I knew I was a detective at the age of eight, but my career did not actually begin until I was twenty-five in 1969. In the more than half a century since, I became various kinds of sleuth—ranging from paranormal to literary to homicide—including police-licensed private investigator for the first American detective agency, the Pinkerton’s. Founded in the early 1850s, its trademark—an open eye with the words “We Never Sleep”—gave rise to the term private eye. The agency taught its “operatives” such essential skills as “shadowing” (surveilling), “roping” (artfully fishing for information), and much more, including role-playing and disguise.

Now, role refers to an actor’s part and by extension any part or function played in real life. (It is from the French rôle, referring to the roll of paper on which an actor’s part was written.) Role-playing is extensively used by detectives—as in the “good cop, bad cop” technique in interrogation—and is central to undercover work. (My ability to role-play was valued by Pinkerton’s to the extent that certain assignments were saved for me. I became, for instance, an entry-level “lens polisher” in an optics lab where gold was missing.)

The following pages treat role-playing in detective work as it relates especially to paranormal claims. We will consider the pioneering Allan Pinkerton himself; Kate Warne, whom Pinkerton hired as America’s first woman detective; magician Harry Houdini, who spent the last years of his life exposing phony spiritualists; Houdini’s clever advance agent Rose Mackenberg; and finally James Randi, who inspired skeptics around the world—not a few of whom have themselves become role-playing detectives.

Allan Pinkerton

America’s first private detective, Allan Pinkerton (1819–1884), was ironically a Scottish fugitive. (A radical Chartist, he brought his strong views to America: he opposed slavery—championing the cause of John Brown until Brown was hanged—and he believed women should be allowed to vote.¹) He and his new wife settled in a cabin he built in frontier Illinois in 1843, and he resumed his trade of cooper.

One day in 1847 while seeking wood for his barrels on a lush island of the Fox River, Pinkerton came upon what appeared to be a clandestine camp. He returned one moonlit evening for a surveillance and then, accompanied next time by the sheriff and his posse, helped arrest a gang of coin counterfeiters. Discovering himself a born detective, he soon caught another counterfeiter named John Craig. Urged by village businessmen, Pinkerton instinctively played the role of a man willing to engage in low-risk passing of bogus $10 bills, which he purchased at discount (with the businessmen’s money). After Pinkerton made a second, bigger purchase, he and a deputy sheriff arrested Craig. He was indicted on Pinkerton’s testimony before the grand jury.

Pinkerton himself then became a deputy sheriff of Kane County, but subsequently (about 1849) he moved to Chicago when newly elected Mayor Levi Boone named him the city’s first detective. He survived an initial attempt on his life. Two slugs in his arm—fired so close his coat was set aflame—were later excised by a surgeon along with pieces of bone and cloth (according to a September 9, 1853, article in the Daily Democratic Press [Horan 1967]). After about a year, he resigned, complaining of “political influence” (Horan 1967, 15–23), but soon he had another badge.

As Special United States Mail Agent, Allan Pinkerton was appointed to solve a number of thefts and robberies that plagued the Chicago Post Office. He arranged to be hired there in the role of a mail clerk, spending weeks handling mailbags and loading them onto mail cars—all the time keeping an eye out for any worker who might be removing envelopes containing postal money orders or other valuables. He struck up friendships, and one clerk eventually rewarded him by bragging that his fingers were “so sensitive he knew when a letter contained a penny or a dollar.” Pinkerton sought opportunities to watch the man from behind a stack of parcels and discovered him pocketing envelopes. He soon had the man’s signed confession (Horan 1967, 23–24).

In the early 1850s, he founded his Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency. He began with five operatives—one, George Bangs, doubling as a first-rate operative and office manager. It is said that “the Chicago office at times resembled the backstage of a theatre,” with Pinkerton and Bangs giving instructions on role-playing. Also, Pinkerton maintained a large closet in his personal office stocked with disguises (Horan 1967, 28–29).

Pinkerton led the fight against bank, express-company, and railway robbers; foiled an assassination plot against president-elect Lincoln; created a spy agency during the Civil War; and sent its role-playing operatives behind enemy lines. Over time, he established branch offices across the country and created a pioneering Rogues’ Gallery of photos—among other innovations. And then there were his detective stories. To meet the public appetite for these, Pinkerton cranked out best-selling books of detective adventures. He outlined stories—based on actual Pinkerton investigative techniques—then turned them over to ghostwriters to expand with description and dialogue (Horan 1967, 44, 52–61, 78–79, 288; Waller 2019, 18–22, 97–98). In his The Spiritualists and the Detectives, Pinkerton concluded, for example, that a central spirit medium’s phenomena “did not reach to the dignity of respectable sleight of hand” and could be duplicated by “lady operatives in my employ” (Pinkerton 1876, 325).

