Spiritualists wrapped themselves in glowing fabrics painted with radium to convince people they were ghosts

A closer look

In the ultimate combination of mystical grift and fatal scientific ignorance, fake mediums in the 1920s discovered a terrifying new prop. To create the illusion of glowing phantom spirits in a dark seance room, they smeared their robes (and sometimes their actual skin) with highly radioactive radium paint. They successfully convinced the audience that spirits were present, right before unknowingly giving themselves massive, lethal doses of radiation.