We all know there is something magical about being Welsh. But over the years, some of Wales' finest sorcerers and illusionists have taken this further and achieved fame by sharing their jaw-dropping talents with the world.
Caernarfon's Ivor Parry, better known as Rovi, was part of the prestigious Inner Magic Circle and is regarded as one of the most legendary British magicians ever thanks to his astonishing card tricks. More recently, Welsh magic has captured the imagination of the public through shows like Britain's Got Talent, with Aberdare father and son act James and Dylan Piper leaving the judges stunned while escapologist Jonathan Goodwin has wowed audiences by being hanged, buried alive and burned at the stake.
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One 20th century Welshman, however, is not remembered so fondly for his supposedly supernatural abilities. While he, admittedly, did not claim to be a magician, spiritualist Colin Evans drew in huge crowds on the premise that he could levitate - with the help of the spirits.
However, unfortunately for Evans, and those who paid to see him, he was later discovered to be nothing but a fraud.
The spiritualist would routinely hold seances in large rooms and halls, in which he would attempt to communicate with the spirits, conveying messages from them and trying to demonstrate their existence through supernatural acts. He would request that the room was completely dark, with the audience sitting in pitch black around him, chanting as he attempted to contact the other side.
During one of these first seances, held at Wortley Hall in London's Finsbury Park in 1937, Evans took a flash-illuminated picture of himself allegedly 'levitating', claiming that the spirits in the hall had lifted him out of the chair he had been standing on. The audience was none the wiser, as in the instant of the blinding light, he could supposedly be seen levitating.
Many of those that had been sceptical prior to the stunt were now firm believers. To them, there was no other way to describe how, in that moment, Evans had been suspended high above the ground, with this seemingly backed up with photographic evidence, which showed his feet no longer touching the chair, with his body rigid and 'floating' in mid-air.
However, some of those previous sceptics remained sceptical, and were quick to notice that in all of the photos of Evans seemingly levitating, he was holding a cord that ran out of his left hand. With suspicions raised, it was also pointed out that in almost every photo, his feet seemed to be slightly blurred.
This was the case with a photograph taken by the Daily Mirror in 1938, with Evans permitting the newspaper to set up a camera in a pitch-black Conway Hall in London. The cord was, again, clearly visible, as he pressed a button at the end of the wire to turn on an infrared light and expose the photograph. So too were his blurred feet, with other magicians claiming that this was evidence that he had simply been jumping out of chairs, rather than being lifted by the spirits.
They were right. Evans was exposed as a fraud having been found to have jumped high into the air to fool audiences that something supernatural was at play, with the darkness helping to ensure that nobody could see what he was doing.
Weeks later, he performed the same trick to an audience in Regent's Park. However, it ended in disgrace, with the audience left unimpressed and forcing him to return money to those that had paid him.
Not much is known about what happened to Colin Evans after his humiliation. But, while it may not have been for the reasons he had hoped for, he has gone down in the history book as the man who tried to fool hundreds of people, but ended up looking like a fool himself.
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