TL;DR: This is not a breakdown of Timeless S1E11 "The World's Columbian Exposition" (original release date 1/16/2017) because They crammed a lot of shit into it without a theme. Some of the references appear purposeful. We’ll uncram a few and you can take away what you like.

Our time traveling heroes return to the Chicago World's Fair, known more formally as the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Way beyond the scope of even the Salem Witches, I have come to subscribe to the theory that the world’s fairs were—among many other techniques—used to annihilate the remains and even memory of the Tartarian Empire after a global war spanning the 19th Century. None of the action takes place in the fair itself and we won’t talk about it here.

The episode should more rightly have been called, “Murder Castle”. Seriously, if you want to attract viewers, does “exposition” or “murder castle” seem catchier? You see, the episode mostly takes place in a hotel purpose-built for serial killing by “The Devil in the White City”, H. H. Holmes (1861-1896).

Some necessary context: There are two categories of serial killing-type things going on in the world. One type is real and They don’t want you to know about them. That would include “Missing 411”, black serial killers, Satanic sacrifices, and the very disturbing and puzzling “Smiley Face Murders”. The other type is fake and They want you to “know” all about them. Holmes is of the second type. A standard reference work on Holmes comes from our standard reference disinformation agent:

H. H. Holmes: America's First Fake Serial Killer (Miles Mathis 11/12/2018 13-page PDF)

Mathis shows the whole affair is phony but his work is a form of limited hangout. Decide for yourself whether this is incredibly subtly constructed disinfo or if the “Mathis” writing team is just not as good as you are led to believe. For a master of genealogy, a very very very long writeup ends the shocking news that Holmes was a crypto-Jew! I found only a handful of snippets even close to relevant:

Yes, Mudgett was related to Oliver Wendell Holmes. Through his grandmother, Oliver descended from Massachusetts Governor Simon Bradstreet and his wife, poet Anne Bradstreet, who was the daughter of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Dudley…. (Holmes was a Winthrop….)…. A look at some of its earliest alumni confrms that Holmes was related to all the top families: [blah blah blah big impressive list]; Thomas Coffin (Idaho congressman);….

Let’s break all that down. Mathis actually gives you this link to Famous Kin of Dr. H. H. Holmes: Serial Killer aka “Devil in the White City” and suggests you study it. He knows no one will. We will.

TBH, I don’t think the writing team itself had much idea what they were looking at. This was during the phase of “everybody is secretly a Jew and that’s all that’s important”. I’ll tell you what’s important, at least as I see it, in order of increasing importance.

Family Relationship of Dr. H. H. Holmes, 8th Great-grandson to Gov. John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: He was dead 40+ years before the Salem Witch Trials but a heavy hitter and his bloodline crops up occasionally. Did you know there’s a Winthrop Rockefeller?

Family Relationship of Dr. H. H. Holmes, 7th Great-grandson to Gov. Thomas Dudley: Another early heavy hitter, including being one of the founders of Harvard University and Cambridge, Massachusetts itself. They purposely obfuscate these things, so you should know that the President and Fellows of Harvard College:

… also called the Harvard Corporation or just the Corporation, is the smaller and more powerful of Harvard University's two governing boards. It refers to itself as the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere. At full capacity, as of 2024, the corporation consists of twelve fellows as well as the president of Harvard University, for a total of thirteen members.

We’re down to one dinner party calling the shots. We back up further to find in the History of Harvard University, the caption for one of the images tell us:

The Harvard Corporation's charter was granted in 1650 by Governor Thomas Dudley.

The guy that authorized the whole deal almost four centuries ago. Can you understand why I just SMH in disappointment when conspiracy theorists wet their pants over a picture of Jeffrey Epstein wearing a Harvard sweatshirt?

Back at that excerpt, Mathis mentioned Simon Bradstreet, Gov of MA, and his wife Anne, a “poet”. More pertinent: their son, Dudley Bradstreet (1648-1702), and daughter-in-law, Anne Wood Price Bradstreet (1650-1707), were directly involved in the SWTs. She was accused of witchcraft and he was a magistrate who declined to issue further arrest warrants. After that, both were accused of witchery and “fled the area”. Mathis did not mention that despite having written a paper on the SWTs three years previously. See why I insist that shitty research functions as its own form of disinfo?

Family Relationship of Dr. H. H. Holmes, 6th Great-grandson to Nathaniel Merrill (c1601 - 1654/5): Not long ago, I blew up the 2008 Financial Crisis in “’The Big Short’ should be retitled ‘The Big Financial Rape of the World by the Salem Witches’” (conspiracies.win 9/24/2025).

In that post I heavily suspected that Merrill, the financial company we all knew and despised, was in fact a Salem Witch operation. I was able to trace it back to Nathaniel Merrill, but no farther. Now we know to whom Nate was connected. Not even a surprise, is it?

Family Relationship of Dr. H. H. Holmes, 4th cousin 4 times removed to Lucretia (Coffin) Mott: This is a triple-header:

First, have you grown sick of all the Feminism shoved down our throats as a social engineering operation, and all the virtue signaling and righteous condemnation that comes with it? It was born back in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention, and one of the main organizers was—you knew it—Lucretia.

Second, how about this guy Mott that she married? I blew up the Motts a while back in a post called “Peek behind the Flint water crisis and you’ll find the Motts (oh, and they also run General Motors and maybe the state of Michigan)" (conspiracies.win 10/28/2024).

