Psychic Tour of Wickland

Ever been to Bardstown's historic Wickland house? Well, maybe tonight's the night you should check it out: A Visit With the Spirits of Wickland, billed as "a psychic tour of the 1826 Plantation house with a small group" is being held this very evening at 7:30pm sharp.

Then again, apparently they do this every Friday.

I'm not really sure what a psychic tour entails. Since it's implied - well, no, heck, it isn't implied, it's actually stated that you'll be visiting with spirits - is this going to be some sort of seance kinda thing? Or, like 1,001 lame TV programs with soulless scammers like Sylvia Browne, is the host going to close his/her eyes at some point and start channeling "Ozmo, the Fifth Ascended Celestial Angel Guide from the Great Magellanic Cloud"? I'd rather go back to 1942 and hang out with Madam Brent behind her beaded curtain and get some phrenology.

It says on the Visit Bardstown site: "Take a 90 minute paranormal family-friendly tour which includes the opportunity to interact through a psychic medium and the friendly spirits who once lived there." Click through that link if you have a strong stomach for fried baloney and hogwash - it runs down a detailed list of the characters, with a highly detailed "backstory" for each of them. I don't know whether it makes me angry or just sad. Both, maybe?

Ask yourself: if you had psychic abilities, would you use your God-given supernatural powers to help mankind, or would you host "ghost tours" of an allegedly haunted house in a small town in Kentucky for a $15 admission price?

Say what you will about Edgar Cayce, but even if he was delusional, he at least loathed the idea of making money off his alleged psychic gifts.

I'm not carping on this because I'm a skeptic - I'm carping on this because I know there are such things as ghosts and psychics and hauntings and channelled entities, and I don't like seeing them presented as goofy tourist attractions. I've had some "psychic" experiences myself, and you don't see me even talking about it, let alone hyping myself as a medium, let alone claiming it's something that can be repeated with guaranteed results, every Friday, week after week, year after year.

Those who say don't know, and those who know don't say.

Okay, okay, I hear ya, "Don't be so wedged, Jeff, it's just all in good fun", right? Fine. Go, have a great time, give yourself some spooky shivers, and tell 'em I sent you by. Reservations are required, so call 502-507-0808 to make yours.

Editha Salomon

Editha Salomon, aka Ann O'Delia Dis Debar, Laura Horos, Ellora, Madame Helana, Swami Viva Ananda, Della Ann O'Sullivan, Angel Anna, Claudia D'Arvie, Editha Gilbert Montez, Vera Ava and Blanche Solomons, was an occultist and scam artist whose exploits were once legendary around the globe, yet this Kentuckian's story is all but forgotten today.

Harry Houdini referred to her as "one of the most extraordinary fake mediums and mystery swindlers the world has ever known". Despite this, she was apparently sincere about the paranormal on some level, and was genuinely influenced by more legitimate occult practices such as Helena Blavatsky's Theosophy. Blavatsky (pictured below) believed that all religions were true at the core of their innermost teachings. Her writings, combining esoteric spiritual philosophy with modern science is considered by many to be the progenitor of "New Age" thought.



In 1870, under the name Editha Gilbert Montez, she swindled a lot of money by passing herself off as the daughter of famous dancer/actress Lola Montez. By the 1880s she was in a fraudulent Spiritualism racket and claiming to be related to West Virginia lawmaker Joseph H. Diss Debar. In truth, she was born Editha Salomon in Harrodsburg, KY and raised in Louisville.

In 1888 she was sentenced to six months in prison on charges of fraud. After getting out of jail, she went right back to her phony-medium cons (as Vera P. Ava), and her fake-royalty pose (as Princess Editha Lolita). In 1898 she was living in New Orleans and it was there that she married her partner in crime, Frank Dutton Jackson.

After a brief jail stay in Louisiana, the pair next popped up in Paris, where they met occultist S. L. MacGregor Mathers. By claiming to be Anna Sprengel, Editha managed to gain access to top-secret texts of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which the pair subsequently absconded with. The incident is mentioned in a footnote about Mathers in The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats:


Interestingly, as it turns out, historians now believe there was no real Anna Sprengel, having been a hoax concocted by William Wynn Westcott. But Westcott's backstory of this mythical Anna Sprengel includes her being the daughter of Lola Montez, which begs the question: was it actually Editha who created the character? Was Westcott a co-conspirator, or he was duped by her into believing this persona? Yet, one must ask, why would she need to return to steal the secrets of the Golden Dawn, if she was in fact its co-creator? What a mess.