Kate Warne

Allan Pinkerton’s liberal attitudes were to come to the fore regarding women. One afternoon in 1856, a young lady—a widow aged twenty-three named Kate Warne (ca. 1833–1868)—was answering a Pinkerton advertisement for detectives. Allan Pinkerton was taken aback because he had never known of a female in that capacity, but he asked how she thought she might be of value. Warne was ready for the question, explaining in detail how she could “worm out secrets in many places to which it was impossible for male detectives to gain access” (Horan 1967, 29). She seemed to understand instinctively such techniques as role-playing and roping. Pinkerton thought about it overnight and the next day hired the first career woman detective in America, if not the world. By 1860, Pinkerton’s even had a “Female Detective Bureau” headed by Warne.

Until her untimely death in 1868, she played effective roles and wore appropriate disguises for Pinkerton cases. As one of a team of operatives assigned to a $40,000 Adams Express Company robbery, Warne was superb: she went undercover, adopting the persona of a wealthy forger’s wife so as to establish a common bond with the suspect’s wife. Warne stayed at a local boardinghouse, impressing the Pennsylvania village “with her fine clothes and regal manners,” as she carried out her assignment to cultivate the woman. When the woman asked Warne’s advice about giving stolen money for safekeeping to a man her husband knew only from jail—another Pinkerton!—Warne knew just how to advise her. Pinkerton’s recovered all but about $400 of the stolen money (Horan 1967, 45–48; Waller 2019, 14–15).

Warne is most famous for her role in the “Baltimore Plot”—a conspiracy to assassinate newly elected President Lincoln in 1861 as he was en route to Washington, D.C., to take the oath of office. Warne was one of several operatives whom Pinkerton sent in advance into Baltimore, where Lincoln was to change trains. Attired as a flirtatious “southern belle,” Warne befriended local secessionists and collected intelligence regarding the widely rumored plot. Then she booked seats in a special train sleeper car “for a sick friend and party.” A stooped Lincoln was slipped on board, disguised with an overcoat draped over his shoulders and a less extreme hat than his signature “stovepipe.”

At Lincoln’s low-key boarding, an American Telegraph Company wire climber—on Pinkerton’s orders—cut crucial lines so other conspirators could not be alerted. Pinkerton operatives were positioned along the route to flash secret “clear ahead” signals, and Warne “carefully drew the curtains and charmed the curious conductor” (Horan 1967, 52–57; Waller 2019, 15–19).

During the Civil War, Warne was one of Pinkerton’s chosen agents for his intelligence-gathering bureau (a forerunner of today’s U.S. Secret Service). Whereas Confederate General Robert E. Lee believed female agents were unreliable, “not apt to take a calm and dispassionate view of events attending the war” (qtd. in Waller 2019, 184), Warne and the other female U.S. spies, at least, were proven professionally adept.

    In his book The Detective and the Somnambulist: The Murderer and the Fortune Teller (1874), Pinkerton relates a later undercover adventure of Warne’s in which she assumed the role of a fortune teller to obtain information from a suspected prisoner’s confidants. In the narrative (one of his “detective stories”), Pinkerton even rented a space for Warne to use as part of that role. Specifically, she was “posing as a clairvoyant with costume and makeup to convince a superstitious woman to admit to poisoning her brother” (Waller 2019, 13–14).

Harry Houdini

The great magician and escape artist Harry Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss, 1874–1926) spent his last years exposing widespread spiritualist fraud. Spiritualism is a religion based on the alleged communication with spirits of the dead. It may occur through intercessors called “mediums,” typically in dark-room sessions known as séances.

Houdini crusaded against phony spiritualists, seeking out elderly mediums who taught him the tricks of the trade. For example, although sitters touched hands around the séance table—in part to prove they were not engaging in deception—mediums had clever ways of regaining the use of one hand. One method was to slowly move the hands close together so that the fingers of one hand could do double duty. This allowed the production of special effects. Houdini, of course, made an excellent detective for exposing tricksters: as an old proverb advises, “Set a thief to catch a thief.”

The famous magician would often disguise himself so as not to be recognized by his quarry. In one illustrative case in Cleveland, for example, Houdini—accompanied by a reporter and a county prosecutor—was disguised for his role-playing with old clothes and heavy eyeglasses. The trio joined the medium, George Renner, at his home and sat with the others around the large table in the dark. At one point, Houdini whispered to the prosecutor that he was leaving his seat. Then, while a spirit trumpet was apparently floating in the air (typically one bore luminescent bands so its position could be seen in the dark), a light suddenly came on to reveal the medium—his eyes blinking and his hands stained with lampblack!

The magician had been up to a trick of his own. In the dark, he had snuck close to Renner’s trumpets and secretly smeared them with the telltale powder. Holding a flashlight, Houdini announced “Mr. Renner, you are a fraud” and called attention to the lampblack on his hands.

