Ormond McGill – Stage Hypnosis in Stanford and Bath, England

Ormond McGill was born in Palo Alto, California, in1913, the son of the city’s telephone manager. At a young age, McGill became interested in magic, and eventually took a correspondence course through the Tarbell Music School in Chicago while still in high school. After graduating from high school in 1931, he attended San Jose State, studying psychology, commercial art and advertising. He relates how his love affair with hypnosis was triggered as a university student when he saw a performance of a stage hypnotist named De Walzoa. Fascinated, McGill began reading books on the subject, and gradually started to incorporate a little bit of hypnosis into his magic shows. Eventually he began performing hypnosis shows as well. In the early days, he recalls, Palo Alto had a clause in its laws that prohibited gypsies from coming to Palo Alto, along with fortune tellers and hypnotists. He remained interested in magic, and soon began traveling as an assistant to “Mandu the Magician. Continuing his interest in stage hypnotism, in which volunteers from the audience are willingly hypnotized in the course of the performance, he continued to travel to wherever his jobs would take him. In addition to his career as a world-traveling magician and stage hypnotist, McGill was also a skilled hypnotherapist and a student of Eastern mysticism. He wrote somewhere between twenty-five and forty books (sources disagree on the total), including such titles as Grieve No More Beloved (about his afterlife contact with his deceased wife), Hypnotism and Mysticism in India, and his autobiography, The Amazing Life of Ormond McGill, “The Encyclopedia of Genuine Stage Hypnotism and a number of books with Hypnotist Tom Silver, two of which are The How To Book of Hypnotism and Hypnotism Training & Techniques Manual.