David Colburn

Every Wednesday after we send our pages to the printer, I take a dive into the past, courtesy of the Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub. I picked up the habit as a way of getting in touch with history in Ely and Tower. As a Kansas native, it gives me a better sense of what made this area tick a hundred years ago and how some themes still echo today.
Last week, in the Nov. 20, 1925 Ely Miner, an ad on page six jumped out at me. It touted an appearance of “the great Marjah, the greatest mental genius before the public.” He was billed as “Demonstrator of the occult. Psychic marvel of the age.” He promised to “name aloud and tell you every hope, fear, and ambition.” At least he didn’t call himself a “stable genius,” leaving that to another man and another century.
So, who the heck was Marjah? Quite a bold promise. “He sees all, he tells all.” This inquiring mind wanted to know, and through online newspapers and other digital resources, I was darned well going to find out.
Thus began a twisting, turning dive into the rabbit hole of 1920s vaudeville, a subject I’d never paid much attention to, but Marjah sucked me in hook, line, and sinker as if he’d known I was coming 100 years later. He sees all, so of course he knew. There just wasn’t anyone in Ely to ask him about it, otherwise the Miner would have reported it.
Researching old newspapers isn’t always easy. Between the Library of Congress, Newspapers.com, NewspaperArchive.com, and a handful of state digital collections, none are comprehensive and each has its quirks. My search leaned heavily on the first three, and lucky for me, two also included Canadian papers, which turned out to be critical.
The earliest appearance I found was Sandusky, Ohio, in 1919. “Marjah the Mystic” promised to put a woman to sleep in a candy store at 8 a.m. and wake her on a theater stage at 8 p.m. Sounds less mystical and more like a great excuse for a long nap. Maybe thin attendance convinced him to raise the stakes. A few nights later, he planned to “pass the full city current through the lady’s body” and perform bloodless surgery while the town’s physicians watched. After that, she surely deserved the trance. He did it twice more, then moved on to Lima.
In Lima, he ditched the stunts. His ads pictured him as a crystal gazer from India, because of course all Indian mystics come from Sandusky. He performed in Springfield and Cleveland, then crossed into Canada for shows in Windsor and Kitchener. In March, he moved on to Detroit for a longer engagement, where the local theater critic panned his act.
And then things got strange. Scheduled to appear next in Bay City, Mich., he sent word to the theater manager that he was gravely ill in a Chicago hospital and couldn’t make it. Two days later, who shows up as the headline act at the Pantages Theater in Minneapolis? Yes, Marjah. Miracle cure? Not likely. He ditched the small venue for his big shot on the Pantages vaudeville circuit, a group of theaters stretching across the U.S. and Canada.
Marjah spent about two months touring and headlining on the circuit, then struck out on his own again. His travels took him back to Canada, including popular shows in Brantford and Niagara Falls, followed by a hiatus in Hamilton. From there he made a triumphant return to Detroit in August 1920.
But at the same time Sandusky Marjah was wowing crowds in Detroit during that second visit, over 500 miles away in Cornwall, Ontario, a new manifestation of Marjah was being born. Vaudeville wasn’t shy about borrowing acts, and Sandusky Marjah must have seemed worth copying. Enter the Great Ovette, a well-known magician of the era, Joseph Ovette.
Cornwall was Ovette’s verifiable home base from the mid-1920s through the late 1930s, so it’s not a huge stretch to assume he lived there in 1920 and used his local theater to test his own Marjah, more frequently spelled Mar-Jah. A successful run in Ottawa followed, and just like that the world had dueling Indian mentalists.
Ovette’s ads often listed Ovette, Mar-Jah, and a Chinese magician on the same bill. The three performers, however, were all Ovette, at least in the early years. A clip from Billboard later revealed that A. N. Rossi joined Ovette to play Mar-Jah for five years starting in 1927.
The Marjahs worked separate circuits, with Sandusky Marjah primarily working the Midwest and Ovette working the East and Canada. Both sought contracts with newspapers and radio stations to answer questions from the public in addition to their theater work. Ovette included more stunts, such as driving a car blindfolded around city streets.
With the true name of Sandusky Marjah unknown, Ovette’s version became the more interesting story of the two, and in particular the man underneath the turban. A son of Italian immigrants who grew up in New York, a 10-cent book about magic got him hooked as a youngster. In his years in Cornwall, the Great Ovette delighted in doing shows for local groups and charities, and even birthday parties. He wrote over a dozen books about magic. Toward the end of his career, his most famous stunt was being hanged by the neck from a building while tied to a chair. The Cornwall paper had one of the best headlines ever about his preparation for the stunt, “Joseph Ovette practicing to hang himself; wife helps.” But back to Marjah.
With his focus on the Midwest, we can reasonably assume the Marjah who came to Ely was Sandusky Marjah, though there were possibly more Marjah clones by then. Having gotten his big break in Minnesota earlier, a return trip makes sense. His northern loop in 1925 also included Duluth, Hibbing, and Virginia.
If you’re an Ely native with deep roots, perhaps you’re a by-product of that 1925 visit. One of the most asked questions put to him in his events concerned marriage prospects, and an affirmative answer from Marjah may have been the gentle nudge your grandparents or great-grandparents needed to tie the knot.
There’s far more to the Marjah story than space allows here, yet there’s no story of Marjah in the online annals of vaudeville, at least none that I found. Given the thousands of vaudeville performers back then, that’s not surprising. Mentalist mystics were a dime a dozen. This is likely the most comprehensive piece you’ll ever read about someone, nay, someones named Marjah, all because a small-town editor with a love of historical mysteries spent far too much time chasing this one.