In the late 1900’s at the height of the Spiritualist movement, Huxley Auspex took his place among the movement’s elite by creating and ushering into the world the Auspicmoriscope. The fantastic claims of this invention were simple: the user looked into the eyepiece and turned the handle and the spirit realm became visible within the instrument’s view finder.
The instrument caused a stir among even the most hardened in the community and Auspex became a quick celebrity, embraced by the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He followed this rise to celebrity by creating a variety of variations on his original device, each offering claims more brilliant and fabled than the next. The final version of the auspicmoriscope was a heavy contraption that came complete with a strange scrying board and typewriter like letter box that was meant to allow the user to type in messages or relay the names of those they wished to contact. Auspex claimed the additions to the device allowed for better locating and displaying of those the viewer desired to see.
Though Auspex was a darling of the spiritualist movement and the auspicmoriscope one of its most valued tools, these things only served to make him a vocal point for the debunkers of the movement’s claims. Auspex even came under the wraith and dedicated attention of the infamous Harry Houdini, the renowned skeptic and revealer of spiritualist trickery. Houdini was one of the first to step up and proclaim Auspex’s invention nothing more than a charlatan’s tool and he sought every method and means to prove this theory. The problem was that the auspicmoriscope was not so easy to debunk and expose for the hoax it was seen to be. When most any viewer put their eyes to the eye piece, the simple fact was they did see a vision of this world as it was not seen through normal eyes. The darker shades of the shadows were highlighted and brought into deeper detail. The bright blue skies no longer looked as simple as they did on a spring day. And all too often thick vaporous forms seemed to dominate the viewfinder with no reasonable explanation as to why. What was more disturbing was how these vaporous forms seem to show more definition the longer one viewed them. Faces emerged and bodies slowly became outlined. Even those who were dead set on not seeing anything within these forms came away from the auspicmoriscope with the unsettling feeling that they had indeed viewed something other worldly.
The minor details of Auspex’s invention and its various forms are details better left to the history books detailing the history of Spiritualism, except that few mentions are ever actually made about Auspex and his place within that history. He was not removed from these histories simply because the auspicmoriscope was one of those strange instruments that lay in that iffy ground of being proven a fraud and proven real. He was removed because of the strange legend of one particular auspicmoriscope that came to haunt Auspex and cause him to be wiped from most spiritualist pages by the believer and naysayer alike.
Auspex hand crafted each of his auspicmoriscopes and was given to the desire to personally name each. The Asphodel auspicmoriscope was christened such after the name of an individual and not the flower, an individual he would never actually identify or speak of.
The Asphodel began its life in the typical fashion of Auspex’s auspicmoriscopes. It was unveiled at one of Willum Spiderworts’s (a noted spiritualist and alchemist) private parties and invitees were given first chance to take a turn and peer into the viewfinder and witness the spiritual realm. By all accounts, there were no recorded moments of unrest or moments of the unexpected fantastic with this unveiling. Viewers looked into the viewfinder and saw… well, by all accounts most queried later on said they saw very little in this particular auspicmoriscope as compared to the others they’d had benefit to look into. It was suggested that perhaps Auspex was finally losing his magical touch. This was later dispelled when his Bramble auspicmoriscope debuted to great reviews among the spiritualist community.
The Asphodel was soon sold into the realm of traveling curiosities and left to the life of either amazing or boring the average man. It found a home in a traveling tent of curiosities belonging to Clotbur Clover, the owner of a small seasonal carnival. Most individuals who offered up a penny to five cents (depending on the wealth of the town the carnival was visiting) saw nothing that struck them as fantastic. On a whole this auspicmoriscope, though one of the heralded inventions of the infamous Huxley Auspex, was little more than a fancy looking contraption to view the regular world with a few shadows brightened. But very little was said to be lurking within those brightened shadows.
It has never been fully substantiated where the legend of the Asphodel came into being. There was of course an individual given the honor of being claimed the first to experience the Asphodel’s strange properties, but as any writer of history knows there could have been many others who experienced similar events and simply kept those events to themselves.
