Einstein attended one seance . . . spooky at a distance . . . sounds familiar:

Upton Sinclair had sent Einstein a copy of Mental Radio before his arrival in the US. Einstein was a great admirer of Sinclair’s previous, muckraking works and offered to write an open-minded, if ultimately non-committal, preface. The two became the closest of friends. Einstein wrote telegrams of support for the striking workers that Sinclair championed, and Sinclair provided Einstein with a break from celebrity and science, taking him to the cinema to see All Quiet on the Western Front, which had been banned in Germany as pacifist propaganda. Other than in the preface to Mental Radio, Einstein had never professed any kind of interest, let alone belief, in supernatural beings or extra-sensory powers. “Even if I saw a ghost,” he once said, “I wouldn’t believe it.” But Sinclair was excited by the prospect and thought that this was his best chance to convert Einstein to his cause. Count Roman Ostoja was a muscular, dark-eyed man who claimed to be a Polish aristocrat, although he was really from Cleveland, Ohio. He had been working the west coast under the stage name of Nostradamus and gained plaudits for being buried underground in a coffin for three hours. He claimed to have studied under “occult masters” in India and Tibet and had wowed Sinclair with his mind-reading. Nevertheless, Ostoja must have been slightly overawed by what was now suggested to him. Sinclair wanted Ostoja to conduct a seance at his house to which would be invited not only Einstein, but Richard Tolman, soon to be chief scientific adviser to the Manhattan Project, and Paul Epstein, Caltech’s professor of theoretical physics. When the evening came, Sinclair addressed the learned crowd, warning them not to panic. At a previous seance Ostoja had managed to levitate a table while in a trance. Helen Dukas, Einstein’s secretary, remembered being “frightened to death” by the proceedings. Ostoja went into a cataleptic trance and began mumbling incomprehensible words. Each of the guests was invited to ask him questions. Silence fell, the table shook, “and then,” remembered Dukas, “nothing happened.” Sinclair was distraught. He grumbled about “non-believers” being present at the table. Curiously enough, when Einstein was asked, years later, about his beliefs in the telepathic experiments of Dr JB Rhine, then studying parapsychology at Duke University, he stressed his scepticism in strictly scientific terms. All of Rhine’s experiments had reported that psi-forces did not decline with distance, unlike the four known forces of nature — gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. “This suggests to me a very strong indication that a non-recognized source of systematic errors may have been involved,” Einstein wrote. Indeed it was scientific fallacies such as these, rather than drawing room seances, that could most reliably send a shiver up Einstein’s spine. When he was confronted with seemingly illogical phenomena in quantum mechanics — where particles appear to communicate instantaneously with each other — he chose to label it in terms more suited to one of Sinclair’s seances as “spooky action-at- a-distance.”

The reknowned count from Cleveland, Count Roman Ostoja, was more likely using a series of cheats, gambits, and illusionist cons than any real mind reading. Sadly, there are still conmen using the same sets who are bilking millions out of folks looking for answers. One new twist is that a number of these folks are now using quantum physics terms to dress up their con claims.