Henry Slade (medium)

According to Joe Nickell, Slade was repeatedly caught faking the spirit messages in his séances and he produced his phenomena by a variety of magic tricks.

Slade was writing these messages from the "dead" using tiny pieces of chalk held in the fingers of either hand, the toes of either foot, or his mouth.

[5] In a séance Stanley LeFevre Krebs employed a secret mirror and caught Slade swapping slates and hiding them in the back of his chair.

[10] Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leipzig conducted several controlled experiments, using Slade, to evaluate his claims of paranormal ability in 1877.

[1] Hereward Carrington in his book The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism (1907) revealed the fraudulent methods (with diagrams of the rope tricks) that Slade used in the Zöllner experiments.

The magician Harry Houdini met the ex-medium Remigius Weiss in Philadelphia who had testified to the Seybert Commission that Slade's methods were fraudulent.