Talk:Ann O'Delia Diss Debar

Category change
Categories have been changed in accordance with the recent Arbitration on the paranormal, specifically 6a) Adequate framing, and Cultural artefacts.  Martinphi  (Talk Ψ Contribs) 21:07, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

From a 1934 newspaper article
http://www.daytonhistorybooks.com/tragicside.html There is, perhaps, a little more information about her last years here. It is from a 1934 newspaper, and details, inter alia, that she died in a "Cincinnati charitable institution" which the article suggests, but does not explicitly say, was a mental institution. She apparently had sunk into "melancholia." This was a few years after 1891, which does not jibe with the dates in the main article. But it does indicate the name "Ann Amelia Diss de Barr" and "Vera Ava", so I suppose it is the same person. Or perhaps after being institutionalized she emerged again, for another round of swindling. Anyway, thought it interesting.Hypercallipygian (talk) 08:22, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Messant and McGoon were two different men, and she was entitled to both last names, because she was legally married to both. They both died very shortly after she married them. Messant was a Frenchman, publishing a small newspaper in New York City. McGoon was - if I remember right, ill when she married him and not as rich as she had apparently believed. His family fought her on the inheritance Hypercallipygian (talk) 15:27, 10 October 2019 (UTC)

Another Article from the New York Times, August 28, 1909
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F10F17F63E5D12738DDDA10A94D0405B898CF1D3

This talks about her showing up again, and lecturing, etc. It is quite a bit of fun. Anyway, she was still going strong at that time, at the Mahatma Institute at 32 E. Thirty Third Street.Hypercallipygian (talk) 08:36, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Regarding Buggery Charge and Where She Was in 1909 and After
I can find no report that indicates either indictment or conviction of buggery. They seem to have been convicted of rape. There is a reference to buggery in a 2004 article but I suspect that the author was relying on wikipedia in reporting the charge. For instance, he follows wikipedia in saying she was last seen in Cincinnati in 1909, which appears in wiki, and which I have been able to find nowhere else but wikipedia. I have found newspaper reports showing her on vaudeville in New York on September 29, 1909 but nothing for Ohio that year - actually no report of anyone seeing her anywhere thereafter.

I suspect that she went to Toronto after New York, and died there. Ann O'Delia had been traveling with a man named David Livingston Mackay since her release from prison in England in 1906. She traveled with him to the U.S. from England after her release. (They came to take over a cult in Detroit and Windsor Canada which was part of the Holy Roll sect.) She disappears from the newspapers very shortly after he was deported to Canada in 1909, and is heard from no more.

In New York she had been working in concert with Mackay, Lillian Hobart French and Frances Belden at a place called the Mahatma Institude. (Whether by coincidence or not, the ages of Mrs. French and Mrs. Belden are the same as would be the ages of two daughters taken away from Mme. Diss Debar in New York after the Marsh trial in 1888.) Mrs. Belden is described in several of the news reports as the sister of Mrs. French and later as the wife of Mackay. In at least one 1909 report, a woman named Frances Wright is mentioned at the Mahatma Institute in New York, and I infer she is the same person as Frances Belden.

Frances C. Wright (which name I take to be an alias of Frances Belden) authored a book called "Woman's Divine Rights: or Key of David to Physical Immortality, A New Revelation" published by The Philadelphian Order in Toronto in 1910. (The New Revelation language had previously been used by French and Belden, and there is almost no doubt this is the same Frances Wright.) There were some newspaper discussions of the book in the Toronto Sunday World in January and February, 1911, and apparently "Frances C. Wright" had set up some sort of institute in Toronto. "Mrs. Wright, we understand, has established an institute at 27 Carlton-street, for the dissemination of her views, and where the book is to be had" David L. Mackay was involved with publishing, and in fact his deportation from the U.S. in 1909  had to do with a previous conviction on a pornography charge in Canada. It is pretty certain that Mackay and Mrs. Belden went to Canada and published books and set up another cultic institute at almost exactly the same time that Ann O'Delia disappeared. It is a natural inference that Ann O'Delia went with them to Toronto to help set up the cultic center.

