Hello and welcome to The Odder Podcast. I’m your host Madison Paige and today we are meeting the woman Harry Houdini called the most extraordinary fake mediums and mystery swindlers the world has ever known. Today on the Odder, we are talking about Ann O’Delia Diss Debar. Also known as Editha Lola Montez, Madame Messant, Swami Viva Ananda, and a host of other names. So grab your crystal ball, your clean robes, and guard your savings account and Let’s go!
2. Hello! I’m back! We are here! My Odders! We’re back! We were gone for the winter and I bet some of you thought that was it for The Odder, I bet you thought you’d never see us again but like that one college friend who you always swear has died after a long night out, we have come limping back in wearing two different shoes that do not belong to us, with a black eye, and a mcdonalds bag for a hat. We just needed to sleep it off behind a dumpster and we are back and ready for another go around. Seriously though, I appreciate those that waited for the return and the understanding that sometimes we need a break. I say we but I am the odder and sometimes I’m having a hard time. For those that don’t follow the TikTok, on top of the podcast, I also work a full time job and I’m working on my masters degree and I got a little overwhelmed with some personal things that led to me needing to take a break. But I never forgot about you guys. And my long winter's nap was well needed and used and I am back and better than ever and The Odder perseveres. I actually had a weird little spike in my audience over the break so any new listeners who are here because of the Mother GoD documentary that came out who then followed the wormhole to my episode, welcome. Let me introduce you to my usual little spiel. For the returning listeners, welcome back, for the new listeners, welcome welcome to The Odder podcast where we are a trail mix of all things unknown, unsolved, and just plain odd. If you have an idea for an episode you think would be fun, good
news! I do listener requests so if you want your own personalized episode, you can send me an email at theodderpod@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you and know what you want to hear from me! I hope you enjoy today's episode and if you really enjoy it or if you don’t, please leave a rating and review, they really do help! Let me just say, I hope everyone had a fantastic holiday, whichever you celebrate and great wishes for the new year. I don’t know what your new year's resolution is but if it’s to listen to more episodes of The Odder, then extra cosmic brownie points to you! If it's to get back to the gym, great news, I’m a fantastic workout companion! What better motivator for the treadmill than listening to my unsolved episodes? Resolution to eat better? There's a whole episode about a tick that makes you vegetarian! Wanting to be more spiritual? May I interest you in some deep dive into some cults? Safe to say that The Odder is here to be your buddy in the new year! But enough plugging, onto the show! I thought it would be fun to enter the new year with some whimsy so we are banging down the door with a con woman who was so hilariously bad but also just kept getting away with it. Today we talk about Ann O’Delia Diss Debar, a woman of many names and alias, husbands, cons, trials, mysteries and one of the only swindlers to ever gain the admiration as well as horror of Harry Houdini who you probably know as a magician and escape artist but who was also a absolute god at unmasking charlatans and dragging them through the mud. HE dedicated an entire chapter in the 1924 book “ A Magician Among Spirits'' to Diss Debar who he called “one of the most extraordinary fake mediums and mystery swindlers the world has ever known."
3. In 1849, a baby was born in Kentucky
4. Maybe
5. Whose father was John C. F. Salomon, a professor of Music at Greenville Female Institute in Harrodsburg.
6. Possibly
7. And this baby was named Editha Salomen
8. Allegedly
9. And Editha Salomen would one day grow up to be one of the greatest conwomen the world has ever seen.
10. Or at least that’s who we think Ann O’Delia Diss Debar was born as. The problem is, we don’t really know. The actual identity of our lady of honor is not something anyone has ever been able to verify. Although George C. T. Salomon, the son of the good professor, would come forward later to testify to being Diss Debar’s brother, she would actually deny this. And Ann herself would claim and name so many different identities and backstories that it would have made ancestry dot com nauseous.
11.However, for most historians, Ann O’Delia Diss Debar is believed to have started life as Editha Salomen or possibly Ann O’Delia Salomen which was listed in census data and in a family bible that became part of an 1888 court case. And like her difficult to trace backstory, Ann was said to be quite the handful.
12. Her brother, which I am saying with finger quotes, would later state “Whenever she enters a house peace departs and with it everything portable. Nothing is safe in her hands.”
13. As a young girl and into womanhood, Editha Salomen would frequently run away from home. She would be gone for increasingly long periods of time and when she returned, she would regale her family and friends with long winded tales of romantic trysts and fantastical lovers who had kept her away for so long. These stories, however, were clearly a little more imagination than reality.
14. Make believe romances were the least of Editha’s escapades however as she was also a known thief and left a trail of debts across the united states. The New York Sun is quoted as saying about her “She skipped out of Kansas City leaving debts and a reputation as a beer guzzler.”
