Monday, November 4, 2024
7pm ET
Free! RSVP with email at checkout

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This lecture will explore the Eddy brothers and the popular spiritualist spectacle they staged at their Chittenden, Vermont home in the 1870s. The reports of their spirit variety show made them well-known throughout the Northeast and brought lawyer/reporter/assassination investigator Henry Steel Olcott to investigate them. His stories published in the New York Sun attracted the attention of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy. She made her way up to Vermont and took over their spiritual cavalcade, summoning a whole different class of spirits from all over the world including Egyptian jugglers, Russian folk singers, and horrific spiritual beings that butchered one another and tossed the body parts across the stage to the shock of the audience. 

Blavatsky’s partnership with Olcott’s would have long-lasting reverberations, which are still being felt to this day. Join historian, Justin McHenry, author of Lemuria: A True Story of a Fake Place, for this enlightening and entertaining exploration of spiritualism, the incredible life of Henry Steel Olcott, and the rock-star like emergence of Madame Blavatsky onto the world stage.

Justin McHenry is a writer and historian who is the author of the recently released Lemuria: A True Story of a Fake Place and the upcoming book, Raising Philadelphia: The Making of America’s First Great City. His writing has appeared in Belt Magazine, 100 Days in Appalachia, Journal of the American Revolution, FATE Magazine, and in historical journals and newspapers.