Renner shouted, “I have been a medium for forty years, and I have never been exposed.”

“Well you are now,” Houdini replied, identifying himself as he took off his disguising heavy glasses (Polidoro 2001, 181–182).

To make his exposés more numerous and effective, Houdini began to send advance persons—his niece Julia Sawyer, for example—to visit mediums for personal séances at their homes or to attend their public presentations. In this way, Houdini could know what to expect, divine how some “materialization” or other trick might be performed, and come prepared to more effectively discredit a phony spirit communication. The person who became Houdini’s chief agent in this regard was a colorful woman who gave new emphasis to role-playing and disguise.

Rose Mackenberg

It is not too much to say that Rose Mackenberg (1892–1968) was a one-woman troupe of actress-detectives. Indeed she was herself a Brooklyn private investigator. According to Massimo Polidoro (2001, 180):

She was particularly adept at disguise, and would present herself as a jealous wife, a simpleminded maid, a neurotic schoolteacher, or a wealthy eccentric. At every séance she would receive assurances or news from dead children or husband [she had neither], suggestions on how to invest money, or what to do about her job. When Houdini arrived in the city, Rose would pass him all the details about the mediums she had visited.

Photographs show her remarkable facility in creatively styling herself to fit a role (see Polidoro 2001, 180).

No doubt Mackenberg’s costuming was at first simply an aid to her role-playing: that is, helping her play a part. But as she became better known to spiritualists, her creative garbs likely assisted her in hiding her identity. (This double benefit I too have experienced, as no doubt did Houdini. Kate Warne, on the other hand, would have shunned notoriety in the first place, so her disguises would not have needed to conceal her appearance.) If Mackenberg’s work sometimes seems a bit caricaturish, it was all the better: she would show up the crook so humorously that, at the end, one would ask, who was the fool after all? Psychologist Loren Pankratz (1995, 29) noted: “The findings of Rose Mackenberg have strengthened my opinion that spiritualism was not merely a silly fad. Most spiritualist practitioners were morally corrupt and based their presentations on fraud.”

Indeed, speaking of being corrupt, some of the male mediums, Mackenberg reported, victimized her also by sexual harassment. A feigned trance state gave more than one such medium a seeming excuse to touch Mackenberg. This so disgusted Houdini that he suggested she might want to carry a pistol, but she declined (Polidoro 2001, 181).

Becoming Houdini’s most celebrated agent, Mackenberg even went so far as to collect ministerial credentials she had purchased from numerous spiritualist churches. When Houdini wanted to publicly demonstrate with what ease one could claim to be a “spiritualist minister,” he would introduce her to exhibit her collection of bought credentials.

After Houdini’s premature death on Halloween 1926, Mackenberg determined to continue his effective crusade by herself. She went on a lecture tour, wherein she effectively demonstrated to service clubs and various organizations such mediumistic tricks as levitating spirit trumpets, producing ectoplasm (an imagined spirit substance), and reading sealed messages by the help of spirit guides. Her articles were syndicated and appeared widely. As an example, one of a series of eight, published in The Winnipeg Evening Tribune magazine section (between February 23–April 13, 1929), is headlined, “Mystic Cameras Dupe Bereaved with Fascinating Facts about Ectoplasm,” and it bills our heroine as “Houdini’s Clever Girl Detective.”

Mackenberg had worked for Houdini for two years and had, by her own count, investigated over 300 seers and psychics. She continued that career for two more decades, telling a Hearst newspapers reporter in 1949, “I smell a rat before I smell the incense” (qtd. in Edwards 2019). I think the great Houdini would have been very proud.

James Randi

World-famous magician and escape artist James “The Amazing” Randi (born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge, 1928–2020) was the very embodiment of Houdini. He also became a great proponent of role-playing and disguise, as in infiltrating the theatrical performances of sham faith healers to expose their deceptions. One of his sensational exposés featured Pentecostal evangelist and director of a religious empire Rev. Peter Popoff.

Randi focused on Popoff’s apparent gifts of healing and what is called the Word of Knowledge—allegedly consisting of receiving, directly from God, special messages that are then to be imparted to others. For example, at a service in Anaheim, California, in 1986, Popoff called out, “Virgil. Is it Jorgenson? Who is Virgil?” When a man in the audience identified himself, Popoff continued, “Oh, glory to God. I’ll tell you, God’s going to touch that sister of yours all the way over in Sweden.” Popoff then broke the man’s cane over his knee and stood by as the amazed audience watched the man walk about unaided,² giving praise to both Popoff and God (Steiner 1989, 124–126).