15. However, Editha, who going forward we are just going to call Ann, was not a great con woman. She was caught frequently. And her method of getting out of trouble was to call upon some overt acting abilities and feign a dangerous illness. She was known to have an abscessed tooth from which she could suck blood. She would then cough and faint and expel the blood from her mouth in order to
convince whatever unfortunate shopkeeper, cop, or good citizen that had grabbed her that she had tuberculosis.
16.Similar to if you started wildly coughing in public in these post-covid times, it was a good way to clear a room quickly.
17. Unfortunately, this method didn’t always save her hide. In Dayton Ohio, while trying to sneak out of a hotel without paying for her stay, she was quickly grabbed by the manager. Ann began her usual bloody coughing spiel but apparently overplayed it for the in-house doctor who did not buy her acting. It was apparently such a bad performance, that he threatened to use a hot iron to open her mouth and look inside when she refused to allow him to examine her. Seeing that the jig was up, Ann sprung up, tackled a nearby priest who had come to perform last rites before trampling his group of accompanying nuns. In the ensuing scuffle, she managed to outflank all her pursuers and escape the hotel leaving a collection of bruised religious figures, a disgruntled doctor, and a hefty unpaid bill behind.
18. This incident, as outrageous as it sounds, was not a one off and Ann was followed across the countries by creditors, debtors, and those she robbed blind. Ann is generally considered to be a rather terrible conwoman but always managed to get away with what The New York Sun called "a general rumpus, a hair-pulling match, and the devil to pay generally." in 1888.
19. It was around this time that Ann realized that Editha Saloman had too many marks on her name to keep doing business and whether it was this reason or simply the flight of fancy that had followed her all her
life, she began to reinvent herself and start taking on the myriad of names and backgrounds that leave us confused and uncertain to this day.
20. She is best known for claiming to actually be named Editha Lola Montez, the resulting love child of the scandalous and well known affair between King Ludwig 1 of Bavaria and the dancer Lola Montex. She claimed to have been born in secrecy in Italy in 1854 but spirited away to be raised by foster parents or a convent, depending on which story you heard.
21.Now it is no shock that the story of a royal babe resulting from a steamy affair would be much more interesting than a simple Kentucky bumpkins humble upbringings and Ann utilized this by going on tour.
22.Giving her self titles first as the Countess Landsfeldt or the Baroness Rosenthal, Ann went from place to place enthralling her audiences with this fictitious tale of a childhood she did not have. She even eventually began calling herself a princess.
23.Somehow during this time, she even managed to convince the Montez estate to pay her a $300 settlement as the supposed abandoned daughter of Lola.
24. Now remember that this was all before the advent of the internet, easily available census info, or even reliable newspaper systems, so you could actually get away with claiming a lot if there was nobody to outright contradict you.
25.While the lecture series put a few coins in her pocket, Ann’s real scheme was her myriad of swindled upper crust lovers.
26. Plying herself as this poor misbegotten princess, she rubbed elbows, knees, and shoulders with teh escalon of high society and found no lack of gullible young men who wanted the thrill of adding a possible hot blooded royal to their address books.
27.She would lure them in before clearing their pockets by claiming to have been taken advantage of by banks and incompetent investment agents and just needing a little help paying some bills till it all got smoothed out. Once she had determined that he swiped all she could from her target, she would leave town and move to another with a bigger fish to fry.
28.Using this method, it is estimated that Ann cleared a quarter of a million dollars in 1870 currency. This lavish funding led her to a life of luxury and also a problem with opium laced cigarettes. This addiction would later send her to the hospital with what would be called “nervous exhaustion”.
29. But Ann didn’t always play at being a princess, just like she had other identities, she also always had another con up her sleeve. Now this is where stories about her start to get muddled. Like I said, because she
used so many different identities and stories about herself, it's kind of gotten difficult to decode what happened in her life.
30. But she somehow ended up in a psychiatric hospital in Blackwell's Island. Now this may have happened as part of a normal attempt to outwit a con and attempt the tooth trick. However, at the hospital, they quickly figured out what she was doing and in order to not go to prison, she claimed insanity and got sent to Blackwell. Some other stories have that this occurred after she tricked the Vanderbilt heir into spending all his money buying shares from her after playing a medium and telling him it was what his late father would have wanted. He quickly realized it was all a hoax and she once again claimed insanity to get out of prison.
31.Unfortunately, I can’t find which timeline is correct but somehow she ends up in Blackwell's Island and that's important so let’s get there. 32. Ann did not like being in a psychiatric hospital. It was a big step down from being a princess to a patient. However, she couldn’t just leave. So somehow, Ann got a hold of a knife and in a desperate attempt at escape stabbed her doctor.
33. Except it wasn't her doctor!
34.It was a nearby medical student named Paul Noel Messant. And he did not die, he survived. But Ann did not escape and in order to keep from getting transferred to real prison, she sat back and played up the insanity act in order to stay at the hospital.
