Rose Mackenberg (1892-1968) is known as a real-life ghost buster. She partnered with magician Harry Houdini to investigate psychics and mediums across the United States. Her detective work helped expose scams and protect vulnerable people.
Rose Mackenberg (1892-1968) is known as a real-life ghost buster. She partnered with magician Harry Houdini to investigate psychics and mediums across the United States. Her detective work helped expose scams and protect vulnerable people.
You’re probably familiar with rebels without a cause, but what about rebels with a cause? This month on Womanica, we’re talking about women who broke rules that were meant to be broken. From the “Godmother of Title IX” Bernice Sandler, to the most prominent figure of the People Power Revolution, Corazon Aquino, to the “Queen of Civil Rights” Ruby Hurley, these women took major risks to upend the status quo and create meaningful change.
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Every weekday, listeners explore the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of groundbreaking women throughout history who have dramatically shaped the world around us. In each 5 minute episode, we’ll dive into the story behind one woman listeners may or may not know–but definitely should. These diverse women from across space and time are grouped into easily accessible and engaging monthly themes like Educators, Villains, Indigenous Storytellers, Activists, and many more. Womanica is hosted by WMN co-founder and award-winning journalist Jenny Kaplan. The bite-sized episodes pack painstakingly researched content into fun, entertaining, and addictive daily adventures.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan. And this is Womanica.
This month, we’re talking about Rebels WITH a cause: women who broke rules that were meant to be broken. These women took major risks to upend the status quo and create meaningful change.
Today, we’re talking about a woman known as a real-life ghost buster. She partnered with magician Harry Houdini to investigate psychics and mediums across the United States. Her detective work helped expose scams and protect vulnerable people.
Please welcome Rose Mackenburg.
Rose was born on July 10, 1892. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York in a Russian immigrant family.
When Rose was a teenager, she became fascinated with spiritualism. Spiritualists believe that it’s possible to communicate with the dead, usually through a medium. Spiritualism experienced booms in popularity following periods of strife in America. Including, around the Civil War and then again after World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic. Typically, grieving people sought out mediums to contact lost loved ones — usually for a steep price.
By the mid-1920s, spiritualism had attracted a lot of skeptics. The most famous was Harry Houdini, the iconic magician and escape artist. He publicly criticized mediums for being frauds and con-artists taking advantage of vulnerable people to turn a profit. After Rose heard about Houdini’s scorn for spiritualism, she lost interest in it as a legitimate belief system.
In her early 30s, Rose worked as a legal stenographer and private detective. A client asked her to look into a psychic who'd convinced him to buy a stock that ended up losing him money. Rose contacted Houdini for help, and he advised her on how to investigate the fraud.
Houdini was in the middle of forming what he called his own “secret service” — a team that would investigate and expose phony spiritualists. In 1925, he recruited Rose to join the effort. Over the next two years, Rose investigated over 300 spiritualists across the country for Houdini.
Part of her job involved infiltrating Spiritualist churches. It was illegal for mediums to directly charge for their services, so they often operated as official religious organizations. That way, they could avoid taxes and collect “donations” instead. Rose got ordained in so many of these churches that her fellow investigators nicknamed her “the Rev.”
Another part of the job was disguises, and Rose was a master. In a newspaper interview, she described some of her aliases as the “rustic schoolteacher,”and the “tipsy consultant.” Rose used shawls, hats and round black spectacles in her costumes. She also liked to use wordplay to come up with false names. “Alicia Bunk” was a play on “All Is a Bunk.” “Frances Raud or F. Raud” was code for “fraud.”
When she met up with mediums, Rose usually pretended to be a grieving mother or a widow. The mediums would then relay messages from these people beyond the grave that Rose had completely made up. She would also observe the tricks they pulled to fool clients — from table tipping to pretending to make objects levitate. She reported her findings back to Houdini, who would then publicly expose the phony psychics.
One time, Rose was investigating a medium in Indianapolis. She posed as a mother grieving a lost baby, and he charged her $25 dollars for his services. Adjusted for inflation, that’s more than $400 today! He also said it’d be easier to get in contact with the spirits if Rose took off her clothes. Rose told Houdini everything. Six weeks later, he gave a lecture in Indianapolis. The medium was in the audience. Houdini called him up on stage and publicly humiliated him by exposing him as a con artist.
In 1926, Rose and Houdini’s work brought them in front of Congress. At a congressional hearing over e a bill that would outlaw fortune telling in Washington, D.C., Rose’s testimony caused a big stir. She revealed that several members of Congress – and even the President’s family — had hired mediums before. They denied it, and the bill ultimately failed. But Rose and Houdini still made a splash in the press.
After Houdini’s death, Rose continued to investigate spiritualists, partnering with police departments, insurance companies and Better Business Bureaus around the country. Over the course of her career, she investigated more than 1,000 mediums. Rose also gave lectures and wrote articles on how to spot spiritualist scams. She even wrote an autobiography about her work called, “So You Want to Attend a Seance”, though the book was never published.
Rose always maintained that she was open to the possibility of contacting the spirits of the dead. But said she never saw proof of it — just parlor tricks and illusions. She once told an interviewer, “I can smell a rat before I smell the incense.”
Rose died in 1968. She was 75 years old. Today, she is remembered as a crusader against a predatory industry. Spiritualism is still a lucrative field today, and many people across the world still seek out mediums in times of grief. But thanks to investigators like Rose, tactics like physical spirit manifestations and levitation have been debunked and aren’t popular anymore. And now, we at least know to be vigilant when experimenting with Spiritualism.
All month, we’re talking about rebels with a cause. For more information, find us on Facebook and Instagram @womanicapodcast.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator.
Talk to you tomorrow!