Here's a writer with true range -- Tales Written During a Wet Summer, by the authoress of Tales Written During the Hard Frost of 1829.  This one's from 1831.

From Popular Mechanics, 1925.

"A spirit slate-writing experiment."  From Popular Mechanics, 1918.  This should be of interest: The Care & Feeding of a Spirit Board.

"The phone never rings for Jim."  From Popular Mechanics, 1926.

"A marvelous 'living skull' still has human power."  From a piece about the magician Joseffy in Popular Mechanics, 1909.

Done out of French.

Electricity as "this funny juice."  From Popular Mechanics, 1927.

"Held back by—what?"  From Popular Mechanics, 1927.

Some of the best discourses are in the form of skeletons.  By Charles Simeon, 1820.

"Machine produces vowel sounds."  From Popular Mechanics, 1907.  This recalls Webster's Dictionary of All-Vowel Words (can you guess how great a many there are? Scrabble, anyone?)

Do ghosts speak in all-vowel words?  Who better to know than someone named Vowles!  The Question of Apparitions and Supernatural Voices Considered by William Vowles, 1814.

Isn't it always the way?  My own paint question isn't covered in 739 Paint Questions Answered, 1904.

"The farther back you go in history, the more and more things fade into mythologies" (Osho).  To wit, The Gospel in the Stars, Or, Prímeval Astronomy by Joseph Augustus Seiss, 1882.

The ghastly thing standing in your window suggests that "lack of sleep may be the fault of your bed."  From Life, 1920.

When a reviewer took the presumptuous liberty of identifying our one-of-a-kind book on Astragalomancy as our own "feet of clay," we recalled that "Clown stilts have feet of sand to make walking easy."  From Popular Mechanics, 1925.

Here's the unglamorous explanation of the title Odd Moments; or Time Beguiled (1825).

Well, of course learned doctors of The Medical Standard sought to perform an autopsy on a Ouija board, to literally get an inside scoop.  But more fools they, as there is no "inside" to a Ouija board.  They found nothing and celebrated their own genius.  Sad.  From 1921.   See The Care & Feeding of a Spirit Board.

Here's some relationship outsourcing: "Hell Upon Earth" Made Heaven, or The Marriage Secrets of a Chicago Contractor as told to Rev. George Washington Savory, 1907.  See The Collected Lost Meanings of Wedlock.

The heir to castles in the air is one John Putkins, census-taker, as revealed in Putkins, Heir to Castles in the Air, A Comic Drama in One Act by William R. Emerson, 1871.

Here's the day science caught up to the age-old power of broomsticks, in Popular Mechanics, 1908.