FORTUNE-TELLERS PREY ON IMPRESSIONABLE WOMEN

Taranaki Daily News, 8 September 1934, Page 15 (Supplement)

FORTUNE-TELLERS PREY ON IMPRESSIONABLE WOMEN

Dark Prophecies Drive Mother

To Her Death

‘T’HE scandal of the fortune-tellers x who prey on impressionable women was illustrated in an acute form by a story told at an inquest in London recently.. Mrs Isabella Baker, aged 30, of Grosvenor Buildings, Poplar, E., was a woman who believed in fortunetellers,, and shortly before the birth of her first baby she went to one. “You are going to have a bad future, and you will not be able to bring your child up,” she was told. The sequel was that Mrs Baker, who had been brooding on these dark prophecies, gassed herself. Her husband told the story at the inquest. “I cannot stand it any longer. . . I cannot bring the baby up. . . the cause of this is fortune-tellers,” his wife wrote to him before taking her life. Mrs Baker’s is not an isolated case. At the risk of heavy fines fortunetellers are flourishing, in the Old Country, many of them openly. During the past year or two, after a police campaign against them, they deemed it advisable to become less conspicuous. Many places in the cities where the “art” of crystal-gaz-ing, palm-reading, and card-telling was practised, were closed. It is apparent, however, that the fortune-tellers have decided that this is a safe time to emerge once more into the open. The scandal lies in the horrifying tales which are told to nervous and impressionable women. Filled with gloomy predictions on their future they often become victims of acute mental strain. The hundreds of families living

in Grosvenor Buildings are keenly distressed at the death of Mrs Baker. Some of the mental strain suffered by her through her belief in' the “bad” future prophesied for her was revealed by Mrs Marten, one of her neighbours. “She told me that the fortuneteller had prophesied the birth of a child after seven years of marriage,” Mrs Marten told a “Daily Mail” reporter. “When the forthcoming event

became certain, she was so impressed by the accuracy of this forecast that she believed all the terrible things she had been told. “When, after all, the baby was born, and it was a girl, which both she and her husband wanted, I felt sure she would be convinced that the prophecies were nonsense. She was very fond of children, and often stopped to play with my two. “Her death was on the first day up since the birth.”