Magic and Malarky

10/17/2026

Sharing a search I did on what kinds of standard magic routines can be adapted as spooky magic for Halloween

10/05/2026

09/18/2026

The icon in Queens was crying.

People had seen it. The streaks ran down the face. A crowd was coming.

Joe Nickell drove out and got close to it. The varnish was glossy. The surface had tiny cracks running through it.

Then he stopped looking at the icon and watched the room instead.

People were coming in holding candles. They already expected tears. Flickering light was moving across glossy paint over hairline cracks.

That was the whole miracle.

Here is the part that made him different from every other man doing this work.

Joe hated the word debunker. He refused to use it about himself. He was not there to disprove anything. He was there to find out what actually happened.

So priests let him in. Families walked him through their houses. He never mocked a single one of them.

Mackenzie House in Toronto had footsteps. On the stairs. At night. Staff had been hearing them for years and nobody could explain it.

Joe found the answer next door. Cleaners worked late in the neighbouring building. That building had an iron staircase. The sound was coming through the wall.

Now the obvious question. Who was this man.

He was born in Kentucky in 1944. His father was a postmaster. His mother kept the books. Joe learned sign painting as a boy and that trade fed him for years.

Then the rest of it.

Stage magician. Carnival pitchman. Blackjack dealer. Riverboat manager. Private detective in Toronto.

Every one of those jobs taught him the same subject. How people fool other people.

At 43 he finished a doctorate in English. He collected antique inks and antique paper. He taught himself how ink was made. He learned to read a document under a microscope.

Magician, detective and scholar in one man. There was nobody else built like that.

1982. He got interested in Peru.

The Nazca lines. Enormous drawings cut into the desert floor. Writers had been saying for years that aliens made them, and the reason sounded solid. You can only see them properly from the air.

Joe disagreed.

He took a small drawing of a condor. Wooden stakes. String. A few family members. They walked into a field in Kentucky.

They measured points on the small drawing and copied them onto the ground. A few days of work.

A 440 foot condor in white lime.

A pilot flew over it and named the bird instantly.

No aliens. Stakes, string and relatives.

1983 he published a book on the Shroud of Turin. A skeptics group read it and hired him, and something new existed in the world. A full time paid paranormal investigator. He liked saying he was the only one on earth.

After that they sent him everywhere.

Amityville. The Wi******er house. Mothman. The chupacabra. Bigfoot in Australia. A headless saint in Spain. A swamp monster in Louisiana.

He met a voodoo queen. He examined a tortilla that people said showed the face of Jesus. He went undercover in disguise and sat with people who spoke to the dead.

A diary turned up claiming to be Jack the Ripper's. Joe studied the ink. Fake.

The weeping statues kept coming. Russia. New York. Small towns nobody had heard of.

Most were simpler than the one in Queens. Somebody had put oil on it. Or water.

Hundreds of cases across 40 years.

Not one of them held up. Not one.

Joe Nickell died on 4 March 2025 in Buffalo New York. He was 80.

Think about what he was walking into every time. A room where every single person already knew the answer. Where doubting out loud made you the villain.

He walked in anyway. He looked at the varnish. He looked at the candles. He asked the question nobody else in the room was willing to ask.

And then he did the thing almost nobody does. He gave people the truth without taking their dignity with it.

He could have made them all look stupid. He had the material. He never once used it.

There is a room somewhere tonight where everyone agrees, and nobody is checking.


~Weird But True

09/17/2026

Magicians fool people all the time even when the people know it is tricks. As I tell folks, every word a magician says, everything they don't say, everything they do or don't do, their mannerisms, facial expressions, everything, is designed to plant a thought, an idea. And when that is done, the subject can be really, really stubborn that that is what they are seeing.

The trick was swapping paper tags.

That was it. That was the whole method that fooled a university laboratory for four years.

The lab table was covered in spoons and keys. Each object had a small paper tag tied on with string. A scientist would measure an object, write down its shape, and attach the tag.

