Sunday, April 14th, 2024
4pm - 6pm ET
Starting Point: Grace Church, 802 Broadway, New York, NY, 10003

This walking tour, released in conjunction with the book Mortimer and the Witches, will Gide us through the bustling and elegant historically-rich streets of Union Square, Stuyvesant Square, and Gramercy Park. Mortimer Thomson, the journalist who wrote under the pseudonym, Q.K. Philander Doesticks, P.B. went undercover in 1857 to investigate and report on the fortune tellers of New York City’s tenements and slums.

When his articles were published in book form in 1858, they catalyzed a series of arrests that both scandalized and delighted the public. But Mortimer was guarding some secrets of his own, and in many ways, his own life paralleled the lives of the women he both visited and vilified.

On this tour, we will examine the lives of some of these marginalized fortune tellers while also detailing Thomson's peculiar and complicated biography. You will also learn of the fascinating relatives and friends who surrounded him, including the Prince of Wales, his mother-in-law, Fanny Fern, who was the highest paid columnist of her time, and his daughter Ethel who would later become a famous children’s book author.

Marie Carter "Marie Carter was born in Scotland and has been based in New York City for the last twenty-three years. Fascinated by New York City’s macabre and little-known histories in her writing and life, she is a licensed tour guide, as well as researcher and developer with Boroughs of the Dead, a walking tour company that specializes in strange, macabre, and ghostly walking tours of New York City. Her first book, based on her experiences in learning trapeze, The Trapeze Diaries, was published by Hanging Loose Press. Her novel Holly’s Hurricane was published in 2018 and was a finalist for the 2019 Montaigne Medal.