Luther Marsh’s daughter and wife were not the only figures who communicated with him from beyond the veil through Ann O’Delia Diss Debar’s mediumship. As historian Edmund Richardson explains, Marsh was an ardent enthusiast of the Classical world, and this was something that Diss Debar took full advantage of. Diss Debar claimed to have summoned the spirit of Apelles, the court painter of Alexander the Great, to do a number of her spirit paintings, including medallions representing Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and Archimedes. She subsequently summoned the ghost of another painter, Polygnotus, to create supernatural portraits of Pelopidas, Epaminondas, Pericles, Homer, and Cicero. Likewise, via the medium, the ghost of the Roman statesman Appius Claudius Caecus, who commissioned the building of the Appian Way, the most famous of all Roman roads, informed Marsh that the lawyer was his direct descendant. Subsequently, a large portrait of Appius became Marsh’s prized possession.
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Paintings weren’t even the end of it. Another spiritualist trick that Diss Debar pulled off was filling seemingly empty notebooks with dozens of pages of text written by a ghostly hand – in this case, allegedly new writing by such long-dead luminaries as Socrates and Aristotle. It was later revealed in court that this trick was accomplished by a simple sleight of hand trick: Diss Debar would just replace the blank notebook with a pre-filled one in the very act of wrapping the notebook up so that it would seem untouched.
