“Authorities were agreed that the devastating blast signaled the long-threatened Red outrages,” the Times reported on its front page the day after, while an adjacent article followed the far weirder story of “Two Cards of Warning” sent by the former ninth-ranked men’s tennis player, Edwin Fischer, who had vaguely predicted the explosion to his friends.
Fischer, a seldom-employed 44-year-old sportsman from the Upper West Side, had picked both September 15 and 16 as likely days for the attack; he had also warned a groundskeeper at his tennis club and a stranger on a train and had told a Toronto bellboy that some millionaires were soon to get what they had coming. His brother-in-law, who caught up with him in Ontario after he had mysteriously fled, reported that Fischer had twice been committed to sanitariums but had nevertheless shown psychic powers for several years. Dr. Walter F. Prince, at the American Institute for Scientific Research, told reporters it was possible Fischer had received a “psychic tip” of the bomb plot, like “picking up a wireless message.”
