MRS. SEYMOUR, CLAIRVOYANT, No. 110 SPRING STREET.
This woman is at the same time one of the most pretentious and most clever of the clairvoyants, and she does a very large business. Most of her customers come for medical advice, although, in accordance with her printed announcement, she is willing to talk about “absent friends,” and whatever other business the client may choose to pay for.
One branch of the clairvoyant trade which formerly brought as much money to their pockets as any other department of their business, was the finding lost or stolen property, and giving directions for the detection of the thieves. This specialty has however been pretty much abandoned of late by nearly all of them, in consequence of law-proceedings against certain ones of the sisterhood, which have in three or four instances been commenced by parties who have been wrongfully accused of theft, through the agency of the clairvoyant impostors. Several suits have been instituted against them for defamation of character, and they have been made to smart so severely that they are now all very careful about accusing persons of crimes.
As an evidence of the implicit faith put in these people by their dupes, it may be mentioned that many applications have been made to Judge Welsh, of this city, and to the other judges, for warrants of arrest against respectable persons, for theft, the only grounds of suspicion against them being, that some clairvoyant had said that the property had been stolen by a person of such and such a height, with hair and eyes of this or that color, and that the suspected person happened to answer the description. Of course, all such applications for legal process have been refused by the magistrates, and the applicants dismissed with a severe rebuke.
Mrs. Seymour was an intimate friend of Mrs. Cunningham, of the Burdell-murder notoriety, and was a witness in that memorable trial.
The Cash Customer had an interview with this woman, which he thus describes:
Another Clairvoyant, who is not much in particular.
If a man be desirous of knowing what sort of a moral character he bears in the spirit-world, and what style of society his disembodied soul will circulate in, or if he desires to know the particulars of the after-death behavior of any of his acquaintances, of course he will find it to his interest to marry a “medium” of average respectability, and in good practice, and so save the expense of frequent consultations. The “rapping” and “table-tipping” communications from the spirit-world are hardly satisfactory. It is, very likely, pleasant for a man to be on speaking terms with his bedroom furniture, to spend an agreeable hour occasionally in conversation with his washhand-stand, to enjoy a spirited argument with his bedstead and rocking-chair, or to receive now and then a confidential communication from his bootjack, but on the whole, these upholstery dialogues do not satisfy the “yearnings of the soul after the infinite.” The powers of speech of a washhand-stand are circumscribed, bedsteads and rocking-chairs are seldom equal to a sustained conversation, and the most talkative bootjack has not a sufficient command of language to make itself agreeable for any great length of time. The logic of a poker may sometimes be convincing, but it is not generally agreeable; and the rhetoric of uneducated coal-scuttles is hardly elegant enough to pass the criticism of a refined taste. It is therefore much more satisfactory as well as economical, for a person who desires to enjoy his daily chat with the Spirits, to get a “speaking medium” to translate the eloquence of all parties and make the thing pleasant. Even then, confidential communications must be very guarded, and on this account the person who invents some means by which every man can be his own medium, will win an equal immortality with the author of that invaluable book, “Every Man his own Washerwoman.”
Johannes had been thinking over the spiritual subject, of course with a view to profitable matrimony, for he thought he could manage to turn an intimacy with the spirits to good pecuniary account, and inveigle those incorporeal gentlemen into doing something for those of their friends who are yet bothered with bodies.
He knew that there are in New York, plenty of spiritualists in such constant communication with their acquaintances on the “other side of Jordan,” that they know the bill of fare with which those seventh-heaveners are served every day, and whenever their jolly ghostships sit down to a pleasant game of whist, they send word to their earthly relatives by “medium” every fresh deal, what the new trump is, who hold the honors, and how the game stands generally.