About
Full time. Thirty‑nine states. Thousands of shows, for ten people and for three hundred.
The Arcane Parlor is my company. Under it there are two things.
The Séance Collection is three finished séance pieces — Gurnsey Hollow, Spirits of the Titanic and Operation Sanguinum — plus a fourth built from scratch for hosts whose evening already has a story attached.
Murder By Magic is the other thing entirely: a comic whodunit for ten people in a living room or three hundred at a banquet. It's the show I've performed most, over the longest stretch of time.
I want to be straight about this because the séance business often isn't.
I don't claim to contact the dead. I don't read your guests' futures, and I won't tell anybody that what happened in the room was supernatural. What I do is theater — the same thing the Victorians were doing when they invented most of this, in parlors, for entertainment, knowing full well it was a show, and loving every minute of it.
Being honest about it makes the evening better. Nobody in the room has to defend a position.
They can just sit there and let it happen — and then argue about it afterward, which is the entire point.
Before the séances there were twenty years of corporate rooms: General Motors, United Airlines, Bank of America, US Foodservice, Foot Locker, and several hundred companies whose names you wouldn't recognize but whose banquets were exactly the same.
That's where Murder By Magic comes from, and it's why I'm relaxed about a three‑hundred‑seat ballroom with a bad sound system and a cash bar at the back. I've worked that room many times. I bring my own PA now.
I'm based in Niagara Falls, New York. Most weekends that's Western New York — Buffalo, Rochester, the Southern Tier, and down into the Finger Lakes.
Beyond that I'm regularly in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Connecticut and Massachusetts, and I've performed in thirty‑nine states. If your date is worth the trip, ask — the worst that happens is I say the travel doesn't make sense and we leave it there.
Usually within a few hours. If I'm on a plane it'll be that evening, but you won't be left wondering.
Date, headcount, where you are, what kind of room. A show forty minutes away and one five hours away aren't the same job, and I'd rather give you an exact price than a range.
If your event isn't right for any of this, I'll say so in an email rather than in your living room. It happens a few times a year and nobody has ever minded.
A plain one. What show, what time, what I need, what you're paying. Nothing in it will surprise you.
If your guests don't enjoy it, you don't pay. Twenty‑five years, and nobody has ever taken me up on it.
