Meet Ann O'Delia Diss Debar: The Fake Medium Even Harry Houdini Complimented

Harry Houdini is one of the best-known magicians and escape artists in history, but it is somewhat less well-known that he was — as Britannica explains — dedicated to using his knowledge of stage magic to expose charlatans and hoaxsters using magic tricks to con people into believing in the supernatural (and usually into giving them money). In fact, in 1924, he wrote a book on the topic called "A Magician Among the Spirits." In this book, he covers a number of notable charlatans, but there is one that he called "one of the most extraordinary fake mediums and mystery swindlers the world has ever known."

This swindler was Ann O'Delia Diss Debar, also known as Swami Viva Ananda, Sister Ignatius, "The White Lotus Mother," and a host of other names. But who was this dedicated con artist, and what kind of life did she lead that even Houdini had to begrudgingly admit to being impressed?

Historian Edmund Richardson says that the young Editha Salomen committed a streak of crimes and left a trail of debts all across the U.S. and beyond, quoting The New York Sun as saying, "Her campaigns have extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the lakes to the Gulf ... She skipped out of Kansas City leaving debts and a reputation as a beer guzzler." Even when she was caught, she could generally escape punishment by pretending to be dangerously ill. As the Chicago Tribune explains, she had an abscessed tooth from which she could suck blood, which skill she would use to fake tuberculosis.

On one such occasion, however, things didn't go so smoothly. While trying to ditch a hotel in Dayton, Ohio, without paying, she faked a particularly fatal-looking coughing fit that didn't convince the in-house doctor. When he threatened to use a hot iron to open her mouth and look inside, she body-checked the priest who had come to perform last rites as well as a handful of nuns and beat feet out of the hotel, just barely avoiding capture. This process of being caught faking and swindling led to Salomen being chased across the country by creditors, though she generally emerged unscathed, even if her escape required, as The New York Sun put it in 1888, "a general rumpus, a hair-pulling match, and the deuce [i.e., the devil] to pay generally."

According to "A Magician Among the Spirits" by Harry Houdini, the success that Editha Salomen might have experienced with her princess con didn't make up for the fact that she wasn't actually a very good con artist, as she was constantly getting caught. Even though she had managed to pull her love trap on any number of young men in Baltimore, her act wasn't super convincing to people who really knew anything about European nobility. Nevertheless, she managed to cheat various gullible boys out of about a quarter of a million dollars in 1870 money, which is presumably about a quadrillion in modern funds. She fell into a life of luxury and got into smoking opium-laced cigarettes, which landed her in the hospital with a bout of "nervous exhaustion." Illness, whether genuine or faked, had once again kept Solomen out of jail.

She ended up in a psychiatric hospital on Blackwell's Island in New York, according to "Some Human Oddities: Studies in the Queer, the Uncanny, and the Fanatical" by Eric John Dingwall. where she really amped things up by trying to stab her doctor and escape. In the fray, however, she ended up stabbing not her doctor, but rather a nearby medical student named Paul Noel Messant. Rather than being subsequently sent to, like, double jail, Salomen was declared insane and sent to an asylum. The diagnosis of insanity seemed to cover up a number of her recent crimes, including stabbing a guy. Time in the asylum merely gave Editha Salomen time to plan her next scams.

At this point, Mme. Messant decided it was time not only for a new identity but also to up her game in the fake psychic racket. According to "A Magician Among the Spirits" by Harry Houdini, she managed to kill two birds with one stone by marrying General Joseph Hubert Diss Debar, an artist of French origin and minor government official in West Virginia. (As historian Edmund Richardson points out, however, Joseph, a naturalized citizen and skilled artist who designed the West Virginia state seal, was by no means actually a general.) The general fell for Mme. Messant, leaving his wife and children for her, and the former Princess Editha gained the name by which her crimes would be best known, Ann O'Delia Diss Debar. The two of them lived in New York, where Ann decided to put all her effort behind her spiritualism.

