The mediums produce “blood-red letters on the arm” in a very simple way. It is done with a pencil, or some blunt-pointed instrument, it being necessary to bear on hard while the movement of writing is being executed. The pressure, though not sufficient to abrade the skin, forces the blood from the capillary vessels over which the pencil passes, and where, when the reaction takes place, an unusual quantity of blood gathers and becomes plainly visible through the cuticle. Gradually, as an equilibrium of the circulation is restored, the letters pass away.
This “manipulation” is generally produced by the medium in connection with the ballot-test. Having learned the name of an investigator’s spirit-friend, in the manner stated in a previous article, the investigator is set to writing some other names. While he is thus occupied, the medium quickly slips up his sleeve under the table, and writes on his arm the name he has learned.
Try the experiment yourself, reader. Hold out your left arm; clench the fist so as to harden the muscle a little, and write your name on the skin with a blunt pencil or any similar point, in letters say three-quarters of an inch long, pressing firmly enough to feel a little pain. Rub the place briskly a dozen times; this brings out the letters quickly, in tolerably-distinct red lines.
On thick, tough skins it is difficult to produce letters in this way. They might also be outlined more deeply by sharply pricking in dots along the lines of the desired letters.
Among others who seek to gain money and notoriety by the exercise of their talents for “spiritual” humbuggery, is a certain woman, whom I will not further designate, but whose name is at the service of any proper person, and who exhibited not long since in Brooklyn and New York. This woman is accompanied by her husband, who is a confederate in the playing of her “little game.”
She seats herself at a table, which has been placed against the wall of the room. The audience is so seated as to form a semicircle, at one end of which, and near enough to the medium to be able to shake hands with her, or nearly so, sits her husband, with perhaps an accommodating spiritualist next to him. Then the medium, in an assumed voice, engages in a miscellaneous talk, ending with a request that some one sit by her and hold her hand.
A skeptic is permitted to do that. When thus placed, skeptic is directly between the medium and her husband, and with his back to the latter. The husband plays spirit, and with his right hand—which is free, the other only being held by the accommodating spiritualist—pats the investigator on the head, thumps him with a guitar and other instruments, and may be pulls his hair.
The medium assumes all this to be done by a spirit, because her hands are held and she could not do it! Profound reasoning! If any one suggests that the husband had better sit somewhere else, the medium will not hear to it—“he is a part of the battery,” and the necessary conditions must not be interfered with. Sure enough! Accommodating spiritualist also says he holds husband fast.
A tambourine-frame, without the head, and an iron ring, large enough to pass over one’s arm, are exhibited to the audience. Medium says the spirits have such power over matter as to be able to put one or both those things on to her arm while some one holds her hands.
The party who is privileged to hold her hands on such occasion, has to grope his way to her in the dark. Having reached her, she seizes his hands, and passes one of them down her neck and along her arm, saying: