Frederick Tansley Munnings (1875,

Lowestoft Lowestoft ( ) is a coastal town and civil parish in the East Suffolk district of Suffolk, England.OS Explorer Map OL40: The Broads: (1:25 000) : . As the most easterly UK settlement, it is north-east of London, north-east of Ipswich and sou ...

– 1953)"A Varied Career."

South Australian Register ''The Register'', originally the ''South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register'', and later ''South Australian Register,'' was South Australia's first newspaper. It was first published in London in June 1836, moved to Adelaide in 1837, and f ...

, March 15, 1923, p. 12. was a 20th-century British spiritualist medium and former burglar. He was exposed as a fraud.

Career

Munnings lived in Hastings and worked as a boarding-house keeper. He was convicted of

burglary Burglary, also called breaking and entering and sometimes housebreaking, is the act of entering a building or other areas without permission, with the intention of committing a criminal offence. Usually that offence is theft, robbery or murder ...

for housebreaking at

Woking Woking ( ) is a town and borough status in the United Kingdom, borough in northwest Surrey, England, around from central London. It appears in Domesday Book as ''Wochinges'' and its name probably derives from that of a Anglo-Saxon settlement o ...

and was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment. Munnings claimed to be a "direct voice" medium, but was exposed as a fraud when one of his séance sitters turned the lights on, revealing him to be holding a trumpet by means of a telescopic extension piece and using an angle piece to change the auditory effect of his voice. In February 1926 a public warning against Munnings was issued in the press by

Arthur Conan Doyle Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for ''A Study in Scarlet'', the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Ho ...

, Abraham Wallace, R. H. Saunders, and H. D. Bradley. The psychical researcher Harry Price also exposed his fraudulent mediumship. Munnings claimed to produce the independent "spirit" voices of

Julius Caesar Gaius Julius Caesar (; ; 12 July 100 BC – 15 March 44 BC), was a Roman general and statesman. A member of the First Triumvirate, Caesar led the Roman armies in the Gallic Wars before defeating his political rival Pompey in a civil war, and ...

, Dan Leno, Hawley Harvey Crippen and

King Henry VIII Henry VIII (28 June 149128 January 1547) was King of England from 22 April 1509 until his death in 1547. Henry is best known for his six marriages, and for his efforts to have his first marriage (to Catherine of Aragon) annulled. His disag ...

. Price invented and used a piece of apparatus known as a voice control recorder and proved that all the voices were those of Munnings. Munnings admitted fraud and sold his confessions to a Sunday newspaper. Price, Harry. (1939). Chapter ''The Mechanics of Spiritualism'' in ''Fifty Years of Psychical Research.'' Kessinger Publishing. Munnings's daughter Hilda Tansley Munnings became a noted ballerina under the name Lydia Sokolova.

References

External links

*
'Astonishing Confessions of a "Bogus Spirit" Medium'
' Munnings's confession published in the Milwaukee Sentinel, July 28, 1928 *Anonymous. (1925)
''The Cases of Mr. Moss and Mr. Munnings''
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 22: 71–75. {{DEFAULTSORT:Munnings, Frederick Tansley 1875 births 1953 deaths English spiritual mediums British people convicted of burglary People from Hastings