When the anti-vice investigators worked for one month in Lancaster in 1913, they focused on commercial sex, gambling, and drinking. But that wasn’t all. These agents also visited several fortune tellers in the city. State law banned fortune telling, because officials saw it was inherently fraudulent. The Pennsylvania law, initially passed in 1861, stated that it was a misdemeanor for any person to “pretend for gain..to predict future events by cards, tokens, the inspection of the head or hands of any person.” According to anti-vice reformers, fortune tellers were a problem not only because they were swindlers; they were also suspect because they were often involved in other areas of vice, such as commercial sex. Fortune tellers in Lancaster were usually part of the most marginalized groups; they were people of color and often women. Furthermore, observers claimed that these “charlatans” depended on a “large class of ignorant and superstitious people, including silly girls, who think it fun to have their fortunes told.”
Minerva Mullen, the only woman on the team of four undercover investigators in 1913, visited two fortune tellers as part of her survey of vice in Lancaster. Both fortune tellers lived in Black neighborhoods; one was a white woman, the other was a Black man. Both were involved in other aspects of vice.
First, Mullen went to see a “bleached blonde” white woman, Mrs. Killinger, on 38 North Street, near the corner of S. Duke and North Street. Mullen noted that the neighborhood was “more colored [sic] than white.” This was in the seventh ward, the neighborhood with the highest concentration of Black Lancastrians (neighborhoods were shaped by practices of segregation). Mullen described Mrs. Killinger as “dissipated looking…[smelling] strongly of liquor.” She told Mullen that her husband had been drinking hard for five weeks, bringing colored [sic] women into the house and being intimate with them.” His behavior, she said, was interfering with her regular customers. Then she turned her attention to Minerva Mullen’s future.
Minerva Mullen recalled the interaction in her notes:
She then told me the following– I would have trouble with my husband. He was going with other women. She could stop all that by working on him for a small sum… “But I am a widow, how can my husband be with other women and dead,” I said. “Oh but you are married, you cannot fool me, your hands show housework the cards show you cooking and washing and sweeping around your home,” she answered. She became very insulting when I told her that was not true and left.
In fact, the fortune teller’s tale was closer to the truth than Minerva Mullen’s. Mullen’s husband, James, was alive and well, living in Brooklyn, New York, with their five children, aged 4 to 20. Her hands probably did show signs of household labor, which she escaped when she joined the investigators in Lancaster. Perhaps the oldest daughter took care of household responsibilities while Mullen was away.
Next, Mullen visited Thomas E. Wilson, a Black fortune teller on West Grant Street (he lived at 230 and 238). In 1901 Wilson and his daughter Louisa Francis had been charged with running a disorderly house. This was an umbrella category that included drinking, loud partying, and/or commercial sex. They were acquitted in this case, but nine years later again faced charges of running a disorderly house and fortune telling. Wilson was known as Lancaster’s “Hoodoo Doctor.” Hoodoo spirituality grew out of the mixture of central and western African traditions among enslaved Africans in the United States; it involved conjuring spirits and creating herbal remedies, among other practices. The chambermaid at the Wheatland Hotel, where Mullen was staying, explained her faith in Wilson:
I forgot to tell you of WILSON. He has been working for me for a year now. He tells wonderful. [This is not a typo. I think it means “his fortune telling is wonderful”–] He can put spells on people – they can’t work, make them sick.
Mullen described her ominous meeting with Wilson, the Hoodoo Doctor:
He looked at me steadily for a time, then said, ”You make me chilly and uneasy. I can’t tell but somehow you smell like death and ruin to me. I am afraid I can’t tell you everything you want to know, you are deep. You will leave here in four days, but I will know when you go. You will travel near 500 miles but I will follow you.”
Mullen did leave Lancaster soon after this meeting, but in eighteen days, not four. And she would travel a substantial distance–165 miles to her home in Brooklyn, not 500 miles. The Hoodoo Doctor was on the right track, but his particulars were incorrect. Mullen’s notes do not suggest any cracks in her skepticism about fortune-tellers, even when they came close to the truth. Others, however, clearly relied on fortune-tellers to help them reconcile with or punish cheating husbands, to solve crimes, or reassure them about their precarious futures.
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