Davenport brothers
[2]: 53 Their father took up managing his sons and the group was joined by William Fay, a Buffalo resident with an interest in conjuring.
B. Ferguson, a follower of Spiritualism, who assured the audience that the brothers worked by spirit power rather than deceptive trickery.
William Davenport died on 1 July 1877 at the Oxford Hotel in King-street, Sydney, aged 36 years, during a tour of Australia and New Zealand.
The brothers had arrived from New Zealand three weeks previously; during the performances there William had "broke a blood vessel, and came to Sydney under the advice of his medical attendants".
[6][2]: 54–55 The stage magician John Nevil Maskelyne saw how the Davenports' spirit cabinet illusion worked, and stated to the audience in the theatre that he could recreate their act using no supernatural methods.
[7] Magicians including John Henry Anderson and Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin worked to expose the Davenport Brothers, writing exposés and performing duplicate effects.
Edward Dicey who attended a séance in 1864 observed that there were a host of circumstances which suggested purposely designed trickery and described the Davenports performance as a "mere conjuring trick of no very high order".
[8] He concluded that "all but the most confirmed believers will admit that, if it can be shown the Davenport Brothers can slip their hands out of the ropes, there is nothing supernatural, or even extraordinary, to explain in the exhibition."
They tied the Davenports into their box with a Tom fool's knot that could not be easily removed and thus exposed the trick to audience who demanded their money back.
[10] On 25 February 1865, Henry Irving and his fellow actors Philip Day and Frederick Maccabe who had read about the Liverpool exposure reproduced the Davenport brothers séance phenomena through trickery at the Library Hall of the Manchester Athenaeum.
Irving and his actor friends were able to reproduce all the tricks of the Davenports and they repeated the performance at the Free Trade Hall to large crowds of influential people from Manchester.
Houdini in his book A Magician Amongst the Spirits (1924) also reproduced a letter from Ira claiming "we never in public affirmed our Belief in spiritualism."
[17] In 1998, skeptical investigator Joe Nickell discovered the Davenports' scrapbook from the museum at the Lily Dale Spiritualist Assembly.
According to Nickell "taken as a whole, the evidence of the scrapbook does indicate that Ira Davenport was a practicing spiritualist, or at least pretended to be, although he and his brother used trickery to accomplish the effects they attributed to spirits.
