Mentalism, Comedy, Star Wars, & More!
Baltimore's relationship with magic goes back to 1787, when an Italian showman named Falconi set up shop at the Old Theater and charged 75 cents a seat to watch things that were inexplicable, and probably weren't. A crowd of 50,000 showed up on a Tuesday afternoon in 1916 to watch Houdini possibly f
The Blog of Poe's Magic Theatre at the Lord Baltimore Hotel
Issue 5 | May the 4th, 2026
Today is May the 4th, which means the internet is legally required to make the same pun it makes every year, and frankly, the pun has earned it. Star Wars Day exists because "May the Force be with you" sounds like "May the Fourth be with you," which is either a masterpiece of accidental wordplay or proof that the universe has a sense of humor and a very long setup time. Either way: may your midi-chlorians be high, your Kessel Runs short, and your evening involve something genuinely impossible happening on a stage at the Lord Baltimore Hotel. We can't promise lightsabers. We can promise that what Santiago does to your certainty on Friday night will feel about as explicable as the Force, and considerably harder to blame on George Lucas.
FEATURE: SANTIAGO WANTS INSIDE YOUR HEAD
This Friday and Saturday, a mentalist named Santiago takes the stage at Poe's Magic Theatre, and the show he is bringing has a title that is either a promise or a warning, depending on how comfortable you are with the idea that your mind is not entirely your own: Mysterious Connections.
Santiago has spent years working in what might be called the psychological end of the magic spectrum, which is a polite way of saying he is interested in deception, influence, and the surprising number of ways the human brain confidently arrives at wrong conclusions. The show is not a demonstration in the clinical sense. It is more immersive than that. More theatrical. The kind of experience where you walk in thinking you are watching something and walk out uncertain about the relationship between watching and being watched.
What sets this particular show apart from standard mentalism fare is the framing. Santiago is not interested in simply telling you what card you picked. He is interested in why you picked it, which is a meaningfully different question and a considerably more unsettling one if you sit with it long enough. Certainty, he seems to suggest, is a much flimsier thing than we treat it.
Mysterious Connections runs Friday May 8 and Saturday May 9, both at 8:00 PM at Poe's Magic Theatre inside the Lord Baltimore Hotel. General admission includes close-up magic before the show and a post-show meet. VIP tickets add priority seating and a 30-minute aftershow with exclusive illusions. Tickets at poesmagic.com.
This is one to book early. The VIP aftershow in particular tends to fill before anyone quite expects it to.
POE'S MAGIC THEATRE | UPCOMING SHOWS
Santiago's Mysterious Connections | Fri & Sat, May 8-9 | 8:00 PM
Santiago has spent years going deep into the psychology of deception, the mechanics of influence, and the strange places where certainty falls apart. Mysterious Connections is part theater, part quiet confrontation with how easily the mind is wrong. Your mind is the stage. He knows that. Get Tickets
Poe's Comedy Brunch | Sun, May 10 | 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Ja'Nai Clarise hosts Baltimore's monthly comedy brunch at the Lord Baltimore Hotel, and this one falls on Mother's Day, which makes it either a perfect outing or a very easy gift decision, depending on how you look at it. Comics who punch up, not down. Brunch plates. The historic ambiance of one of the great dining rooms in the city. Laughter pairs well with practically anything on the menu. Get Tickets
The Magic Showcase | Fri, May 15 | 8:00 PM
The best working magicians in the Mid-Atlantic, one stage, one night. The Showcase is what Poe's does when it isn't doing something with a specific headliner: it gathers the finest close-up and stage talent in the region and simply lets them work. Arrive early for close-up magic in the lobby. Get Tickets
Worlds Beyond Imagination Featuring TEO | Sat, May 16 | 8:00 PM
TEO brings what is best described as a nerdy adventure in magic. Smart, sharp, impossible to ignore. His show pulls from science fiction, fantasy, and the kinds of obsessions that turn into something genuinely theatrical when they hit a stage. Come early. The lobby magic is worth the trip alone. Get Tickets
Burlesque Brunch with Tapitha Kix & Charm City Burlesque | Sun, May 17 | 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Tapitha Kix and Charm City Burlesque take the LB Tavern stage for a brunch that does not require explaining to anyone who has attended before. Bold, confident, and stylish. Get Tickets
Magic Among Friends with Chuck Thomas | Sat, May 23 | 8:00 PM
Chuck Thomas brings a warmth to the stage that makes magic feel like something personal rather than a demonstration. This is not the kind of show you watch from a distance. It is the kind that happens around you. One of the better evenings Poe's has on the calendar this month. Get Tickets
Vince Wilson: The Paranormalist | Fri, May 29 | 8:00 PM
Your host and the director of Poe's Magic Theatre takes the stage for an evening of mentalism, strange stories, and the kinds of experiences that are genuinely difficult to explain afterward. The show draws from Baltimore history, Poe's mythology, and the peculiar folklore of this part of the world. VIP tickets include a 30-minute aftershow. Get Tickets
AT THE LORD BALTIMORE HOTEL
Drag Brunch LIVE! with Gizele Monae | Sun, May 24 | 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Baltimore's only exclusively live-vocals drag show returns to the LB Tavern. Gizele Monae is one of the DMV's top live-singing drag performers, and the show she and her company put on is genuinely unlike what you get anywhere else. No lip-syncing. Just the real thing. Get Tickets
The Lord Baltimore Hotel continues its tradition of hosting events that reward the kind of person who actually leaves the house on a Sunday morning. The full calendar is available at poesmagic.com/eventspage.
