Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,513
By This is the grave of Dixie Haygood.
Born in 1861 in Milledgeville, Georgia, Haygood became one of the most famous magicians of the late 19th and early 20th century. I couldn’t find a ton out about her childhood. But in 1884, she saw the magician Lulu Hurst perform. Hurst was also from Georgia and her bit was acts of unbelievable physical strength, which were of course all tricks. She was fascinated. At this time, she was married. In fact, she had been married at the age of 17 to a man in law enforcement. She had three kids. She didn’t do much with her fascination over Hurst’s act at first. But in 1886, her husband was shot and killed during an argument. Evidently, it wasn’t her, nor do I think it was in the line of duty. Whatever the cause, she now had to support her children as a single mother. You would not think that magic was going to be a smart call here, but amazingly, it worked out for her.
Haygood started studying Hurst more and figured out some of the tricks. The Georgia Wonder was quite skilled and Haygood wanted to be her. Like her inspiration, she became known for her physical “strength,” lifting large objects, men, etc. Unlike Hurst, she was a tiny woman so audiences were even more impressed. She was also, as one probably needed to be to survive in this racket, a huge grifter. She pushed her physical healing powers at the same time. Everyone basically knew all of this was absurd. As her popularity grew from her time on the road, it got more attention. There were plenty of news articles talking about the tricks that made this kind of lifting possible. But audiences didn’t care. When did bad reviews hurt a show like this? The people kept coming. In fact, Haygood became known as the Georgia Wonder herself.
By the 1890s, Haygood took her act to Europe. I would have thought a name like Dixie Haygood would be pretty good for the stage, but she developed her own stage name of Annie Abbott. Guess that sticks in the head. She was there for a couple of years. Originally, it was a 6 week contract to work in London, but she became so popular over there that she went across the continent. And this was no little thing either. She performed for multiple monarchs, including Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor Franz Joseph I, and Tsar Alexander III. Now, evidently what Haygood understood was leverage. She wasn’t even a very strong woman. But she figured out how to use the body in interesting ways to do things that it shouldn’t be able to do. But of course that’s not how she played it. She stated it was a mystery, or “The Great Unknown,” as she liked to call it. That pretty well fits late 19th century culture, not only in the U.S, but in Europe. This was an era of mysteries. This was the era of people actually buying hook, line, and sinker that people knocking under their tables and making weird body noises was actually the dead communicating with you. So it isn’t overly shocking that people would be taken in by this.
And again, it’s not like skeptics weren’t pointing all this out at the time. It took about 5 minutes for a reporter to London to write about how all of Haygood’s methods were ridiculous. But the audiences didn’t care. As for Harry Houdini, the genuine king of tricks, he thought she was pretty good at it. He didn’t respect it all that much. But he granted that she was a good entertainer and certainly better than most.
Here’s a poster from her time in England.
Haygood had a good long career before finally coming back to Georgia. She died in Macon in 1915. She was only 54 years old and I am not sure of the cause of death.
Dixie Haygood is buried in Memory Hill Cemetery, Milledgeville, Georgia.
If you would like this series to visit other magicians or other such tricksters, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Harry Sargent, who was huge for awhile after the Civil War, ended up in England and is buried at Leeds, so I guess that doesn’t work, though I could combine such a trip with seeing where The Who played their great live album if anyone wants to drop me $1000…..In the real world, John Scarne is in Fort Lee, New Jersey and Milbourne Christopher is in Parkville, Maryland. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.