree in 1881, who managed and promoted her shows, among them a clairvoyant turn called Somnolency. As the appetite for spirit phenomena waned, Fay reinvented herself around mentalism and mind reading, and in 1894 adopted Samri Baldwin's question-and-answer act, soon performing it better than anyone. Spectators wrote questions on slips of paper before the show and kept them; later, seated and draped with a light cloth, Fay answered some three a minute on wealth, health, lost loved ones and marriage. The secret lay in her assistants, who swapped the slips for wax-coated dummies and carried the originals down near the footlights, leaving Fay simply to read the notes from beneath her sheet. She would end by collapsing dramatically into her husband's arms, to be carried from the stage amid a storm of applause. Old favourites still featured too, the dancing handkerchief, a floating table and a rapping hand among them, but the question-and-answer feat was now unmistakably the climax of her show.

So believable was she that, for all the magic and ventriloquism, audiences took her work for the real thing. She never quite claimed it was, but the disclaimer she gave before each show left everything to the imagination: if you wish to believe what you see is real, you are welcome to, she would say, in effect, we present these demonstrations for your kind consideration, an artful ambiguity later echoed by the Piddingtons and their famous invitation to "be the judge."

Family Tragedy and Houdini

All went splendidly until her son John married Eva Norman in 1898. The two women never got along, and matters worsened when John and Eva set out on their own with a rival act, The Marvellous Fays, in effect a copy of his mother's, opening a rift in the family. In 1908, handling a loaded pistol, John accidentally shot and killed himself. After visiting Fay in 1924, Houdini claimed she had confided all her secrets, though there is little evidence she revealed much; he printed a photograph of the two of them gazing at a sun-ball in her garden and wrote of her in A Magician Among the Spirits. According to the Kenneth Silverman biography, the one thing she did confide was sadder and more human: that she visited her son's grave often, forever hoping for a message from beyond that never came. Fay was also present in January 1925 when Houdini prepared to challenge Margery the Medium in Boston.

Legacy

Fay was a shrewd businesswoman, reputedly the highest taxpayer in her area, mistress of the large and impressive Heathman Manor in Melrose Highlands, Massachusetts, and wealthy from property as well as the stage; in later years she even earned a steady income answering letters. During a British tour in 1913 she was elected the first Honorary Lady Associate of The Magic Circle, a singular distinction. An accident in Milwaukee in 1924 brought her long career to a close, and she died in 1927, interred in the family mausoleum at Wyoming Cemetery in Melrose. No performer of her kind, before or since, has cast quite so long a shadow over the worlds of spiritualism and the stage.

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From The Magic Circular

This profile is adapted and expanded from Roberto Forzoni's original feature in The Magic Circular, the journal of The Magic Circle, January 2016.

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