Thereafter, I suspect she passed away in Toronto. There had never been a long period, after 1870, when Ann O'Delia had not been in the papers, yet she disappeared entirely from public view after September, 1909. Frank Dutton Jackson showed up in Toronto in 1913, after being paroled from Dartmoor. He immediately married a seventy-year-old woman he met there, whose name was Harriet Cadman Sharp (or Sharpe). Mrs. Sharpe was put in contact with Jackson by a couple whom she referred to as "the Mackays", who decamped to California shortly before Jackson arrived. I infer that these Mackays were David Livingston Mackay and Frances Belden (Frances C. Wright.) Frank Dutton Jackson published an autobiography in conjunction with David Livingston Mackay, in 1913 or 1914 which Jackson claimed was the cause of his estrangement from Mrs. Sharpe. See New York Tribune, March 27, 1914 Frank Dutton Jackson used the name Francis C. (for Cyril) Wright as an alias, as had Frances Belden. When he was arrested in Canada in 1914, Jackson was associated with something called the "Philadelphian Order of the Crystal Star" - the "Philadelphian Order" published the 1910 "Woman's Divine Rights" book. ("Philadelphian" is from a letter in the Book of Revelation which mentions the Key of David, has to do with immortality, etc.) Thus, Jackson almost certainly was a part of the Toronto operation, and if so must have known the status of Ann O'Delia in 1914. I could find no account of a divorce between Jackson and Ann O'Delia, though some of the genealogy sites suggest there was. I could find no newspaper report that Jackson was ever charged with bigamy, though Mrs. Sharpe brought civil and criminal actions against him for fraud in 1914, and had their marriage annulled. If Jackson hooked up with Ann O'Delia's group, but didn't find her, it seems likely she was dead. Thus, while it is not at all certain, the most likely course of events was that Ann O'Delia went to Toronto to rejoin David Livingston Mackay and Frances Belden after Mackay's deportation from the U.S., and died in Toronto sometime in between 1910 and 1913. (She would have been sixty-five in 1913.)

Of course, an alternative explanation would be that Ann O'Delia had learned her lesson. Previously when she showed up in the newspapers as Vera P. Ava, or as Elinor Mason, or as Veeda Thompson/A Diva Veed Ya, people would figure out who she was, and the operation would be destroyed. Maybe she learned to go totally incognito and disappear from public view. As to Jackson - marital vows meant nothing to him, and the Harriet Cadman Sharpe scam was just a matter of being a little rusty after all those years in jail. Ann O'Odelia had bobbed in weight from approximately 200 to approximately 300 pounds during her adult life, and perhaps in her sixties and seventies she dropped to a totally unremarkable weight and was not immediately recognizable. However, she did seem to love the spotlight, and staying under the radar seems contrary to her long-established character.

Periodically after the business with Mrs. Sharpe, Frank Dutton Jackson would show up in the papers claiming to be looking for Ann O'Delia, seeking her supposed fortunes inherited from Diss Debar and Luther Marsh. This had to be a scam, since he must have known that no such fortunes had been inherited. I found in a genealogy forum (which I have been unable to relocate) a story that Jackson and Ann O'Delia went to Australia and lived quietly there until she died of cancer. I seriously doubt this. First, they were separated between December 1901 and 1913 while Jackson was in prison. Second, Jackson remarried in 1913 or 1914, and continued to claim to be looking for Ann O'Delia well into the twenties. Third, Ann O'Delia seemed to have replaced Jackson by taking up with David Livingston Mackay, who was very like Jackson in age and roles in her schemes. (The relationship of Ann O'Delia with Jackson was bizarre - not a normal marital relationship, but something like thatwhich the madame of a brothel might have with a pimp.) Fourth, Jackson seems not to have given up the confidence games and settled down until much later than any probable life span of Ann Odelia. He died in 1948, in California, but was kicked out of India by the British government in 1926, presumably for some sort of confidence game.

Ann O'Delia was legally married to Paul Noel Messant. Messant was a type setter.( He was not a doctor. There is some possibility that Ann O'Delia had taken medical classes when she was young, and perhaps she and Messant had taken some sort of medical class together. But he was never a doctor, or an officer of the mental hospital to which she was committed in 1870-71 as most places report.)  Ann O'Delia may or may not have legally married Joseph H. Diss Debar. At one time she produced for a reporter an extract of record showing herself to be married to Joseph H. Diss Debar, though both denied being legally married during the 1888 trial. This could have been, however, because such a marriage would have been bigamous for Diss Debar - a more serious crime than that for which they were charged. She was legally married to William J. McGowan, marrying him immediately after being released from prison in Illinois in 1895. McGowan died in 1897. She legally married Frank Dutton Jackson in 1898. There really wasn't much time for her to have married anyone else. I found not news report, or public record of her having divorced Jackson.