DOWNTOWN BALTIMORE | WHAT'S ON
May in downtown Baltimore tends to reward simply being outside. Camden Yards is in season, the Inner Harbor is shaking off whatever the winter did to it, and the kind of warm evening that makes city streets feel briefly like they belong to the people walking on them is now a regular feature rather than a surprise.
The Orioles are playing home games this week through Thursday (the Athletics, starting May 8) and again the following Monday through Wednesday against the Yankees. Camden Yards is one of the genuinely good ballparks in the country, which is worth saying plainly even when the Birds are sitting at 15-17 and looking slightly hesitant about the whole enterprise.
The Enoch Pratt Free Library's Central Branch continues to run programming worth attention for anyone in the region interested in Baltimore history, folklore, and the kinds of subjects that don't fit neatly into any one genre. Worth checking the calendar at prattlibrary.org if you haven't already.
BALTIMORE MAGIC HISTORY
On December 7, 1911, a small group of magicians gathered at the home of Arthur D. Gans in Baltimore and inaugurated the Demons Club of Baltimore. Gans, who worked as a Safety Agent for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and performed on the side as "the safety first magician," had been part of the earlier Society of Baltimore Magicians before it disintegrated. So they started over.
The Demons Club became part of a remarkable cluster of organized magic in early twentieth-century Baltimore. The Society of Osiris followed in 1923, founded by Thomas Worthington and formally incorporated in 1924. The Pyramid Magic Club appeared in 1925, the city's first all-boys conjuring organization, run by Ernest B. "Fes" Marx, a teacher at Baltimore City College who kept attendance records with the kind of rigor usually reserved for mandatory education. The story goes that you had to attend every meeting just to be admitted, which is exactly the kind of test that would have separated the serious ones from the curious ones very efficiently.
Howard Thurston, who retired as America's greatest magician at Ford's Theatre in Baltimore on May 16, 1908, passing the unofficial title to his successor, would have recognized the impulse. The organized magic society is not about secrets. It is about belonging to something that takes the work seriously, and Baltimore has been doing that, in various configurations, for well over a century now. Poe's Magic Club continues in that lineage. Whether or not any of them would have admitted it.
CFG BANK ARENA | COMING UP
The R&B Lovers Tour | Fri, May 8 | 8:00 PM
Keith Sweat, Joe, Dru Hill, and Ginuwine. All four of them. On one stage. In Baltimore. If you grew up on late-nineties R&B and this lineup doesn't make you feel something, there is probably no helping you. Tickets at cfgbankarena.com.
Hot Wheels Monster Trucks Live: Glow-N-Fire | Sat-Sun, May 30-31 | Multiple showtimes
The arena's May calendar closes with the complete sensory opposite of the R&B tour. Hot Wheels Monster Trucks Live returns for the Glow-N-Fire edition, with performances on both days. Excellent if you have children. Honestly not bad even if you don't.
Looking further ahead: Don Toliver comes June 2, Megan Moroney on June 5, 5 Seconds of Summer on June 7, and A$AP Rocky on June 8. Then Shakira on July 6 and Tame Impala on July 18-19, which is a genuinely impressive booking for any city.
SPORTS
The Baltimore Orioles are sitting at 15-17, which puts them third in the AL East and slightly behind where the more optimistic preseason projections had them. The rotation has been inconsistent. The offense has been inconsistent. This is, historically speaking, not an unfamiliar condition for a Baltimore baseball team in early May, though it does not make it more comfortable to watch.
This week they travel to Miami for a three-game set (May 5-7) before coming home to Camden Yards to host the Athletics (May 8-10) and then the Yankees (May 11-13). The Yankees are 21-11, which says something about the relative state of the division. The home stretch starting Friday is, diplomatically, an opportunity.
The Orioles broadcast on MASN and MASN+. Tickets through mlb.com/orioles.
LOCAL FOLKLORE | THE SNALLYGASTER'S SPRING
It is May, which means the Snallygaster is theoretically awake again.
The Snallygaster is Maryland's most extravagant cryptid, which is saying something in a state that also has Chessie, the Goatman, and Black Aggie. The Snallygaster is described variously as a dragon-chimera with the features of a bird and a reptile, sometimes with sharp teeth and tentacles, sometimes with a single enormous eye, always with a sound described as something between a baby crying and a woman screaming. The original name, brought over by German settlers to the Middletown Valley of western Maryland, was Schneller Geist. Fast Ghost. You can see how that became something else in the mouths of different generations.
The creature made its biggest cultural splash in 1909, when The Middletown Valley Register ran accounts of attacks near Braddock Heights and the story spread fast enough that Theodore Roosevelt allegedly considered canceling his African safari to come investigate. He did not. But the fact that anyone thought he might suggests how seriously the story was taken, at least briefly, by at least some people who should probably have known better.
What the Snallygaster represents, as with most regional cryptids if you look at them long enough, is less a question of zoology than of geography. Western Maryland is a different place than the coast or the city, and its folklore reflects that. The creature belongs to the hills and the old farmland and the roads that connect places that are not easy to get to. It shows up where the documented world gets thin. Which is, when you think about it, exactly where you would expect something like that to live.
The Snallygaster is alive in Maryland folklore. It is in print, in campfire stories, and in at least two craft beers that we are aware of. Whether it is alive in the Catoctin Mountains is a separate question, and the only honest answer is that nobody knows for certain, which is the condition in which folklore tends to do its best work.
The Purloined Dispatch is published every other Tuesday. Poe's Magic Club members receive it first. Subscribe or become a member at poesmagic.com.
The Purloined Dispatch publishes every other Tuesday at 9 a.m.
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