A long time ago, My Aunt Mary) attended a spiritualist church. Although nominally Christian, this was neither a legit religious organization nor a recognized denomination. In fact, it was a total fraud. After some token prayers, the services were mostly cheap magician's tricks designed to con the parishioners into believing they were communicating with their dead relatives and getting them to make generous donations and will their property to the church. One favorite charity was to rename for your departed, (after a donation, of course) sinkhole lakes in land the church owned in Lutz, a Karst region north of Tampa. The ministers wore leisure suits or multi-colored satin tuxedoes and pancake makeup a centimeter deep on their faces.

Aunt Mary invited me to a couple of these seances, and they had the usual ectoplasmic manifestations: ghostly flying trumpets, voices and rappings from the walls, diaphanous "presences" floating around the darkened room. One trick they pulled was to receive signed, sealed envelopes from the audience with questions about the deceased which the ministers could answer before the envelopes were opened. The unsealed envelopes were later returned to the audience who treasured them as evidence of the existence of their loved ones in the afterlife. I tried to explain to Aunt Mary these were all magician's tricks used to rip off the flock, but the lady, (who had a long history of consulting fortune tellers and psychics) insisted these people knew things about her she had never revealed and they couldn't possibly know.

Years later, I was in a bookstore and spied a book called The Psychic Mafia which I recognized, from the author's photo on the jacket, to be written by one of the church's ministers. It appears the minister got an attack of conscience and decided to go public with the fraud, and his book detailed a complete record of his activities, including explanations of how all the spooky manifestations had been generated. For example, the sealed envelope trick was the easiest of all! The minister would open the first envelope and read it, but a fake answer would be directed towards a plant he had in the audience, who would react with the appropriate emotional response. He would then open and read the SECOND envelope, and plausibly answer the question that was in the FIRST one. In this way, he would be able to work his way through scores of questions, and each person who had filled an envelope out would receive a satisfactory answer. Simple, effective, foolproof, and I would never have figured it out in years.

The book revealed this and many other gags the spiritualists used to get the audience convinced, but most important, he explained the Psychic Mafia itself. This was his name for a network of psychics, palm readers, Tarot artists, etc throughout the country who collected biographical data on their marks, and then shared their files with others. If you had ever had a business relationship with a psychic anywhere, then moved to another town and visited another, by the time your appointment came up he or she would have called your home town and had your original consultant spill your most intimate secrets to him. Can you imagine how this would work today with the Internet? Aunt Mary didn't have a chance.

I bought Aunt Mary the book. It may seem cruel to dash her beliefs, but I didn't want her cheated by these low-lifes any more, and I hoped that an admission by the perpetrator himself would be more effective at convincing her than anything I could say. The author's name and photograph on the cover, and the confessions inside did little to change her mind. "Maybe so," she said, "but I STILL think there was something to it." The desire to believe is stronger than the need to know.