As the wife of someone people believed was a general, Ann found herself living comfortably amongst high society, a group of people for whom hypnotism and mediumship were in great fashion. She made a great deal of money this way, but due to her spendthrift nature, she found herself in dire financial straits once again, but now people were growing bored of hypnotism, so she shifted to mediumship, and she was able to make a great deal of money by doing cold readings on those who had lost loved ones to feign communication with their spirits.

Ann O'Delia Diss Debar's fraudulent spirit paintings became such a sensation that she managed to land an exceptionally wealthy and exceptionally gullible target in the form of Luther Marsh, one of the richest and most respected lawyers in New York. As Harry Houdini himself said in his book "A Magician Among the Spirits," Marsh's brilliance in the field of law did not keep him from being, in Houdini's own words, "an exceedingly easy mark." Marsh had recently lost both his wife and young daughter and was desperate to communicate with them on the other side. This fragile emotional state made him particularly vulnerable to Diss Debar's wiles. 

According to historian Edmund Richardson, Diss Debar would conjure up comforting messages from Marsh's wife and daughter, and soon used her spirit painting technique to produce drawings and other images from not only Marsh's loved ones but also from famous artists like Rembrandt. As Marsh's house filled up with these counterfeit paintings, his gratitude grew to the point that he just straight up gave Diss Debar his house, which she turned into a Spiritualist "Temple of Truth." The ghost of Marsh's daughter had told him he should, you see. However, Marsh was so impressed by Diss Debar, that he planned a public exhibition of her powers without her knowledge. Put on the spot with no time to prepare, Diss Debar found herself unable to replicate many of the spectral wonders she had become so famous for.

Luther Marsh's friends and family soon became (understandably) worried about his mental state by the time he gave away his lavish townhouse to a woman who was so clearly a fraud. The other group of people angered and aghast at Ann O'Delia Diss Debar's claims was perhaps a less expected one: stage magicians. Practitioners of stage magic love to perform illusions, but generally resent anyone who scams people out of money by claiming magic is real. As such, as historian Edmund Richardson attests to, a number of prominent New York magicians began publicly replicating Diss Debar's spirit painting effects with simple chemical tricks and sleight of hand, proving how easily they could be done.

Between these displays and requests from Marsh's family, as well as character testimony from her own brother George, both Ann O'Delia Diss Debar and her husband were arrested for conspiracy to commit fraud. According to Harry Houdini, the trial was long and scandalous, with numerous professional magicians (including Carl Hertz, pictured) brought in to explain how Diss Debar did her tricks. During the trial, Diss Debar said she had been visited by the ghost of the Roman orator Cicero and a "council of ten," who very helpfully suggested she should return Mr. Marsh's property to him. In light of these mitigating circumstances, the Diss Debars' sentence was lessened such that the two spent only six months each in prison.

According to "A Magician Among the Spirits" by Harry Houdini, Ann O'Delia Diss Debar and Frank Jackson fled the U.S. at this point and tried new identities abroad, eventually making their way to London, where they landed in hot water for recruiting people into their new cult, "the Theocratic Unity," as The New York Times reported at the time. As Kerry Segrave explains in "Women Swindlers in America, 1860-1920," this new cult, led by "Swami Laura Horos" and her "son," Theo, was doing all right recruiting people until a member noticed that the Swami and her son-husband had stolen from her. For this, the couple were arrested and tried, and once the news hit international papers, people from the U.S. let the courts know just whom they had arrested. Over the course of the trial, it was revealed that a number of what one could generously call strange rituals were performed, which led to the couple being convicted on counts of theft, rape, and sodomy. They were each sentenced to seven years for these charges, the harshest sentence Diss Debar would ever receive.

In 1906, however, Diss Debar a.k.a. Laura Horos a.k.a. Laura Jackson would be set free on parole after less than five years. She immediately disappeared from London. Making her way back to the U.S., she tried some of her old schemes under new identities but now she was too well known, and no one wanted to give their money to a convicted sodomite. She was last heard from in 1909, and no one knows what happened to her after that.