[4] In the summer of 1881, May and her mother were arrested for "doing business without a license",[5] and while they claimed to be evangelists and such charges could not be brought against ministers, they were fined by the police court the following day.

[13] That year, one of their wealthy clients, photographer Henry Jestram, reportedly paid vast amounts of his fortune for their seances.

[15] According to the Chicago Daily Tribune, in March 1890, a Chicago grand jury declined to bring charges against the Bangs Sisters,[16] but in May 1891, the Illinois Senate passed a bill: ...prohibiting anyone from personating the spirits of the dead, commonly known as spirit-medium séances, on penalty of fine and imprisonment.

As reported in the Fort Wayne Sentinel on September 10, 1894, the Bangs conducted a Massachusetts wedding ceremony between a wealthy woman and her dead fiancé.

Millionaire leather manufacturer Jacob H. Lesher was "told" to marry May by his dead mother, and according to a July 16, 1909 story in the Chicago Daily Tribune, was divorced and penniless in less than 24 months.

[22][23] Regarding the sisters' drawings, magic historian David Witter has noted that "experts have surmised that sketches were made beforehand, hidden and slowly moved forward into the light by a free hand while the subjects were not looking.

"[1] In 1901, the psychologist Stanley LeFevre Krebs exposed the sisters as frauds; he employed a hidden mirror and caught them removing a blank letter sealed between two slates and writing a reply which they would pretend a spirit had written.

After Carrington gave incontrovertible evidence he had visited the sisters and caught them in fraud, Moore had to publicly retract his charges in a letter for Light, December 14, 1912.