Steve and Michael swapped the tags around.

An object measured minutes earlier suddenly looked bent. Trained researchers wrote it down as evidence of psychic ability.

Here is how two teenagers ended up in that room.

1979. An aircraft company chairman gave Washington University in St Louis half a million dollars. He believed in psychic powers and he wanted them studied properly.

This was the era of Uri Geller bending cutlery on television in front of millions of people. Serious institutions wanted to know if it was real.

So the university opened the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research. A physics professor in charge. Five year term. Real university. Real money.

The lab asked for volunteers. Hundreds applied. People who said they could bend metal with their minds. Move objects. See the future.

Meanwhile there was a folder in New York with the word Alpha written on the front.

James Randi was the most famous debunker alive. A professional stage magician who spent his entire life exposing fake psychics, on television, in front of the people claiming the powers.

Two boys had written to him offering to help if he ever needed them. He had no use for the letters at the time. He kept them anyway.

Steve Shaw was 18. Born in England, living in Pennsylvania, working at a hospital by day and performing mentalism in small clubs at night. Very good with his hands.

Michael Edwards was 17. Still a student in Marion Iowa. The whole town knew him as the local magician.

Randi wrote to the professor first. He offered help and sent a list of 11 warnings about how to test human beings.

Do not put more than one spoon on the table. Mark your test objects permanently. Control exactly who touches what.

The lab thanked him politely. Then ignored almost all of it.

So the boys applied on their own. Nobody mentioned Randi.

Out of hundreds of applicants, the lab chose two. Steve and Michael.

Before they walked in, Randi gave them one rule, and it was absolute.

If a scientist ever asks you directly whether you are using tricks, you tell the truth immediately. You say yes. You say Randi sent us. Then you answer every single question they have.

Remember that rule.

The boys got to work.

They made images appear on sealed film. They blew fuses inside electrical equipment. They moved objects inside sealed containers. They made clocks change.

Every one of them was a trick a magician learns young.

The lab documented all of it. Careful notes. Detailed records. Video tape. These were serious people doing serious work.

Then the professor started telling the field. He said the results were extraordinary. He said these two young men were the real thing.

By 1981 it was circulating at conferences. Reports were going out. The scientists were not stupid and they were not lying.

They believed it completely. That was the problem.

Summer 1981. A rumour reached the professor that the boys might be connected to Randi.

So he changed the conditions. Covers went over the equipment. Test objects were marked with coloured lacquer, and the lacquer was locked in a cupboard. The boys were not allowed to touch anything.

Steve and Michael rang Randi in a panic. They could not do a single thing anymore.

Randi was delighted. That was the entire point.

Under proper controls, the psychic powers vanished completely. By 1982 the lab had stopped testing them. Nothing was happening at all.

January 1983. Randi called a press conference. Both boys sat there and explained every trick.

Now go back to the rule.

Four years. A real university. Half a million dollars. Trained physicists. Cameras running the whole time. Two boys sitting in the room under strict instructions to confess the instant anyone asked them a single question.

Nobody ever said the words.

The reaction split the field in half, and it has never really healed.

One side said it proved paranormal research was careless and deserved to be ignored. The other side said Randi ran a four year deception on working scientists and destroyed honest people's careers for a point he could have made another way.

The professor spent years afterwards defending himself in print. The laboratory closed in 1985.

Steve Shaw kept his stage name. Banachek. He became one of the best mentalists in the world and designed effects for famous performers.

For years he personally ran the tests for a million dollar prize offered to anyone who could prove a real psychic power under controlled conditions.

Nobody ever collected it.

The lesson here was never that psychics are fake.

It is that intelligent people, watching closely, taking careful notes, can miss something obvious for years. Especially when they badly want the answer to be yes.

Somewhere today, somebody clever is being fooled by something simple. They are writing it down carefully. They will not think to ask either.


~Weird But True