SYMHC Classics: Charles Colchester

Stuff You Missed in History Class

This episode explores the life and career of Charles Colchester, a controversial 19th-century spiritualist who claimed to have warned President Abraham Lincoln about his assassination. Hosts Holly Frey and Tracy B. Wilson trace how Colchester

Key takeaways

• Charles Colchester (possibly named Sealby or Sealbic) claimed to be an illegitimate English duke's son and used a hidden telegraphic device on his bicep to create 'spirit' clicking sounds during seances.
• President Abraham Lincoln accompanied Mary Todd Lincoln to Colchester's seances not out of belief, but to investigate the tricks; he enlisted Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry, who identified the mechanical source but couldn't legally prove fraud without a body search.

Main topics

• 19th-century American spiritualism and mediumship
• Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln's grief

Notable quotes

"the real name of Colchester is Sealby or Sealbic. He is an English imposter, and the spiritualists declare that he is a fraudulent trickster and not one of their number."

Conclusion

The episode serves as a fascinating historical case study in how grief and wartime anxiety created fertile ground for

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Speaker 5 (0:02) Guaranteed human. Lisa, tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Iwano. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa DiGiulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions. And at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. Now in my 30s, being the founder of New Shoes, good taste is my business. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get Speaker 6 (0:32) your podcasts. Speaker 6 (0:35) I'm Melissa Jeltsin, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge. You Speaker 8 (0:51) never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Speaker 6 (0:56) And you can get access to all episodes 100 % ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today. Speaker 4 (1:14) Hi, this is Kylie Brakeman, Angela Geritana, Speaker 8 (1:16) Jeremy Colhane, Patrick McDonald, and Speaker 4 (1:18) we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists podcast, the Speaker 8 (1:22) improvised character comedy podcast, where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of Eurovision participants. And Speaker 5 (1:31) we do a little Halloween sometimes. Does the Pope dress up? He Speaker 8 (1:35) winks on Halloween. He gets right up next to the microphone. Speaker 4 (1:38) I hear you can almost hear the eyelashes hit each other. Speaker 8 (1:41) You've never seen Italy so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. Speaker 4 (1:46) Listen to Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (1:54) I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand-up comedian, creator, and host of Scam Goddess Podcast. The true crime comedy podcast all about robbery, fraud, and those who practice it. Each week I bring on an amazing guest. Speaker 8 (2:06) Ooh, I scammed him. What? I could talk to you for an hour. Speaker 1 (2:09) You're a generational yapper, like me. That's why I had to make yapping a job. And now you can catch full episodes of my show on YouTube. Start listening to Scam Goddess on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (2:24) So like by age 11 or so, at least 70 % have a phone. Speaker 7 (2:29) I'm Dr. Joy, and this is Therapy for Black Girls. We spend our surviving middle school run getting into what's happening inside your kid's brain, the group chats, and their friendships, and what you can do about it. Speaker 8 (2:40) Your child is not doing this on purpose. Speaker 7 (2:42) That's the kind of perspective we've been pulling from the psychologists and psychiatrists who study this for a living. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (2:56) Happy Saturday and happy October. We are kicking off the month with our episode on spiritualist Charles Colchester, who was connected to Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln and to John Wilkes Booth, and who faced various allegations of fraud over the course of his Speaker 3 (3:12) career. This episode originally came out on September 20th, 2021. Enjoy. Speaker 3 (3:20) Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Speaker 3 (3:31) Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy Speaker 2 (3:34) B. Wilson. Speaker 3 (3:36) It's not quite Halloween time yet, but like the rabies are here. Yeah. I have it worse this year than any previous year, I think. But 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. 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 19th century in America, You'll bump up against that mention. And I keep 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. Not in any sort of like scary, creepy Halloweeny way, but just like there's some fascinating legal stuff that goes on. As well, it's just a person who manages to be. kind of 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 U.S. in the 19th century, only to ultimately be rejected by that same movement. Speaker 2 (5:04) Yeah, so as Holly just alluded to, Colchester's early life is entirely a mystery. There is 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 imposter, and the spiritualists declare that he is a fraudulent trickster and not one of their number. So, spoiler alert, Colchester 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. Speaker 3 (5:48) Yeah, there was a lot of, not one of us, not one of us, we don't know this person. I don't know her in the spiritualist meme of the 19th 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 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. Speaker 2 (6:30) Although it was not part of this personal story that he wove, Colchester also drank a lot, and he did use his alleged connection with the beyond to validate his drinking. He claimed that the spirits had authorized it, which is kind of... Funny to me. Speaker 3 (6:49) 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. Speaker 2 (6:59) So after performing seances for clients 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 Speaker 3 (7:19) have talked about Mary Todd Lincoln's fascination with spiritualism and the afterlife before on the show. She came up when we covered spirit photographer William Mumler during our Halloween live show a couple of years back. She was his most famous client, Mumler'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 how she became so very drawn to spiritualism. And the sad catalyst there was the death of the Lincolns' son, Willie, who died from typhoid fever at the age of 11 in 1862. Speaker 2 (7:59) The Lincolns each mourned in their own way. The president spent time alone, was very withdrawn, and grew frustrated with the ways that people tried to console him by talking about Willie being in heaven. He eventually turned his energies to the needs of the country in turmoil. Mary, on the other hand, was swept up in 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 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 Speaker 3 (8:39) was through Mary's many connections and invitations to mediums and spiritualists that Charles Colchester came into the lives of the Lincolns. And once he did so, he took full advantage of that 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 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 claim 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 some peace. But the president also... did not want the First Lady to be anyone's victim. So Speaker 2 (9:42) 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 Institution's secretary 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 Foote's papers in that episode. Speaker 3 (10:17) Yeah, there's also an interesting story between Henry and Lincoln in that they were very much... on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but also respected each other a lot. And Henry's background was in science, and he worked a lot in telegraphs 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 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 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 clothes removed for examination. And that was that. Speaker 2 (11:17) Incidentally, though, Joseph Henry supposedly did uncover the origins of these sounds totally by accident much later. He's said to have met a man on a train and started just idly talking to him. In this marvelous bit of happenstance, this man had engineered a telegraphic device that spiritualists used for exactly this purpose. They wore it 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 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 Lady's meetings with Colchester. Something much darker ultimately took place to sever that relationship. Speaker 3 (12:11) Yeah, Abraham Lincoln, I think, just liked 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 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, 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