Washington Irving Bishop and Eleanor Fletcher Bishop

The late nineteenth century was a popular time for magicians, mind-readers, psychics, and mentalists who captivated audiences—and competed against one another—by performing seemingly impossible feats. One of them was Washington Irving Bishop (1856-1889). Bishop started his career as an apprentice to the spiritualist Anna Eva Fay, before exposing her methods, and lost a lawsuit to the English magician J. N. Maskelyne who objected to his claim of psychic powers. This is why his mother at first suspects Cora, Jack and Euri of being spies from these competing acts. Bishop’s most famous trick was the “blindfold drive” in which he would drive a horse and carriage with his eyes covered. In the afterlife, I figured Bishop might alter the trick to the slightly more appropriate “blindfold fly.”

Bishop’s dramatic death—which his mother, Eleanor Fletcher Bishop, relates to Jack and Cora—is ripped from the pages of history. On May 12, 1889, after performing at the Lambs Club, Bishop fell unconscious. Doctors pronounced him dead and proceeded to autopsy him—sawing open his skull and removing his brain. But, as it turns out, Bishop was prone to such fits and kept a note in his pocket detailing his condition and cautioning doctors not to prematurely pronounce him dead. Upon hearing of his death, his mother, a dramatic woman by all accounts, charged that it was the autopsy that had in fact killed him.

Eleanor Fletcher Bishop spent the next 29 years of her life seeking justice for what she viewed as her son’s murder. She took the doctors who had autopsied Washington Irving Bishop to court (they were found not guilty) and authored the long-winded volume she shows Cora, A Mother’s Life Dedicated and an Appeal for Justice to All Brother Masons and the General Public; A Synopsis of the Butchery of the Late Sir Washington Irving Bishop. Click here to see a photo of Eleanor Fletcher Bishop leaning over the corpse of her son. If you look closely, you can see the line around his head where it was cut open!