Strange Times 135: Spiritualistic Mania

Today we have a single story of—you guessed it!—spiritualistic mania! Smash the crockery on…

May 15, 1921

• At the Adventurers’ Club, explorers exhibit a baby boa constrictor, a king snake, and a ‘two-headed lizard,” which in fact had only one head and a tail that, from ten feet away, resembled a head as well.

• After learning that his wife had lost $20,000 and turned to forgery in order to escape her gambling losses, a husband complains to the police, sparking a raid on her favorite underground gambling den.

• Two Bronx residents are shot during a dispute over who would get first pick of the oysters at a Morris Avenue pushcart.

• The Lucy Stone League, which advocates for women’s right to maintain their maiden name upon marriage, scores a victory when league president Ruth Hale has her name placed on a real estate deed.

• The Weather: Fair and cooler today; Monday, fair; moderate westerly winds.

There is quite a lot crammed into this single short article, which is a classic case of the 1921 newspaper ending a story with, “And they were all taken to a sanitarium,” as though that wraps everything up nicely. I should also like to point out that there is rather a steep escalation from the crockery-smashing of the third paragraph to the crimes proposed in the fourth.

BERLIN, May 14.—From the village of Knechtennoten, Southern Bavaria, comes an amazing story of a whole family of eleven members becoming insane as the result of spiritualistic experiments.

For some time a builder named Brenk, with his wife and five grown-up sons and daughters, at which four younger children also were present.

Apparently under the belief that they had received from spirits instructions to destroy all the material substances in the house, they commenced burning the furniture, including the beds. Then they smashed all the crockery.

Neighbors found them preparing to kill the three months’ old infant of one of the daughters, the father stating that he was going to offer it as a burnt sacrifice to the “spirit of pure light.”

A doctor having declared the family suffering from religious mania, all eleven members were taken under police escort to a sanitarium.