James Randi was a great observer, and he wondered at the healer wearing an apparent hearing aid! He began to suspect the device might actually be a tiny radio receiver and that someone—other than God—was secretly broadcasting such information. So our incognito investigator smuggled in an electronics expert with computerized scanning equipment and, intercepting the messages, discovered where they really came from: the evangelist’s wife in the ministry’s TV trailer parked outside! She obtained the relevant information from so-called prayer cards that attendees filled out before the service and broadcast selected facts to Popoff’s “hearing aid.” Randi, using before-and-after videotapes of one intercepted session with Mrs. Popoff’s voice, exposed the whole affair on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show (Randi 1987, 141–150; Nickell 2013, 197–200).

Early in his work to expose phony spiritualists, miracle workers, psychic wonders, and others of their ilk, Randi turned his attention to a sensational performer from Israel named Uri Geller. He allegedly had a remarkable ability: he could apparently bend metal simply by looking at it! Using only his mental powers, he also appeared to read people’s minds, move objects, start or stop clocks and watches, “see” while blindfolded, and perform other wonders. These strange powers were called the “Geller Effect” by parapsychologists who had tested him. Randi was suspicious—to say the least. He knew all too well that non-magicians, such as Geller’s examiners, could easily be fooled. He suspected there might be a better term for the “Geller Effect,” namely, magic tricks. What was needed, Randi knew, was for him to get a close-up look at the young marvel’s feats. Gambling that Geller probably did not know what he looked like, Randi arranged to join in when Geller was invited to perform at the offices of Time magazine. Posing as a Time editor and changing his appearance to look the part, Randi was transformed by a three-piece suit. In his role-playing, he feigned surprise at Geller’s tricks. For example, although the psychic pretended to cover his eyes while a secretary made a simple drawing, he actually peeked. This enabled him to seemingly read her mind and reproduce the drawing. Also, instead of bending a key “by concentration,” as he claimed, Geller bent it against a table when he thought no one was looking. These and other tricks would eventually be exposed in Randi’s book The Magic of Uri Geller (1975; Nickell 1989, 52–54).

As Randi continued his exposés, the charlatans began to be on the lookout for him. At one theatrical event, he had dyed his full gray beard brown, affixed a brown wig, and donned a flashy jacket. As a consequence, a security “bully” came right to his seat and inquired if he was James Randi! Our hero tried to direct the guard elsewhere, and when he went off to report having found him, the magician quickly transformed himself. That is, he rushed to the men’s room where he ditched the wig and jacket and washed out the dye. He quickly took a seat up front as the real James Randi, whereupon the event had begun, the lights were dimmed, and he thereafter went unnoticed (Bartlett 1986)!

Having known James Randi for over half a century—as colleague, mentor, and friend—I will just say his exploits are far more than legendary.

The same is true of his intrepid forerunners—Rose Mackenberg, Harry Houdini, Kate Warne, and Allan Pinkerton. I just wanted to bring them out from behind the curtain of history for one more bow.

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to those who helped with searches and advice: CFI Libraries Director Tim Binga, SI Managing Editor Julia Lavarnway, and my niece Cara Milby.

Notes

1. It was after Allan Pinkerton’s death that his sons Robert and William notoriously allowed the firm to use operatives and guards against the labor movement! (Allan had himself been a union member in Scotland.) That practice was later ended with a strong ethical code.
2. More often than not, a person with a cane could walk without one—especially because the excitement of such an occasion helps temporarily mask pain.

References

Bartlett, Kay. 1986. 272,000 stipend to ‘The Amazing Randi’: Magician-debunker conjures up ‘genius grant.’ Los Angeles Times (September 14).

Edwards, Gavin. 2019. Overlooked no more: Rose Mackenberg, Houdini’s secret ‘ghost-buster.’ The New York Times (December 6).

Horan, James D. 1967. The Pinkertons: The Detective Dynasty That Made History. New York, NY: Crown.

Nickell, Joe. 1989. The Magic Detectives: Join Them in Solving Strange Mysteries! Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books.

———. 2013. The Science of Miracles: Investigating the Incredible. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Pankratz, Loren. 1995. Rose Mackenberg: Crusader against spiritualist fraud. Skeptical Inquirer July/August: 28–29.

Pinkerton, Allan. 1874. The Detective and the Somnambulist: The Murderer and Fortune Teller. New York, NY: Carleton.

———. 1876. The Spiritualists and Detectives. New York, NY: G.W. Carleton & Co.

Polidoro, Massimo. 2001. Final Séance: The Strange Friendship between Houdini and Conan Doyle. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Randi, James. 1975. The Magic of Uri Geller. New York, NY: Baltimore Books.

———. 1987. The Faith Healers. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Steiner, Robert A. 1989. Don’t Get Taken! El Cerrito, CA: Wide-Awake Books.

Waller, Douglas. 2019. Lincoln’s Spies: Their Secret War to Save a Nation. New York: Simon & Schuster.