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Full-Text Articles in History
The Case Of "Who's Looney Now?" : Psychologists, Psychiatrists, The Public, And Contested Notions Of Insanity In Turn-Of-The-Twentieth Century America, Amanda Lynn Haislip
The Case Of "Who's Looney Now?" : Psychologists, Psychiatrists, The Public, And Contested Notions Of Insanity In Turn-Of-The-Twentieth Century America, Amanda Lynn Haislip
Honors Theses
No doubt, “eccentric” is one word that describes John Armstrong Chaloner, a lawyer, entrepreneur, anti-Spiritualist, “scientific” medium, millionaire heir to the fur-trading fortune of John Jacob Astor, and, at one point, an incurably insane paranoiac. After he married and amicably divorced the Virginian novelist Amélie Rives, in 1888 and 1895 respectively, Chaloner discovered he could communicate with his subconscious, his “X-Faculty” as he named it, using a planchette, an early form of a Ouija board. He claimed to have changed his own eye color from brown to grey using this strange X-Faculty and boasted about winning $600 off of a …