Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 December 1898 — “Professor” Boone the Hypnotist. [ARTICLE]

“Professor” Boone the Hypnotist.

“Prof.” Boone the hypnotist, gave his performance at the opera house last night, to a large audience. In the afternoon he made his blind-fold drive through the streets and successfully found a key cunningly secreted in the waterworks building, and in connection with the same feat, and still blind-folded found an unknown lock box in the post office, took from it a letter addressed to a business man, John Eger, and went and delivered ttie letter, and wrote Mr. Eger’s name, all, of course while heavily hood winked. These feats were in all respects like he did here a year before, and r•* * • » bct'iu itui cubugu Cu»\jb ui iXiiiithreading or “telepathy.” Previous to taking the carriage ride the “Prof.” gave a loug harangue in the streets in regard to his coming evening performance, and in which, by the way, he promised considerable that lie afterwards forgot to perform. Such, for instance, as imitating the Brahmin feat of making a mango tree grow from a seed, on the stage, and t>p <r .tod ripen fruit, and the other Hindoo hocus-pocus of sending a man up a rope and out of sight iu the air. The performance iu rue evening at the opera house included the usual absurd acts of a number of hypnotized kids, and, of their kind, gave several more very good specimens of mind-reading feats, such as finding a pin stuck in one wing of the stage and taking it and placing it in a previously made pin-hole in the opposite side. Also a very life-like representation of that cheerful spectacle, the beheading of Pearl Bryan; which would be a great deal better left out.

The poor devil Douglass was there again with a huge rock on the middle of his outstretched corpus and which rock Boone pounded hard with a sledge-ham-mer but could not break. In short it was a good enough hypnotic and telepathic performance, but at the best they are an uncanny, unwholesome and more or less disgusting style of entertainment, and no one should be sorry that they do not come oftener.