When it came time for John Seybold to place the ring on his bride’s finger, he was given a warning: he must not touch any other part of her body or risk death.
That should have been enough to alert the 71-year-old retired Kansas farmer that things were not as they seemed, but love does weird things to people. He proceeded with the ceremony, held in a darkened séance room, and later sat during a festive wedding dinner next to an empty chair reserved for his spectral bride.
Seybold was in love with “Sarah,” the ghost of a girl he had known in his youth back in Ohio, and he trusted the spirit medium who had summoned her from the great beyond.
The medium, 36-year-old Nellie Moore, had been holding classes in spiritualism in Wichita for the curious and the credulous. She had introduced others to their ethereal soulmates, but being matchmaker to Seybold and his gossamer love had been a singular achievement.
She had enjoyed material benefits from her association with the lonely farmer, who had come to her two years before from Liberal and asked to make contact with his long-dead son. In a darkened room with black curtains and a wardrobe that produced such wonders as spirit photos and floating luminous stars, Moore had done just that.
Or at least Seybold thought she had.
Soon, Moore had a new car and furniture and even deeds to the farms Seybold owned, one near Liberal, a couple of hundred miles away in southwestern Kansas, and another across the state line in Oklahoma.
When it finally dawned on Seybold that he’d been taken for his life savings, he did what many disappointed spouses do: He sued. The case must have been one of the strangest ever to come before a Wichita judge, and it made headlines across the country.
“She was really after his money,” author and historian of the strange Tim Shepard told me. “When it was all over, she got him for $7,500.”
Because I’m a diurnal skeptic when it comes to paranormal activity — my answer changes according to how often things go bump in the night — I asked Shepard for his take on Wichita’s “ghost bride” case.
Shepard is the author of two books of Kansas ghost stories, the most recent of which is “Return to the Prairie: More Tales of History and Hauntings.” He’s working on a forthcoming book about hauntings along Route 66, and as research for that book he drove the length of the mother road in a 1934 Hudson Terraplane. He’s given ghost tours across the state, worked at the Red Rocks State Historic Site at Emporia, and at 52 says he’s considered the grandfather of ghost hunting in Kansas.
“Moore’s tactics were very similar to what most spiritualists were doing in the late 1800s,” Shepard said. “The room she held her séances in was painted black, with black curtains, a large wardrobe, and a couple of chairs. She actually told him not to touch the spirits because if he did both he and she would die. Based on the details he gave of meeting Sarah, there was probably somebody hidden in the cabinet.”
At one séance, Moore was instructed to write a $500 check to an organization for wayward girls. He did so, Shepard said, and an otherworldly hand took the check.
While Seybold’s actions may seem foolish now, he seems to have had a serious interest in spiritualism, a belief system that holds the soul survives death and spirits of the dead can communicate with the living.
It all began with the Fox Sisters in western New York in the 1840s, who claimed they could communicate through raps and knocks with the spirit of a murdered peddler. The sisters were soon demonstrating spirit communication at public events that drew hundreds, dividing the press and the public on whether they were genuinely in touch with the spirit world or youthful hoaxers seeking money and attention.
During and after the Civil War, spiritualism surged in popularity. The bloodiest conflict in American history drove many to the comforting belief that they could communicate with their beloved dead. Even Mary Todd Lincoln held séances at the White House. Years after the war, the last photograph taken of Mrs. Lincoln contributed to another spiritualist-related craze, spirit photography. A photo by Boston photographer William Mumler purports to show the ghost of Abraham Lincoln looking kindly down upon her, hands on her shoulders. But it was a cheap photographic trick relying on a double exposure.
Spiritualism was not just a fad in Victorian American, but a serious societal and political movement. The first woman to run for president was Victoria Woodhull, a trance medium and “free love” radical. Kate Bender, of the murderous Bender Family of Kansas, also claimed to be one. While some mediums were perpetrating hoaxes on their credulous victims, often with the use of mechanical tricks such as the magic slate tablet, there were millions of Americans who embraced spiritualism as proof of life after death.
After the First World War, the movement gained renewed popularity. Its chief proponent was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Despite having created the epitome of the rational detective and being trained as a medical doctor, Doyle was gullible and proclaimed his belief in spirits, including the now-debunked Cottingley Fairies photos.
If Doyle was the champion of mediumship, Harry Houdini was its nemesis. The world-famous magician and escape artist (and friend of Doyle’s) spent much of his career campaigning against charlatanism. He devoted himself to exposing the tricks used by fake mediums. Houdini was an expert in those tricks, because he and his wife Bess had started their careers by using them.
