I performed a mind reading act while in college. Relax. I was a fake. I made interesting money and learned a valuable lesson. People, intelligent well-educated people, men and women, will believe whatever they need to believe – almost regardless of any contrary evidence. I was a seventeen year old fake mindreader that people, years and years older, were asking to tell their fortunes. I just couldn’t do that, though I knew the jargon and the routine, and though I could have tripled my mentalist income if I had. The downside was not worth it.
Years later, I learned another aspect of that lesson while doing volunteer work in a local maximum-security prison when I came to know three con men, and, once gaining their trust, we discussed setting up cons, short cons, long cons and what the real difference was between the thinking and the risks involved. They were experienced cons who could fake sincerity with the best of the politicians. One night as I was leaving, and we had come to know each other, I asked the obvious question: “I’m going home and you are going back to your 5x7 cell. What went wrong?”
Though naturally their details were different, the bottom line was the same. What had brought each of them down was coming to believe their own con, to prefer the fake personae, the fake story to their own reality. As one explained, when you become the wrong person, you stop watching the edges of the con, stop watching your back, and the holes in your story become “pathetically obvious”.
Thus, in my writing, both non-fiction and fiction, the paranormal is all fake, all a con. I wrote the biography of the woman whom Harry Houdini called “… the greatest female mystifier”. That was blonde, blue-eyed, only five feet tall, Anna Eva Fay. (Her biography is The Indescribable Phenomenon from Hermetic Press.) She was the quintessential con woman who went from a condition of near slavery in northeastern Ohio to becoming the most acclaimed spirit medium in the U.S., convincing prominent scientists in the US and UK that she was the real thing, that she could project “a non-human force at a distance”. When the profits from the ghosts started declining in 1894, Annie went on the vaudeville stage to become acclaimed as a greater showman than Houdini. In her act, she repeated some of what she had done in the séance room, then Annie stole the mind reading act of magician, S.S. Baldwin, to add it to her séance material, then performed it better than he did, as Baldwin publicly admitted. Annie died in 1927 at 76 in her own bed, the wealthiest citizen of Melrose, MA. Her home, Heathman Manor, had seen Harry Houdini, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and others who came to consult her on the spirits, real and fake. At the time of her death, Anna Eva Fay was eulogized in the New York Times. Annie, throughout her 48 year career, never believed her own con.
So, when you are plotting the impossible in your story or novel, do you make the paranormal powers displayed fake or real? The problem with doing it “real” is to be able to make your protagonist productively vulnerable, i.e., does the vulnerability advance the plot, is he or she someone who makes believable mistakes and legitimately suffers from them. Be careful as scattering too many chunks of Kryptonite about your plot eventually becomes obvious, silly … and dull.
I knew Walter B. Gibson who created the character of The Shadow, one of the greatest mystery protagonists in the genre. Walter created the Shadow as highly intelligent, relentless, ruthless, with an astonishing range of bizarre knowledge – but never invisible. When the Shadow went on radio with Orson Welles as his initial incarnation, he was not only invisible but could also read minds. As was pointed out at the time with some humor, the only thing between the crooks and justice was the commercials as with those powers, the Shadow could never lose. When it was realized that a super-Shadow was dull, the Shadow lost his mentalist powers and gained Margo Lane. A great trade-off.
When I began my Adventures in Second Sight trilogy I modeled my teen-age heroine, Kyame Piddington, after Anna Eva Fay. At the age of eleven and desperately trying to replace her dead mother in the family second sight act (two-person mind reading), Kyame learns hard lessons as she deals with hostile audiences, bank robbers, jadoo-wallahs, murderous crystal gazers, and others, along with the prediction of a New York Chinese astrologer, that she had the soul of an implacable assassin. All in the course of which, learning from her father and the people she encounters, Kyame comes to understand how to sell her con, to become real to the people as she and her father travel across the American West in 1890-95. At sixteen in San Francisco, she faces the master of the Bing On tong who had literally butchered her father, her own death only a few seconds away, yet it is Kyame who disappears from the master’s windowless office, leaving him dead with a silver knife in his heart, and leaving the door behind her still barred from the inside.
To members of the tong, the young white woman should have been dead, but now they believed she was a tulku, a Tibetan term for an occult wraith who can move through solid walls and locked doors to kill and then vanish.
Kyame had sold her con to her toughest audience.
I love vampires (my favorites are by Scarlet Dean), and I have sat on the Bram Stoker Memorial Bench on the bluff overlooking Whitby Harbor with Dracula in the back of my mind. But for me as a writer, a fake paranormal is more challenging, more intriguing -- and you, the reader, can actually go out and duplicate the wonder you have just read.
Just don’t believe it.