I think the "Mrs. McGoon" reference was a mishearing of Mrs. McGowan.

I would be fascinated if someone could figure out how her father ended up in the U.S. Most places say he was a political refugee from the revolutions of 1848, but since she was born in 1849 in Kentucky, and she had an older brother who was six years older, that seems impossible. In 1869, around Christmas, she showed up in a hotel in Dayton looking for a guy she was involved with, and spun a tale that she was the child of a diplomat from Bavaria who had been stationed in Greece. At that time she spoke and read three languages fluently. My guess is those languages were French, German and English. At the 1888 trial, Ann O'Delia said that her father was Jewish. Her father died in Brooklyn in about 1861 - coincidentally very close to the same time as the death of Lola Montez, also in Brooklyn. Maybe they are interred in the same cemetery? Maybe those things are clues.

She was closely involved with Henry B. Foulke in a spiritualist/Theosophist adventure 1897 at Onset Bay. Foulke (about 35 at the time) was arrested and charged with pederasty, (actually the papers mention him abusing both six teen boys and two twelve year ol girls). Ann O'Delia tried to hustle up some bail for him. I wonder if the later sex-related scams in New Orleans, South Africa and London may not have been influenced by that experience. There was no suggestion in the papers of sexual misconduct in the New Eve cult scam in Detroit and Windsor, though that pattern of working in conjunction with a younger man appeared, with David Livingston Mackay being her protege there. And given that Mackay had been convicted on a pornography beef in Canada, perhaps there were sexual overtones to the New Eve/High Roll adventure as well, that merely failed to make the papers. Dr. Mary Adams testimony is reported as suggesting that the house in Cape Town was mobbed by soldiers due to the sexual activity there, though I don't really have any other source for that.

I wonder if anyone else has insights into her mental state. There are reports available on line from her commitment to a mental institution in 1870-71, which say she was faking mental illness at that time. But she seems to have had almost no concept of truth. There are fairly comprehenseive news reports of numerous court appearances by Ann O'Delia: a matter with Woodhull and Claffin in 1870; a complaint against her servant Katey Goley in 1881; a lunacy commitment proceeding she instituted against her landlord, Florence Mayo, in 1883; the Marsh trial in 1888; some folderol about a contract to appear on vaudeville in tights in 1889; the Irene Mitchell theft trial in 1893 (note she was charged with stealing some cash from a cash box, not with fraud); a trial in 1895 concerned a woman named Phebe Love and a dispute over rented premises; and of course the Theocratic Unity trial in London in 1901. She always interrupted in court shouting "liar" etc. and told outrageous and transparent lies without the slightest compunction. She attacked witnesses, for instance asking the never-married Ms. Love if it wasn't true that her husband was in prison, or asking Dr. Mary Adams in the 1901 matter if it were not true that Dr. Adams had poisoned her husband, both of which were totally without foundation. (Of course, in the 1888 trial, there were rumors that Ann O'Delia had poisoned a man named Loewenhertz, for whom she had "borrowed" paintings and that may have planted the latter idea.) She also recurrently claimed that she was being conspired against by the Catholics, or by the Koreshan Unity, etc. She clung to the story of being the child of Lola Montez for decades, though it was risible. (Interestingly, in 1909 she claimed that she never said she was the child of Lola Montez and Ludwig.)  The various claims in court seem so unbelievable that a true sociopath would have come up with something more plausible.

She was apparently a very attractive young woman in 1869 and 1870, of a healthy weight - plump but pleasingly so, not at all obese. She is described as obese later. Her first child was born in 1873 and her second in late 1879 or early 1880, and maybe that has something to do with it. After 1880 she is almost always described as very obese. Does anyone, though, know of a glandular condition or other disease which would cause a person to both put on a huge amount of weight, and at the same time exhibit an enormous, restless energy? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hypercallipygian (talk • contribs) 23:22, 23 December 2010 (UTC). Her father, John Salomon, had complicity of some sort in the first post-Napoleonic terrorist killing, Kotzebue's, according to two pre-1870 accounts, Googleable under keywords "John B. Newman  Prof. Salomon advertisement," & "Brachmann Salomon Nordhausen ."