Buried in Forest Park are two sisters that you might not have heard of: Elizabeth “Lizzie” Bangs (1859-1920) and Mary “May” Bangs (1862-1917). They were famous (or more accurately, infamous) spiritual mediums in Chicago at the turn of the last century.
The sisters started their mystical careers early as their mother was also a medium. As young children, people paid to spend an evening with the Bangs family in their home. Ads in the Chicago Tribune in 1874 read: “Bangs Children will hold séances at 435 West Van Buren St, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday evenings commencing at 8 p.m. Slate writing and other physical manifestations occur in a well lighted [sic] room.”
A night at the Bangs home included furniture moving on its own, spirits knocking on tables, and kittens appearing out of nowhere. At one point, the girls were tied up and placed in a cabinet that then reverberated with the sounds of a guitar being strummed.
As they became older, the sisters found the spiritual business to be quite lucrative. They catered to wealthy clients as well as to the general public. One affluent woman whose fiancé had died, paid the sisters to officiate her marriage to the materialized spirit of her dead bridegroom. Another rich client, Henry Jestram, was said to have been driven into an insane asylum by the antics of the sisters. During a “visitation” May told well-off Henry Graham that his dead wife had communicated from beyond stating that she had wanted him to marry May. After divorcing Graham, May then informed millionaire Jacob Lesher that his dead mother’s spirit had spoken from the grave insisting he marry her next. (Lesher was out of money and divorced from May in less than two years.)
The sisters had many tricks up their sleeves (and hidden in their skirts), including slates on which messages mystifyingly appeared and a spirit typewriter that produced messages from the beyond. But their most lucrative scheme by far was their spirit paintings.
People who bought these pictures believed that the sisters communicated with dead artists who could generate images of deceased loved ones without the use of paints or brushes. Many prominent citizens purchased these portraits, including judges, businessmen and scholars. Rev. Dr. Isaac Funk of Funk & Wagnalls paid $1,500 (around $55,000 in today’s money) for a portrait.
Many suspected the sisters were fakes and they were often in legal trouble for unlicensed “shows.” In the 1890s, they were officially charged with fraud, but the case was dismissed.
In 1905 the Chicago Spiritualist league claimed the sisters were not “real” spiritualists and published accounts of how they faked spiritual phenomena. The portraits were revealed to be pastels painted over an enlarged photograph on “sensitized” canvases. The scheme the women devised was that clients were asked to bring a photo of dead loved one in an envelope. One sister would take that photo from the client, but as soon as she had it in her hands, a loud “spiritual” rapping would be heard from another table where the other sister sat. As the client looked to see where the rapping was coming from, the sister tucked the photo under her skirts and slid it down an opening in the floor that led to room below where an assistant was waiting. The assistant then snapped a picture of the original photo which was then slid back up to the sister who returned it to the client, still in its envelope. The sisters would then say that the spirit was fading and the client needed to come back in a couple of days when the conditions were better. When the client returned, magically, mystically, the painted portrait would appear.
Even after being publicly debunked, many refused to believe that they had been duped by the Bangs.
The sisters gradually faded out of the news, except when used as an example of fraudulent mediums. They are buried near their parents and each other in Forest Home Cemetery. Lizzie is buried under the name of Elizabeth S. Paul and May’s headstone reads May E. Charter, (Charter being the name of the last of her three husbands.) Spiritualists still occasionally visit their graves, perhaps hoping for their portraits to appear.
References used: Archival newspaper articles from the Chicago Daily Tribune, The Inter Ocean and Hornellsville Weekly Tribune.
Amy Binns-Calvey is a volunteer with the Historical Society of Forest Park and the author of More Dead Than Alive: Stories of Forest Park’s Quietest Neighbors.