35. Ann did have the good luck that in order to be discharged, she just needed to convince the doctors and nurses that they had cured her mental illness. Given that she had never been mentally ill, it didn’t take long for Ann to work this out and subsequently stop pretending to be. She was cleared and released.
36. And just nobody cared that she stabbed that medical student. 37. In fact, she did something that is going to shock and appall you.
38.She married that medical student.
39.That’s right, she and the guy she stabbed tied the knot in holy matrimony and she became Madame Messant.
40. And it apparently was a real relationship. Ann was happy with Paul and they even had a daughter named Alice. During their marriage,
Ann stopped conning people, she stopped all crime. She really just played the part of happy wife. Now we can’t know for 100% certain that this wasn't some weird long con by Ann but almost everyone is of the mind that it was legitimate.
41.Unfortunately, Paul would pass away in 1873. Now a widow, Ann would return to her old ways of making money and begin her conning with a new twist. She decided to enter the world of spiritualism.
- Madame Messant began to ply herself as a professional hypnotist. Ann turned out to be really very good at cold reading and had considerable success at this con in her social circles. However, being the widowed wife of a doctor didn’t get you close enough to the deep pockets that could fund the luxurious life that Ann had begun to miss. In order to get to the bigger fish in the pond, Ann would once again need a new identity.
- She achieved this through another marriage, this time to a General Joseph Hubert Diss Debar. General Joseph was actually a bit of a fibber himself as the closest he ever came to political highstanding was a minor government position in West Virginia. He was actually a french artist and the designer of the west virginia state seal and by no means a real general.
- However, real war service or not, the elevation from being the wife of a doctor to the wife of a general put Ann in the social circles she wanted to be in. The General was actually married with children when he met Ann but was so taken with her that he abandoned his family to run off to New York and start fresh with her.
- It was here in the big apple that she dawned the moniquker she would be best known as and became Ann O’Delia Diss Debar, hypnotist and medium.
- Now in the upper crust of society, the practice of speaking to spirits from beyond the grave was all the fashion and the wealthy could afford to indulge in this kind of hobby. Ann made a great deal of money offering to talk to dearly departed aunt Fanny about where she hid her broaches and so on but she was also a bit loose with her finances.
- Ann likes luxury, she liked to spend money and live well and even working as she did, she struggled to keep up with her own habits.
- And soon hypnotism had lost its thunder so Ann began to rely full time on her ability to read body language and make educated guesses about the loved ones that had passed on.
- But that wasn’t a special skill. There were plenty of mediums at the time and if Ann wanted to keep the wolves away from the door, she needed to come up with a real special act.
- Spirit Paintings became the ticket to keep her head above water. Ann began to advertise that not only could she communicate spoken messages from the departed but she could also use her connection to the other plane to create visual images and paintings. She would bring guests into a seance and seat them with a blank canvas in front. As she hummed and spoke and communed with the deceased, the canvases would suddenly fill with images that they wanted to show to the living.
- Often called spook pictures, Ann claimed them to be the result of a last message to the bereaved from those they loss but seeing an opportunity for more profit, she then claimed that she was able to speak to the great artistic masters of history and that using her, they were unveiling new artworks to the public.
- However, although she claimed these new pieces to be created by the likes of Michelangelo, those that examined them actually found them to be quite bad. They appeared to be copied, unskillfully, from a much better piece.
- It would come to light that Ann would copy the old master's work on a specially prepared canvas that had been layered with the same type of chemicals that were used to develop photographs. When exposed to the touch of a wet sponge, these pictures would magically appear!
- Ann was also fond of making seemingly empty notebooks suddenly filled with the writing of the dead. Especially dead philosophers such as Socrates and aristotle. However, it would later be revealed to be a simple sleight of hand trick in which a blank notebook would be replaced by a pre=filled one when Ann would wrap it up.
- However, this revelation didn’t successfully dissuade everyone. Ann’s best customer was a man named Luther Marsh, one of the richest and most respected lawyers in New York. Marsh, unfortunately was as wealthy as he was gullible but this most likely was due to the tragic loss of both his wife and daughter who he was desperate to communicate with.
- Ann would use her mediumship skills to conjure these messages for Marsh and produced paintings which she claimed to be from his passed family. She then claimed that not only did his family want to speak to him but famous painters such as Rembrandt and Apelles. Marsh was an ardent enthusiast of the classical world and produced a number of spook paintings from figures in it such as Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and so on. She even summoned the ghost of the Roman Statesman Appius Claudius Caecus who informed Marsh that he was his direct descendant. Marsh would soon collect a large portrait of Appius as his most prized possession.
- Ann would conjure these and many more historical figures for Marsh as well as continuing to speak to his wife and daughter. In return, Marsh gave her loads of money and even eventually his house as his daughter had apparently told him he should through Ann.
