
By Pam Tice
In the spring of 1918, a year after the United States entered World War I, the Manhattan District Attorney initiated a special effort to arrest fortune tellers who were charging clients for dubious services. The fortune tellers claimed they could contact, via crystal ball or other conjuring skills, a client’s soldier son in the field to check on his well-being. Some even claimed they could guarantee (for a fee) a soldier’s safe return from war. Government officials considered this fraudulent behavior and, as such, it affected public morale during wartime. Quite a few of those arrested were operating on the Upper West Side.
Seances, palmistry, fortune-telling, and faith-healing were popular in Victorian England and had a following in the U.S. that grew during the Civil War, as people sought comfort from the trauma of the time. The uncertainty and brutality of World War I caused a new outpouring in Britain that soon spread to the United States.
Both countries passed laws that classified fortune-tellers as “vagrants,” and in New York state, they were labeled “disorderly persons,” along with prostitutes, gamblers, and others. Under the state’s Code of Criminal Procedure, they were labeled “persons pretending to tell fortunes,” as the law assumed that a future could not be foretold (though the law did not consider it a crime to tell fortunes purely for entertainment).
Eventually, arguments would be made that believing the future could be foretold was a religious belief that would be a protected right. But the law had not reached this point during the early years of the 20th century.
Since women were often both telling the fortunes as well as seeking them, the efforts to make arrests were led by a new group of female detectives working undercover in the New York City Police Department. They focused on fortune-tellers, as well as juvenile delinquency, street corner loafers, women gamblers, and white slavers. News accounts about the fortune-tellers arrested on the Upper West Side during the spring of 1918 all involved female detectives, who would pose as needy women looking for help finding information about a soldier serving overseas.
In May 1918, one of the undercover detectives visited Mrs. Aso-Neith Cochran on West 114th Street. The detective pretended to be concerned about the fate of a son in the Air Corps. Cochran’s home was referred to as a “temple in Harlem,” and Cochran was well-known for discovering a system of cryptogram numbers with “vibrations.” Cochran predicted the detective’s fictional son would be safe and collected a small fee. She was then arrested though soon released on bail.
At 902 West End Avenue, Olga Neidlinger of the Church of Nature’s Divine Revelations made her predictions through a medium known as “Willem.” Soon, she was in court supported by her aunt, the secretary of the same church. They asserted Willem’s spirit was genuine and offered to help the district attorney find other fortune tellers who were fakers.
On West 91st Street, John Hill, pastor of the Spiritual Church of Advanced Thought, was charged with disorderly conduct after two detectives attended his church service on May 3, 1918, where he “foretold future events” after a small fee had been collected from everyone attending the service.
Also popular, but not arrested during the 1918 crackdown, was Professor Bert Reese of West 99th Street, a well-known psychic who claimed he could read messages without seeing them. Reese had been arrested in 1915, but charges were dismissed when he argued that he was an entertainer, not a fortune-teller.

Perhaps the most significant case in 1918 was the one against Pierre A. Bernard, known as “Oom the Omnipotent,” of 662 West End Avenue. Born Perry A. Baker in Nebraska and renamed Peter Coon in San Francisco, Bernard was already known to the NYPD. In New York City, in 1910, he had been charged with assaulting two young women at the Tantric Order Lodge he had set up on the West Side at an address on West 74th Street. Although he had spent time in the Tombs, the victims disappeared before the trial was to start, and Bernard was released. He then set up his business on West 74th Street as the “Sanskrit College.”
The college is now recognized as the beginning of yoga practice in New York, but at the time detectives and local newspapers portrayed it as a shocking place. Men and women were dressed in tights and “bathing costumes” and said to be “just exercising.” Eventually, the place was closed because the New York state Board of Education determined Bernard had neither a required license nor degrees to run a “college.”
Bernard relocated his business to New Jersey but remained active on West End Avenue. Detective Ada Brady enrolled undercover in one of his classes there and pretended to be indoctrinated into the “cult.” On a night in early May 1918, when police raided, they learned participants had been charged $50 each to gaze into a crystal ball for information about their loved ones. Bernard was not there that evening, but subsequent news reports said police were hunting him. Two weeks later, a newspaper article about his West End Avenue location was particularly salacious in its description of what went on at the address. Printed materials found there “would have caused the hair of [anti-vice crusader] Anthony Comstock to stand up straight on his head,” the New York Herald reported.
By 1919, Bernard had relocated all of his operations to Nyack, New York, where he gained the support of Mrs. W.K. Vanderbilt and her two daughters. He married a dancer named Blanche de Vries and built a business at a country club offering instruction in Sanskrit, Vedic philosophy, and yoga, making it fashionable to the upper class. Today, he is written about as one of the founders of yoga in the United States.
Spiritualism is still strong on the Upper West Side, as one can tell from a quick Google search. Today’s state law, which dates from 1967, makes foretelling the future for a fee a misdemeanor but is usually prosecuted only when it is linked to a more serious crime.
Pam Tice is a member of the Bloomingdale Neighborhood History Group www.upperwestsidehistory.org.
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I was gonna say – there is a psychic practice on 91 st street. For years it was interestingly enough Miss Cleo. But since the summer or fall, the name on he signboard on 91st and Broadway has changed.
Very interesting. Particularly how views towards a practice can change over time. Is criminalizing it a way to restrict others from entering a soace that pulls followers or business from others or really in an effort to “protect” the community? I would love to see old laws that are no longer enforced to get removed from the books. If there is a genuine threat at play then craft a law that addresses the real issue vs carry unused laws that are only used selectively and as a cover to something else, like racism or discrimination. When we do that it undermines our justice system.
You wouldn’t love to see it if you were scammed out of thousands. They take advantage of the vulnerable at bad emotional times and rip them off.
What a fascinating article, Pam! I love how well researched it is!
Wow, what a fascinating story! Cheered to Pam Tice for writing it an to WSR for publishing it.
A psychic told me congestion pricing will not last very long, just sayin.
A fascinating history, thank you. Please consider editing the phrase “white slaver” and changing it to sex trafficker.
This tarot reader makes it very clear that I do not tell the future and that I am not a fortune teller.
To think we used to have some common sense laws that enforced. Those were the days.
Thanks for putting that together for us.
It is legal to be a psychic, but not a fortune teller. There is a difference, but almost all of the people in NYC are Roma practicing their scams as usual. First of all, if they were really psychic, they’d know it was illegal to chain their metal street signage to lampposts in the corner quadrants, which they do despite it being a sidewalk obstruction. If you want to learn about the NYPD’s 1930s to 1960s “Gypsy Squad,” read “Up in the Old Hotel” by Joseph Mitchell who extensively covered it for the New Yorker magazine. They are amazing pieces. Today it’s just called the Fraud Squad or Financial Crimes, but people are still arrested for duping folks out of as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s also politically incorrect to use the word gypsy, and the word is now Roma, as in Romanian, but it’s the same sects and same practices. I see a woman on the upper west side trying to rope people in, although I used to see her for 20 years on the #1 or #2-3 trains with a pillow under her blouse trying to beg for money for her pregnancy. Twenty years. When I saw her in recent times, I asked why all her fake kids weren’t taking care of her now.
Great book! Time for a re-reading.