Reading the daily newspapers every day from 1926, I expect to see stories about Harry Houdini, psychics, and Calvin Coolidge. But one article that includes all three?! This one was way too good to pass up sharing today.

I actually laughed out loud. Then I read the article. Then I read the Evening Star's version. I am still laughing.

Here's what was happening on this exact day, 100 years ago.

Harry Houdini, the escape artist and cultural legend, had spent the better part of the mid-1920s on a personal crusade against Washington D.C.'s psychic community. Mediums, astrologists, clairvoyants, fortune tellers. He thought they were predators. Frauds. And he wanted them banned.

A bill was working its way through Congress that would do exactly that — outlaw fortune-telling in the District entirely. Houdini showed up to testify in favor of it before a House judiciary subcommittee.

But he didn't just show up to talk. He brought a spy.

Her name was Rose Mackenberg, and she was Houdini's secret investigator. For months, she had been moving through D.C.'s psychic underground. Paying for readings, sitting in séances, playing the role of a true believer. She was so committed to her cover that she got herself ordained as a spiritualist minister. Six times. At up to $25 each. Which, she noted in testimony, gave her the authority "to marry and to bury."

When she came back to Houdini, she came back with names.

A medium named Mrs. Jane Coates had told Mackenberg (for $2) that table-tipping séances were a regular occurrence at the White House. With President Coolidge. And his family.

A D.C. astrologist who went by Madame Marcia told her something equally remarkable: that almost all the senators came to her for readings. She named four of them specifically — Senators Capper, Watson, Dill, and Fletcher.

Houdini put Mackenberg on the stand.

The room absolutely lost it.

Mrs. Coates, sitting in the audience, started screaming denials while Mackenberg was still speaking. Madame Marcia kept interrupting, demanding to be heard. Houdini was yelling over both of them. The Evening Star described the committee "vainly and unsuccessfully" trying to maintain order.

At some point in the chaos, a congressman named Representative Hammer actually asked Houdini for a demonstration. So Houdini picked up a spirit trumpet — the device mediums used to produce ghostly "spirit voices" — and showed exactly how the trick worked. He delivered a spirit message to Representative Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts. She confirmed she heard something. He then explained, plainly, that it was a fraud.

Madame Marcia, still not satisfied, kept screaming "test me, test me" — demanding Houdini conjure a message from her dead son. Houdini's response, and I'm reading this directly from the 1926 Evening Star:

The committee adjourned. As the only available option.

The mediums kept arguing in the hallway.

Here's where it gets genuinely interesting. And honestly? A little frustrating.

The bill had real opposition, and not just from the psychics in the room. Civil liberties concerns were raised about the government policing belief. Religious exemptions were complicated: Where exactly was the line between a medium charging for a séance and a minister accepting a donation? The spiritualist community had real political organization behind it, and they weren't going quietly.

Houdini died that October. On Halloween, 1926, which feels almost too on-the-nose. Without his energy and visibility driving it, the bill quietly died too.

Washington D.C. wouldn't get around to banning fortune-telling for commercial purposes until decades later. And even then, enforcement has always been another matter entirely.

I keep thinking about Rose Mackenberg sitting in those séance rooms, taking notes, getting ordained over and over. There's a whole movie in that woman's story that nobody has made yet.

And if you want to read the full articles and see what didn't make the cut today, members get a cutting room floor story headlined "Spank 'Em and Cure 'Em."
Yikes indeed for the guy named and pictured.

See you tomorrow.

-Chris