Austin Author David Brandon Hodge Pierces the Veil With Supernatural Machines

David Brandon Hodge hands me a small, faded brown envelope, no bigger than a matchbox. Inside the wax paper is a short, slender pendulum on a thin chord. In green printing on the outside of the wrapper, its purpose is explained. 

“The Sex Detector. Wonderful Fun-Maker. A Scientific Instrument. Better Than a Ouija Board.”

If you follow the instructions, it’s supposed to tell you the sex of any creature, even an unborn baby. This is what led to it being the only supernatural divining device banned by the USDA for being junk science. 

Hodge explains, “They were pitched to the poultry industry because you can determine the sex of an unhatched egg, and so you could prioritize, because you wanted more pullets than roosters. Well, the government cracked down on that.”

It’s the kind of item that, if it wasn’t for federal intervention, you might see among the other toys of yesteryear at Hodge’s store on Menchaca, Monkey See Monkey Do! Indeed, if you’ve ever chewed on an old-fashioned sweet treat at Big Top Candy Shop, either at its original South Congress site or its Hyde Park addition, their walls adorned with circus sideshow-style banners, then you’ve experienced Hodge’s fascination with vintage curios.

But there’s a more arcane and mystical side to his obsession with bygone times, one that doesn’t just raise the curtain of history but pierces the veil between worlds. In his new book, Supernatural Machines: The History of Spirit Communication Devices, out Oct. 27, Hodge explores the strange history of attempts to use mechanical devices to communicate with spirits.

A W.S. Reed “Espirito, or Revelator” planchette, circa 1892 Credit: Richard Whittaker

Hodge’s interest in the topic really goes back to his childhood. “I was always the weird kid,” he says. “Bloody Mary at sleepovers – not the drink but the mirror incantation. Light as a feather, stiff as a board. Books on haunted houses, Mysteries of the Unknown. Just ways to entertain ourselves in southeast Texas.”

This interest became part of one of his first jobs when he moved to Austin, running the magic counter at Lone Star Illusions at Barton Creek Square. “That was where they stuck all the new employees before they would let you start selling Zippo lighters,” Hodge says. “I [started] performing all these little tricks, and the next stage was that you had to learn how to juggle, and I didn’t really have a talent for that, so I’m like, ‘You know what? I’ll just work the magic counter.’”

At the same time, he switched his UT-Austin degree from an English major and history minor to a history major, and changed his focus from Black Death-era Europe to American religious movements – most especially, the Spiritualist movement of the late 19th century. With a plan at that time to become a schoolteacher, he says, “I thought that maybe my job prospects would be a little more attractive if I had a more localized specialty.”

Eventually, his day job and his degree combined when he began to tire of what he calls the “antagonistic nature, the gotcha nature, of a lot of magic.” He started looking at the work of what are known as bizarre magicians, whose performances are more than just cup-ball, ball-cup, penny-behind-the-ear tricks and instead blend esoteric arts and immersive arcana, to create a haunted antiques show. With real antiques modified or gaffed for special effects, and some plant stands discarded by the Bombay Company and rescued from the mall’s dumpsters, he would entrance the audience with a night of mystery. Rather than just a series of tricks, “it was more storytelling.”

Hodge eventually retired the show, but among the props was his first authentic device, a scientific planchette produced by the E.I. Horsman Company in the 1890s. That eBay purchase became the seed of a massive collection, which then became Hodge’s website, mysteriousplanchette.com, and now has transmogrified to print in Supernatural Machines.

While most people know it as the heart-shaped flat wooden board that points out letters and numbers on a Ouija board, the planchette has a history all of its own. It’s an example of an automatic writing device, where the user will place their hand gently on the surface and allow the spirits to move the planchette through them, leaving messages through a pencil clamped at the pointed end.

The earliest precursors to such devices were actually recorded in 11th century China, and the first planchettes were commercially produced in 1853. They then became commonplace with the explosion of interest in American Spiritualism in the 1860s. Ouija itself wasn’t invented until 1890, when Charles Kennard of the Kennard Novelty Company, his business partner, Elijah Bond, and Bond’s sister-in-law, Helen Peters Nosworthy, were credited with its creation and naming. Nosworthy was a medium and claimed a spirit gave her the name Ouija for this device, which was actually a fusing of the planchette and another device for conversing with the beyond: a talking board.

All these, as well as spirit trumpets, pendulums, volo boards, psychographs, Daestu, Voodoo talking tables, and countless other devices are featured in the lavishly illustrated book, as well as adverts and flyers, and even machines designed to prove or debunk the mystical science behind these gadgets.

A Hudson Tuttle “Psychograph, or Dial Planchette,” circa 1880s Credit: Richard Whittaker

Many examples in the book come from Hodge’s ever-expanding collection, which was initially made up of vintage devices from the 19th and early 20th centuries. However, during the researching and writing of Supernatural Machines, he added more contemporary items. Now copies of Kreskin’s ESP (named after the famous mentalist the Amazing Kreskin) and 1990s glow-in-the-dark boards are part of that archive. But there are still items that he’s seeking, some that slipped through his fingers and he hopes will come on the market again. 

“I often kick myself because I was content so often to just save a picture on eBay,” he says. “I still have files on my computer and on my website that are old auction pictures of items that have never been seen again. Someone’s got it in a closet or on a shelf, and luckily some of them have rematerialized. 

“But some of the ones on my website, it pains me to think of just passing on them. It wasn’t even necessarily the price. I was just like, ‘Oh, I can’t buy everything.’ Turns out, you can try.”

He may have more competition in collecting than ever. The urge to prove there is something beyond this corporeal life becomes more common in times of national trauma and social anxiety. The Spiritualist movement was a response to the devastation of the American Civil War, and Hodge sees a similar trend now. “In times of despair, people turn back to magical thinking,” he says. “We’re seeing a surge, an uptick in interest in the occult, in astrology. Tarot readers on TikTok have never had it better.”

David Brandon Hodge hosts a special Supernatural Machines launch party on Oct. 28 at the Old Rock Store, 6266 US-290, featuring a pop-up museum and séance session at the historic and famously haunted building. RSVP at thenightowlpodcast.com.

He’ll also be a part of  A Séance at the Driskill on Oct. 30, presented by the First Spiritualist Church of Austin. Tickets and info at strangeextraordinaryfest.thundertix.com.

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