In November 1897, they had appeared at the opera house in Garnett, Kansas, promising to name the killer of a recently murdered local woman. Houdini had already demonstrated an escape from the local jail, according to “The Secret Life of Houdini” by William Kalush and Larry Sloman. Bess had been promoted as a “psychometric clairvoyant” and her séances with Houdini were a hit. But it was all trickery, and in Garnett, according to the authors, Bess feigned a swoon at the climactic moment to avoid actually naming the murderer.
In addition to tricks like the spirit slates, charlatans used rhetorical sleight-of-hand. If a medium failed to materialize a spirit it was because there were unbelievers present. Some, like Nellie Moore, claimed they couldn’t remember anything while under control of spirits. If Seybold’s dead son or the ghost of “Sarah” told the old farmer to do things, such as take $3,000 out of the bank to give to her, she would just have to take other people’s word for it.
“During the wedding ceremony,” Shepard said, “he actually places a diamond ring on the ghost’s finger. And he said it felt solid.” But the old man was so fearful of dying from touching the ghost that he dared not embrace his bride.
Seybold, who had two previous marriages to living women, moved from Liberal to Wichita to be close to his medium and was directed to deed all of his property to her. When the aging farmer said he wanted to consult an attorney, Moore produced the ghost of Samuel B. Amidon, a recently deceased Wichita lawyer. But it seems unlikely the famous jurist would have advised him to trust Moore.
“In the very first séance, Mrs. Moore, in a semi-trance, told the Kansan his son had come to her and was telling her what to say,” reported the San Francisco Examiner in July 1927. He was cautioned that turning on the lights, or otherwise interfering with the spirits, would result in immediate death.
Like many of us, Seybold was susceptible to flattery. He was called “doctor” by those in his medium’s orbit, apparently after healing somebody of a headache, and was told he could quickly become proficient at piano if only he bought one for Moore’s home.
“Here’s a lonely old man,” Shepard said. “He believed he was really in love with a ghost. At trial, he pondered whether he was really married to her or did he need to get a divorce?”
The only time “Sarah” visited him in his bedroom, according to Shepard, Seybold became suspicious. “All he saw of her was her hands,” he said. “But instead of just fading away, she backed out of his room and around the corner. Ghosts don’t do that, do they?”
The case went to trial in November 1927.
Moore claimed that Seybold came to establish a “spiritualistic class room,” but that he soon began claiming healing powers of his own. She admitted she had been the recipient of gifts and loans secured by mortgages, but denied having hoodwinked Seybold. Witnesses testified, however, that Moore had shown them devices used in her séances, including a speaking trumpet with a rubber hose and a star that glowed with luminous paint.
“An Aged Farmer Loses his Battle with the Spooks,” the Wichita Eagle reported Nov. 17. “Superlative advice might come from the trusted sources of the spirit world, but all of Seybold’s business transactions were drawn in black and white.”
The judge, J.E. Alexander, ruled Seybold had no case because he had reached a compromise settlement with Moore before bringing his suit. Any question of spectral evidence was not considered. Even if fraud had been involved in summoning “Sarah,” it was not for the court to decide whether spirit communication was possible or had been practiced by Moore.
While Seybold’s faith in Moore was shattered, he remained an ardent spiritualist. He later married again, this time to a woman named Dollie who was an ordained spiritualist minister.
“He was looking for something,” Shepard said. “I think we all desire to connect with something beyond ourselves.”
In the years he’s been investigating the paranormal, Shepard said, he’s run into only three people he considered true mediums. One of them is a woman in Topeka, and when she does her readings for groups of 30 or 50 people, she doesn’t turn the lights off.
“Real paranormal research isn’t done in the dark,” he said. “They want the lights on. They want to see what’s happening around them. They’re trying to answer the questions we’re still searching for. Where do we go when we die? Is there life after death?”
Shepard said he was both a believer and a skeptic. He says he believes there are spirits out there, but that he doesn’t necessarily believe every story that’s told to him.
But there is still mystery to the “ghost bride” case, he said.
What was Seybold’s son’s name, and how did he die? What was Sarah’s last name? Seybold said he knew her during his youth in Dayton, but there’s no evidence from him of how she crossed over — or whether she existed at all.
We may never know.
Seybold died in 1941, aged 85, of lingering injuries suffered when he was struck by a car a year earlier at Third and Broadway in Wichita. Moore moved to California, where she died in 1974, at San Diego. She was 83.
A century after Seybold attended that first séance in Wichita, it might be easy for us to dismiss him as a fool. Here in the modern and allegedly rational age, we would never fall for such tricks. Right?
But there are people who fall in love with their AI chatbots. This year, a Colorado man “married” his digital companion, with the approval of his real-world wife. And the MIT Technology Review cautions that it’s easy to stumble into an emotional relationship with a digital assistant.
We’re all looking for something, whether it’s “Sarah” or “Siri.”
Perhaps in a hundred years, some cyber columnist will look back and be incredulous that any chatbot could ever fall for an ephemeral something made of meat and bone.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