They spent time at the Koreshan Unity religious commune in Florida, learning about Hollow Earth theories of its bizarre founder, Cyrus Teed. (At some point in her exploits, Editha also operated a fruitarian colony in Florida, which may or may not have been related to the Koreshan Unity organization.) After leaving Florida, Editha and her husband gallivanted across Europe claiming to be high-ranking representatives of Teed's organization, which they most certainly were not.


In 1890 they were in South Africa, opening a "College of Occult Sciences" in Cape Town. As "Laura Horos", she lectured on the stolen teachings of the Golden Dawn and gave clairvoyant readings under various pseudonyms. Their college had moved to England by 1900, and their curriculum had expanded to include magnetic healing, parapsychology, clairvoyance, divination, materialization of ectoplasm, thaumaturgy, and channeling divine entities.

Some twisted sex magick was apparently also a big part of their system: in 1901 they were arrested for rape and buggery of a sixteen-year-old girl, jewelry theft and false pretenses. Jackson (who was by now calling himself "Theodore Horos") got 15 years, Editha got 7. She was released early, on July 1906, for good behavior.


The New York Times was seemingly fond of covering her sensationalist antics, as can be seen by combing through their archives. In them, you'll find a whole treasure trove of odd gossip about her adventures in addition to those mentioned here.

One of the many notches on Editha's arrest record was an incident in which she was caught stealing money from an elderly woman who had hired her to try to contact the ghost of her deceased husband in a private seance. Hearing of this, I have to wonder if The Rainbird Pattern, the 1972 novel which became Alfred Hitchcock's 1976 film Family Plot, was inspired in part by Editha and her husband. The book and film are about a husband-and-wife con duo whose scams revolve around her phony-psychic routine.

Late in 1909, Editha was living alone in Cincinnati, Ohio, once again using the name Vera Ava. And then she just disappeared. We don't know where or when she died, and we don't know where she is buried. The proximity to Kentucky in her last known appearance nudges the imagination into supposing that she might have come back to her Kentucky.

Madam Brent

Today this scrap of a 1942 Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper fell out of an old book - a 1930s RCA catalog of radio tubes that I bought in Madison County in the late 1980s. I've shlepped the book around the many different places I've lived since then, and never noticed the scrap tucked into it until 2009.

The scrap seems deliberately torn out of the paper for the purpose of saving Madam Brent's advertisement, since the reverse side is only a truncated portion of an article.

I can't stop staring at it, wondering what it must have been like to drive down Preston Street (before it become Preston Highway) to a "tent and trailer" to see Madam Brent while World War Two raged on. And the longer I stare at the ad, other questions enter my head. Even in a 1942 economy, how did someone support themselves giving "special readings" way out past the edge of town for fifty cents? And being open for business from 10am to 9pm, seven days a week?

Was Madam Brent possibly, just possibly, selling something else besides psychic readings?

The Erica Fraysure Case

Erica Fraysure was a 17-year-old resident of Germantown, KY. She was a senior at Bracken County High School and was employed part-time at Carota's Pizza in Augusta, KY.

Fraysure was last seen on October 21, 1997, during the 9pm hour, at the Video-N-Tan in Brooksville, KY. She drove away and headed for her home in Germantown, but never got there.

The next day, Fraysure's car was found only one mile from Video-N-Tan, parked between haystacks on Fronks Road. Her purse was inside the car with all her money and valuables intact. Fraysure's car keys were discovered nearby, covered with leaves. There was no blood, no signs of struggle, no evidence of foul play. Because of this lack of evidence, her disappearance is being considered a missing person case, not a criminal matter.

In 1998, the cheesy self-proclaimed psychic Sylvia Browne claimed to have information about the Fraysure case that she psychically gleaned with her paranormal abilities. (You can read more about Browne here and you can check out her own ridiculous websites here and here.) Browne announced her claims on, of all places, the Montel Williams Show, where she declared that Fraysure's body was at the bottom of a lake near Brooksville. For reasons unclear to me, the police decided to take the word of a TV psychic hotline lady seriously, and at great expense, all nearby lakes were dredged.

Fraysure wasn't found.


Undaunted by her failure, Browne continued to appear on the Montel show, and allegedly hinted that a man named Chris Mineer was responsible for Fraysure's disappearance. Mineer subsequently committed suicide. Mineer's mother tried to sue over the incident but a judge in Covington, KY ruled to dismiss, for reasons that are also unclear to me.

Meanwhile, investigators are no closer to solving the Erica Fraysure case than before.