OPINION | OLD NEWS: Hypnotized and buried alive in downtown Little Rock

In "The Case of Becky" a good girl becomes evil when her hypnotist stepfather transforms her during stage shows, but she is saved by a famous psychologist. Ad is from the Oct. 17, 1921, Arkansas Gazette.  (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)
In "The Case of Becky" a good girl becomes evil when her hypnotist stepfather transforms her during stage shows, but she is saved by a famous psychologist. Ad is from the Oct. 17, 1921, Arkansas Gazette. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)

People must have been hard up for entertainment 100 years ago.

On June 13, 1921, the Arkansas Gazette reported that throngs of people were jostling one another off the sidewalk outside the Fourth Street display window of the Gus Blass department store in downtown Little Rock. They were watching a woman sleep.

Even more exciting had been watching her get put to bed, by a hypnotist:

"The fair prospective sleeper wore merely an enveloping wrap over [a] nifty pink negligee made for sleeping wear, and topped by an equally nifty pink boudoir cap. The officiating hypnotist gently removed the wrap and the pretty young woman stood revealed in her nightie-nighties."

His stage name was Albertus or Alburtus, and as best I can tell, he was a minor member of Vaudeville's mustachioed tribe of mesmerizing charlatans. It's possible he wrote a small book titled "Entertaining: Conjuring, Hypnotism, Muscle Reading, Mind Reading." He may have started in vaudeville as a juggler. Possibly he almost drowned in 1909 while trying to escape from handcuffs underwater in New Jersey.

He put her to sleep at 5 p.m. on a Sunday and then:

"With the subject in bed and the mosquito bar drawn, the hypnotist began his incantations. He talked and gesticulated vehemently, apparently impressing upon the girl that it was up to her to sleep until such time as he waked her, and in the course of several minutes, she yielded to slumber and slept the sleep of the just, and the hypnotized."

Her mosquito bar was not a piece of metal but rather a net apparatus "barring" mosquitoes. See the John Singer Sargent painting at arkansasonline.com/614bar.

About 24 hours later, she was transported bodily, still snoozing, to the stage of the Gem Theatre, a vaudeville house at 113 W. Third St. (This Gem is sometimes confused with a later Gem that stood at 712 W. Ninth St. and served Black moviegoers. But we need not be confused. The Central Arkansas Library System's Roberts Library has created a bee-utiful Storymap of historic Little Rock moviehouses: See arkansasonline.com/614map.)

The next afternoon's Arkansas Democrat reported that the girl survived her awakening, mind intact, which was the main thing you worried about with hypnotists.

For his next trick, Albertus would use a sledgehammer to break a 200-pound rock resting on the chest of a hypnotized woman. At Kempner's shoe store, he would compel a boy to pedal a stationary bicycle for eight hours. Then he would induce a woman to work at a sewing machine for eight hours. At a ladies-only matinee, he would answer written questions passed up from the audience — without looking at the questions first.

All of his efforts should have seemed ho-hum by 1921. Traveling hypnotists had staged far grander "experiments" at Little Rock over the decades. Acts came and went: The Knowles, America's foremost hypnotists; Prof. H.B. Railey, eminent magnetic healer with an office on Main Street; The Griffiths, "scientific hoodoo hypnotists"; Mrs. B.L. Butler, "queen of laughter and the most expert lady hypnotist in the world."

Vaudeville-style hypnosis was a sham and big joke to savvy consumers of public entertainment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But to others it was spooky stuff. In 1895 at Ardmore — not yet in Oklahoma but rather in the Indian Territory — a man named J.H. Forcline, 26, shot a hypnotist in the head twice for using his art to lead Mrs. Forcline wholly astray while boarding at their home. Before he transitioned from traveling hypnotist to dead, Prof. Dixon had been a well-known phrenologist who phrenologized the heads of Texans, as The Ryan (Texas) Record newspaper put it in 1894.

More sadly telling, only a few months before Albertus entertained at Little Rock in 1921, a Fayetteville man killed himself after telling people he despaired of escaping a hypnotist's spell. The Nov. 27, 1920, Democrat reported on the death of Arch O'Neal, 30, who drank poison at a hotel in Rogers:

"O'Neal, who had lived at Rogers several months, on several occasions said that he was under the spell of the hypnotist whose name he did not know, but to whom he referred as 'the big brute.'"

BIGGER SHOWS

Among the traveling hypnotists whose ambition excelled the little we know of Albertus, one Professor C.S. Cary suspended some fellow between the backs of two chairs in March 1897 at Little Rock and loaded him with a stone supposedly weighing 580 pounds. A Gazette review of his show reported that he also suspended "cataleptic" audience members between the chairs and then had Dr. G.W. Hudspeth and another gentleman — combined weight, 363 pounds — sit on the sleepers.

The Gazette remained skeptical:

"He worked diligently last night upon a number of men and boys who were not in the least affected, and this fact evidently gave birth to the belief that those who were 'influenced' were paid subjects."

But a subject hypnotized during the show continued sleeping in a store window the next day, and policemen were needed to keep sightseers in check. One citizen jabbed the sleeper with a pin. The main effect of that was a fight between the pin-poker and one of Cary's assistants.

But Cary also influenced George McBride, 19, a well-known Gazette newsboy, to quit smoking. A week later, the sight of a cigarette still made him sick.

UNDER THE GROUND

In January 1902, a different hypnotist calling himself Professor Pipp purported to bury Miss Annie Gertrude Lemars alive — for five days — near the corner of Third and Center streets.

Undertaker P.H. Reubel's crew dug her grave "in the center of the vacant lot between the Little Rock laundry and the old Gibson house."

Under a tent 10 feet tall, a wooden frame was erected over "a real grave exactly six feet in depth." Behind it was a platform on which were several chairs, a camera and a coffin. The whole was illuminated by electric and gasoline lights. Citizens, including newspapermen, were invited to sit in the chairs.

Lemars was "outwardly" dressed in a dainty white-satin negligee, but underneath she was more comfortably attired to endure the postulated frigidity of the underground — she wore what seemed to be several suits of heavy woolen underclothes and several pairs of stockings.

After Pipp waved his hands in front of her a few times, she flopped and was helped to the coffin. A doctor took her pulse. Then Reubel fastened the lid. By the way, Reubel had only been an undertaker for six months.

There was no glass in this lid, but there were two four-inch cutouts on either end of the coffin through which air and viewing tubes were to be fed.

The coffin was moved off the platform and lowered into the grave using straps; the tubes were inserted, and planking was laid over the coffin to keep dirt out. After Reubel's men filled in the hole, the audience could peer through the viewing tube and so, by the aid of incandescent light somehow, watch Miss Lemars snooze peacefully.

All of that happened on a Tuesday. She was "unearthed" in the best of health Saturday night before a crowd of nearly 1,000 human sardines with other citizens peering down from roofs and windows and dangling from trees. One man almost fell to his death from a tree.

Pipp was amazing in 1902.

It's not as though newspapers didn't also warn readers against falling for brazen baloney, but we can wait to talk about that June 21 because these 1,287 words are a lot of words. I wouldn't want to put Friend Reader to sleep.

Email:

cstorey@adgnewsroom.com

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