Anna Eva Fay
American spiritual medium
Anna Eva Fay Pingree (March 31, 1851 – May 12, 1927) was a famous medium and stage mentalist of the twentieth century.
Biography
Fay was born Ann Eliza Heathman in Southington, Ohio. She married Henry Melville Cummings, a medium, who went by the name Henry Melville Fay. She adopted the stage name of Annie Fay and began to perform as a stage medium. She became famous for her vaudeville and stage performances in the 1880s and 1890s, where she was billed as "The Indescribable Phenomenon".
Through her career, Fay was exposed as a fraudulent medium. Fay was known for employing assistants including several who would dig up information about séance sitters in the towns that she visited.
In the early 1870s the American stage mentalist Washington Irving Bishop was the manager of Fay's spiritualist acts, but in 1876 exposed her trick methods to the media. In 1883 the ex-medium John W. Truesdell revealed her method of freeing her hands from cotton bandages.
Her first husband died on May 29, 1889.
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This entry incorporates text from “Anna Eva Fay” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.