- Ann would take Marsh’s house and turn it into a Spiritualist’s “Temple of Truth”.
- This proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back from the living family of Luther Marsh and the general public. Concerned about his mental state after giving his house to someone already proven to be a fraud, they made a complaint to the court about Ann O’Delia Diss Debar.
- And shockingly they weren't the only ones.
- Stage Magicians also came forward demanding something be done about the Diss Debar woman. See this was a form of employment taken seriously by its practitioners and while they loved to perform illusions, they resented anyone using their tricks to scam people out of money by claiming it was real. A number of prominent New York magicians began to publicly show how to replicate all of Ann's tricks with the notebooks and the painting and bash her as a conwoman taking advantage of the bereaved.
- The combination of both complaints, displays, and a scathing testimony from Ann’s brother George where he stated “I wouldn’t believe her under oath in any circumstances” led to the arrest of both Ann and her husband for conspiracy to commit fraud.
- The trial was long and scandalous with testimony from several professional magicians who came to explain how each of her “miraculous” tricks of illusion were performed.
- During the trial, Ann was also visited by the ghost of Roman orator Cicero and a “council of ten” who suggested she should return Mr. Marsh’s property which she was suddenly happy to do.
- Since she decided to return the house to Mr. Marsh, the court did lessen her sentence but she was still charged and she and her husband spent six months each in prison.
- Unfortunately for such a highly publicized trial, after her release from the pen, she found it exceedingly difficult to operate in New York. She was unable to continue her old con of mediumship, she tried a short stint in the theater but was not any good at acting, and in the end she had to leave.
- It is rumored even that she faked her death by pretending to have jumped from a bridge into water below.
- However, Ann would reappear in other cities such as Chicago and Cincinnati under the new name of Vera P. Ava which was enough to fool the local police.
- She had a collection of new names that she would trade out as needed as she traveled city to city, utilizing con after con until people realized that Vera or Laura or whatever she was currently calling herself looked a lot like Ann O’delia Diss Debar in a bad blonde wig and she had to pick up stakes and move again. She not only traversed the US but also London and South Africa where she got a new husband.
- Frank Jackson joined up with Ann and together they started to attempt a new con. They started to found a number of different cults under you guesses, a whole bunch of new names.
- None of these cults ever had any great success.
- Their best known one “The Order of the Crystal Sea” was a mystical organization based around fortune telling. At least that’s what they told potential clients. In reality, they were using it to blackmail them. When they were caught, they did a month in jail before being run out of town.
- This time they took their gig to London where they started a new cult called “The Theocratic Unity”. Taking the name Swami Laura Horos and her “son” which was really her husband, “ Theo”, they recruited members into their mystical cult all while stealing from them. This was going all right for a while until a member noticed and reported them. The couple were arrested and tried in September 1901 in England. This time, it would hit international news because they weren't just charged for the thieving. Over the course of the trial, some members came forward to describe what happened in some of the rituals involved in the cult and the charges were upped to theft, rape, and sodomy.
- The US quickly figured out who Swami Laura and her son-husband really were and graciously let the English courts know who exactly they were dealing with.
- They were convicted and sentenced to seven years each.
- In 1906, Ann or Swami Laura or Editha or you wanna call her at this stage, was released on parole after less than five years. She immediately hitched up her skirts and left Londond and headed back to the good ole US of A.
- And honestly nothing could keep her down, she immediately tried to go back to her old cons but she was just too recognizable now and no one would fall for her scheming.
- And then she just disappeared. The last record we have of her is in 1909 and then nothing. We don;t even know when she died. One of the most prolific, fantastical women con-artists in the history of the world just vanished. Came in with a bang, went out without even a whimper.
- It’s a shame we don’t know what happened to Ann at the end of her life but one thing you can’t say about her is that she didn’t have the balls. She just never gave up, no matter what happened. And she lived quite the exciting life. We know she had children but we actually have very little record of them, we also don’t know what really happened to her husbands after she grew tired of them. Ann lived however Ann wanted to and she didn’t let any man, court, or societal expectation stop her. She was by no means a good person but damn was she a driven one.
- Well, that’s all for this episode. So what do you think? Which of Ann’s identities was your favorite? What do you think happened to her? Do you think her marriage to Paul was real love? Let us know what you think on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and leave a review. The Odder Pod is also on TikTok. Come follow us there! Have a suggestion for a show? Send me an email at theodderpod@gmail.com with your request and whether you’d like me to mention your name, your alias, or nothing at all. Remember this is The Odder Side so give me something cool, creepy, or confusing to deep dive for you. If you liked the show, leave us a review! They really help! We’re excited to be back! The Odder Podcast posts every other Thursday. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time on The Odder side.
