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The McEwen Fake.Monday evening, “the great wizard, Professor McEwen,” exhibited some of his miracles of mind reading for the benefit of the Athletic Association the entertainment of Commencement visitors and the advancement of psychic science. In all these respects he was an over ./helming success. The test made was so conclusive as to leave absolutely not a shadow of doubt in the case. The test was so considered by many of the audience as practically the same as that proposed previously by some of the Faculty and declined by McEwen.A volunteer from the audience wrote a word, pricked a letter in it with a pin, put the word in a locked box, and hid the pin in the audience. McEwen not only found the pin, but read the word in the “mind” of the committee and even told what letter had been punctured! This feat of course was impossible by muscle reading and could only be a case of thought transference. It turns up, however, that in this case, the thought had been transferred before the exercises began and by the ordinary channels of speech. The word written, the letter to be pricked, and the place where the pin was hidden were all arranged previously by McEwen with a few students who lent themselves to his game partly for the purpose of thus detecting and exposing a fraud. Immediately after the audience was dismissed they made known the imposture and have signed an affidavit of the facts in the case as above stated. „It is not often that so complete an exposure of the methods of the “mind readers” can be made and on account of the value of the end reached the audience, who were so humbugged, can perhaps forgive the questionable means that were used. The extreme exertion in reading the concealed name, which he already knew, produced in McEwen the customery “nervous prostration of the sensitive mind reader.” Me called attention to the profuse perspiration which the terrible effort brought out, and at the end fell into the usual complete collapse. McEwen wrote in our Monday’s issue with reference to the personal danger in the test proposed by the Faculty,-“and fortunate if the mind or the nervous system of the sensitive mind reader is not injured by the extraordinary strain of discordant influences.” We hope that the “discordant influences' he encountered at Mt. Vernon may not permanently injure the mind of the wizard, but that there may rather be stimulated a healthful activity of the conscience.
Newspaper Details
The Cornellian
Mount Vernon, Iowa, US
Thu, Jun 14, 1894
Page 8
Full Page
Clipped by
Caroline A.
NA, 05 Dec 2024
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The Cornellian
