History Detectives

A couple in Cincinnati acquired a peculiar phonograph at an antiques auction. The machine, labeled "PsychoPhone," included four grooved wax cylinders. The contributors think Thomas Edison invented the PsychoPhone to record messages from the afterlife. As early as the 1870s, Edison and other scientific minds explored psychic phenomena, believing every living being was made of atoms that could "remember" past lives. Did Edison make a machine to unlock the secrets of the dead? "History Detectives" host Gwendolyn Wright travels to the Thomas A.

St. Valentine's Day Massacre - HISTORY DETECTIVES stares down the barrel of a shotgun for clues that one of Al Capone's men fired it in a Chicago gang massacre that shocked the nation. The gun came to the contributor's family after it was handed down through two generations of prominent Chicago families. It's a Western Field single-barreled repeating action 12-guage shotgun. The barrel and the stock were once shortened just the way the Capone gang liked its guns: easy to conceal and with greater destructive force.

Sideshow Babies - A Colorado woman has a silver baby cup engraved "Patricia - 1933. A Century of Progress Chicago." She hopes this 1933 Chicago World's Fair souvenir can unlock the mystery of her mother's unusual start in life. Family lore holds that the Chicago Public Health Board took premature Patricia from her shoebox cradle at home and put her in an incubator at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair. Why were babies exhibited at the fair?

Tokyo Rose Recording - A HISTORY DETECTIVES viewer has a recording he thinks holds evidence used in the World War II treason trial of Iva Tugori, aka Tokyo Rose. Toguri was an American citizen who hosted a Japanese propaganda radio show broadcast to U.S. troops serving in the Pacific. These broadcasts were at the center of what was then the costliest trial in U.S. history. The viewer has never been able to play his oversized record, but family lore says it reveals the role his uncle played in this infamous show trial.

Amelia Earhart Plane - John Ott believes he may have a piece of Amelia Earhart's airplane, the missing Lockheed L-10E Electra in which she made her ill-fated around-the-world attempt. Ott says his grandfather served as a flight mechanic on the airfield in Honolulu where Earhart had a mishap on her first attempt at the flight. She crashed during takeoff, destroying the landing gear and damaging the right wing. Ott says his grandfather took a piece of the plane that came off during the accident and sent it to his mother as a souvenir.