Third, the name Coffin always goes off like a blaring siren for me. Seriously, for a very long time before I discovered the Salem Witches, I was convinced that the real nefarious group were the proprietors of Nantucket Island. They turned out to be only the most important subset of the Salem Witches.

Just as a taste, the daughter of Tristram Coffin (1609-1681) married a guy named Nathaniel Starbuck. If you’re wondering what I know you’re wondering… yes. It is all way too much to get into here.

Myself having just written all that and you having just read all that, we really see what the “Miles Mathis” operation never expected us to see, don’t we? Okay, back to Timeless….

The caper that the villain/hero Flynn has planned is to smoke three primary members of Rittenhouse that are meeting at the World’s Fair: J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison. Naively, one might think this is the signal that the real people were really Salem Witches, right? Reasonable, but not true so far as I can tell.

For the sake of space, JPM=yes and Ford=no, but the most interesting story concerns Edison. Long story short which I’ve never written up: the Salem Witches ran Edison out of his own company. He was gone—not even holding stock in GE—after something like a year and a half. Guess who was running it? Charles A. Coffin. You can’t make this up!

On to Harry Houdini, who figures prominently in the episode. Is he a Salem Witch? Not so far as I can tell, not at all. He’s a Jew, but not crypto (sorry, Miles). I did stumble across something bizarre, though: all the photos of Harry and his wife, Wilhelmina Beatrice "Bess" Houdini (née Rahner), look like fakes. Who saw that coming?

There aren’t that many pictures and they’re pretty good fakes, to my eye. Also, as usual, you know for a fact that no one is looking to see if they’re fakes. Go ahead and search some up and I’ll give you a big, strange clue: when they’re together, they’re looking in different directions. It’s the oddest thing!

You’ll also see that there is no obvious physical interaction in the photos. What I mean, for example, is his hand isn’t wrapped around her tricep, it’s draped over her shoulder. There actually is one where both are looking at the camera and she is holding his head, but it’s the fakest one of all. Boringly, you can look at the light and shadows on their faces in all the pics and see they don’t match.

My only guess—because we need to have some fun guesses once in a while—is that Harry was gay, his marriage was phony, and the guy that was purportedly his brother and magic partner, Theodore Hardeen, was his “partner” partner.

Harry and Bess had no children, unusual at the time. Bess had one brother but Harry was one of seven. Also, they’re buried 35 miles away from each other. They claim it’s because her Catholic family refused to let her be buried in a Jewish cemetery. Perhaps. In any case, if it is mere happenstance that Houdini ended up featured in Timeless, then maybe it’s just that gayness is where you find it.

You may have already been wondering about what which may have been the most obvious question from the beginning: is bullshit serial killer H.H. Holmes related to fellow bullshit mass murderer James Holmes of the ludicrous Batman shootings in Aurora (part of Denver, one of the Salem Witch strongholds)? I mean, I think anyone reading this is going to think they must be related. I do too.

However, after bashing around the genealogical records which are available, what you’ll find is that there is a cloud of very suspicious smoke, and where there’s smoke, there is… in this case, a brick wall behind it.

The whole thing is so scrambled I won’t even bother going into it. Maybe one of these days I’ll get around to writing about Crazy Eyed Jimmy Holmes and document what I have found there. The mainstream admits his ancestry stretches back to the Mayflower. For shit’s sake, there was a Parker aboard, so you know it’s not just a bunch of English Taliban looking to be superstitious in a peaceful wilderness.

I hate to finish with a low note after “Houdini was gay”, so if you’re as tired as I am feel free to bail out. I’m going to push on because there was something that got under my skin….

One of the characters in the episode is Sophia Hayden. She was the first female architect to graduate from MIT and she designed one of the buildings at the World’s Fair (unless the Tartarians actually did, right?). And while she’s not mentioned in the show, Sophia had an architecture partner named Lois Howe.

Trapped with Sophia in the ol’ “Murder Castle” is a man who introduces himself as “George Henry”. Surprise!—it’s Holmes. You’ll see in his wiki that while HHH had a bunch of names, that was not one of them. Sophia says, “I can’t stop thinking about my father, how he’s waiting for me to come home and tell him all about my big trip.” Her father’s name was George Henry Hayden. WTF is this supposed to mean?

Sophia died in Winthrop, Massachusetts (see above) and Lois was born and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts (see above again). Could this all have something to do with Elizabeth Howe (1637-1692), "one of the accused; found guilty and executed"? Off we go on a genealogical adventure….

We can trace Lois Lilley Howe (1864 - 1964) only as far back as John How, I (1610 - 1680). Also consult his WikiTree page at John Howe (abt. 1620 - 1680). His parentage and birthdate are a matter of deep dispute.

Bottom-line: no one knows who his parents are, and I’ll take the 1610 date based on some of the positions he had later in life. Finally, note that he was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, just over the northern edge of Essex, origin of most of the Salem Witch families.

As for the witch, her name came from her husband, James How Jr (1633 - 1702). His grandfather was Robert Howe (bef. 1570 - aft. 1624). Note all the Parkers in the “Descendants” tab! More importantly, though, he had four children with hazy birthdates from “aft 1598” to “bef 25 Nov 1604”. Hazy birth locations as well—the last two unknown—but his second child was born in (you got it) Essex.

What I propose is that Robert could not keep it in his pants and had a late bastard, John How I. He got sent ahead separately to the New World to begin a New Life. That means witch Elizabeth and architect Lois are both direct descendants of horndog Robert. That would be the explanation for this whole weird angle shoehorned into the show.

Lotsa interesting stuff in an uninteresting show, huh? Thanks for reading!