Lottie Dittany was the first documented case of the Asphodel auspicmoriscope and its strange behavior. It was documented that when Miss Dittany first looked into the scope she was greeted with the same variety of highlighted shadows as others had claimed. However, the longer she looked the more the shadows vibrated and seemed to turn. Then she was presented with the apparition of a young woman who did not seem dead at all. In fact, she seemed to be struggling against death with all her might. The peril of her predicament came through the viewfinder and infected the hapless witness. Lottie was overwhelmed with the site of the young woman fighting against her death, which -as best Lottie could surmise- was an incident of drowning. The fear that the woman felt Lottie felt. The pain of her struggle and the slow lose of life to her body was also felt. Lottie stood at the Asphodel and looked upon the last moments of life as it led into death and felt every agonizing moment without her own body having to do anything more than empathize with the experience.
Miss Dittany was said to immediately fall into a panicked state of shock. She fell to the floor of the tent and jumped around as though convulsions had gripped her. She cried out to let her out from under the water, to let her breath, to take the hand from her throat that was holding her beneath the water and let her please come up for air. Miss Dittany had to be placed under a deep sleep to calm her. She had to be sedated in this fashion for many weeks to be kept from further outbursts of hysterics.
After the incident with the auspicmoriscope, Lottie Dittany never really recovered or was able to explain what she had seen. It was a suicide letter she left three years later that offered the only insight into her experience. She wrote:
Dear world, forgive me for my lack of strength but the haunting has become too much for me to bear. From the moment I looked into that cursed contraption of the charlatan Auspex I knew exactly how my life would end.
I witnessed the death of a young woman who was forcefully held under water till her life was no more. I felt first her disbelief that this event was happening to her. Then I felt her panic that came with the inability to draw breath. And when it became apparent that she would not escape this awful fate, I felt her fear and rage. I carried these things with me for a time greater than I could endure, somehow saturated with this knowledge that I would come to the same fate as this woman. Every night I dreamed about the killing hand holding me under that water. Sometimes it was the water of my bathing tub. Sometimes it was the cold water of the river creek near my mother’s house. But always the water.
As I know this is my fate, I have decided that I will meet it and put an end to these savage dreams. Please do not think me weak. My decision is quite sound. I have had to live with the knowledge that I can meet my fate once and be done with it, or I can be tormented by the impending knowledge of it and rehearse it night after agonizing night.
So I go to my death knowing it is by my own hand, but I leave this life with a warning as well. That vile inventor Huxley Auspex knows not what he tampers with as he creates these damned machines of his. He thinks he makes a device for us to spy on the ghosts that are around us day by day, but truly he makes machinery that allows the mortal’s eyes to bare witness to those things they are not meant to see. My death is on his head and if there is a murderer of my life to be named, make it his name that finds your lips. My only hope is that his dreaded machines either be destroyed or deeply lost within the earth where they belong. I hope my death haunts him as his machine has haunted me.
The spiritualist community was ready to attribute this to fluke or the ravings of a mad woman who choose a piece of their movement to attribute her insanity to. Time would prove this a false idea though. Other stories of a similar nature would come to life, each attributed to the once believed inferior Asphodel auspicmoriscope. Most would see nothing, but one viewer among the many would claim to witness the demise of another. Much like Lottie’s suicide note account, they would claim to see the death, to feel it and forever be haunted by it and the knowledge that they too would die this way. And one after the other the afflicted would indeed either die in the manner they witnessed, or bring upon this death themselves to end the constant night after night reliving of this prophesied death.
The Asphodel was lost for a time but was soon found at another dime tent of curiosities. It was renamed the Hemlock and her legend was openly flaunted for the public at large. The price of admission…
The Asphodel, taken from “Motifs” an encyclopedia of harmful sensations, by Etta Diem. The contents of this article are copyright 2008 Etta Diem, 519 Publishing, All Rights Reserved.
