Some of Their Methods--Charlatans Have a Great Hold on the
Poorer Classes of Big Cities, Much Alike--Schools of Crime
Run Full Blast--Silly and Ignorant People Undone by Vicious
and Wide-Open Fraud.
War against the swindlers, impostors and blackmailers who operate
in Chicago under the guise of clairvoyants, trance mediums,
astro-psychics, palmists, magicians and fortune tellers, of whom there
are about 1,500 in Chicago, should be driven out of the city and never
allowed to return.
There exist in Chicago a horde of these brazen frauds, who ply their
trade in the most open and unblushing manner. Few of them are other
than organized schools for the propagation of crime, injustice and
indecencies that would make an unjailed denizen of the red light
district blush to even mention. We particularly refer to the army
of fortune tellers, clairvoyants, Hindoo fakers, mediums, palmists,
hypnotists and other skillful artists, whose sole occupation is to rob
and mislead the superstitious, foolish and ignorant. The business is a
paying industry, realizing, it is said, an enormous sum of money every
month in Chicago, all of which is obtained by false pretenses.
Here is a very large field for police investigation. The practices
of these people are of the most demoralizing tendency. Can there be
anything worse than holding out love potions to married women to
compel other women's husbands to love them? Those dens of iniquity
offer their services and even actually aid in the procuring of
abortions, and in showing how and where a good haul can be made by
robbery or burglary. They bring together the depraved of both sexes.
Many of them are purveyors to our brothels and stews.
They flaunt their profession, their "spiritual mysteries," brazenly in
public in our busy thoroughfares, even invading some of our hotels.
They are the hotbeds of vice and crime, from the robbing of orphans
to the deflowering of innocent girls. They fall into "trances" and
call up spirits from the vaults of heaven, or elsewhere, to testify to
their truth, and in the turn-up of an ace of spades they see a "dark
lady" or a "dark gentleman" who is pining for you, and furnish the
address of either.
[Illustration: Famous Artist's Explanation of Scientific Ghost
Upper Row (left) Real Ghost. (right) Marx's Imitation.