‘I hear dead people’: How the world went wild for talking to spirits 100 years ago
Séances and spiritualists grew popular across the United States and Europe in the 19th century despite the skeptics.
The desire to communicate with the dead is probably as old as human history. Ghosts played major roles in ancient cosmologies from Mesopotamia to Greece to China, but seeking out the counsel of the departed was outlawed in Judeo-Christian traditions: In several places in the Old Testament, consulting “mediums or necromancers” is expressly forbidden.
For millennia, accusations of communing with spirits could result in punishment and death, but that all changed in the 19th century when spiritualism exploded across the United States and Europe. The massive social and technological changes of the industrial revolution, the ravages of war, and the latest scientific advances all challenged traditional beliefs when it came to communication with the dead.
Sister swindlers?
The origins of modern spiritualism in the United States can be traced to Hydesville, New York. It was there in 1848, that Maggie Fox, age 14, and Kate, her 11-year-old sister, held séances that supposedly communicated with the spirit of a peddler murdered in the house five years before.
“If you are an injured spirit, manifest it by three raps,” would come the prompt from one sister, performing before one of their transfixed neighbors. Three knocks duly followed. After local demonstrations of their supposed powers, the Fox sisters went on a national tour whose popularity helped the spread of spiritualism across the U.S. and beyond.
This new form of "communication" with the dead captivated the public because it seemed to marry science with religion. Four years before the Fox sisters began pulling messages out of the air, telegraphs had begun sending messages along electrical wires via Morse code. The tapping messages sent from the dead during séances were portrayed by experts as the spiritual equivalent of electronic telegraphy. “Spiritualism attempted to align itself with the principles of ‘electrical science’ so as to distinguish mediumship from more ‘superstitious’ forms of mystical belief in previous centuries,” wrote Jeffrey Sconce in his 2000 book Haunted Media: Electronic Presence From Telegraphy to Television.
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Spirits in Europe
This “scientific religion” quickly gained followers. It soon spread to Britain, and from there, to the European continent. Believers ranged from rural dwellers to urban middle classes, to intellectuals, scientists, and aristocrats.
By the 1860s spiritualism was particularly popular in England and France. The Frenchman Allan Kardec developed a variation of spiritualism called “spiritism,” which was distinguished by a belief in reincarnation. His Spirits’ Book, published in 1857, was read widely, not only in France but by the 1870s and 1880s, throughout South America and Russia.
In America spiritualism experienced a boom with the Civil War as many of the bereaved turned to séances to contact fallen soldiers. According to one estimate, the war added two million new believers to the spiritualist movement. By the 1880s the movement had eight million adherents in the United States and Europe. In the first decade of the early 20th century, popular interest in spiritualism waned but was revitalized by the twin devastations of World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic.
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Mediums' messages
With no churches or formal organizations, spiritualism was practiced mostly in private settings. Many mediums created similar conditions for their séances, with participants sitting around a table in a dimly lit parlor. Attendees would often hold hands and then wait for signs of paranormal activity. These might be tapping sounds, a breeze on the back of the neck, ringing bells, or moving furniture. Mediums would try to establish contact with the spirit and ask if it was willing to appear.
Floatation devices
Spirits would manifest their messages in a variety of ways, according to accounts. Some employed a series of knocks to spell out words following special codes written on paper. Another method was psychography, or automatic writing: The medium’s hand would “unconsciously” write what the spirit wanted to communicate. In pneumatography, or direct writing, the spirit wrote messages without any intermediary.
Some spirits allegedly communicated through the mouth of a spiritualist. The most famous of these so-called trance mediums was the Bostonian Leonora Piper. Piper channeled the famous—including Johann Sebastian Bach—and the obscure, especially a mysterious Frenchman named Dr. Phinuit. Her voices elicited much scientific interest, led by American psychologist William James. In the end, James could not reach a firm conclusion about Piper, allowing for the possibility she could tap into a “cosmic consciousness” that might include spirits.
Interest in the spirit world even crossed over into the burgeoning world of photography. Some photographers claimed to be able to capture images of spirits while photographing the living. American photographer William Mumler is said to be the first person to capture a “spirit” in a photograph in the early 1860s. In one of his most famous photos, the “ghost” of Abraham Lincoln appears behind his wife Mary with his hands resting on her shoulders. Today it is believed he used a double exposure technique to superimpose the “ghost” onto images of his clients. In 1869 Mumler was charged with fraud but acquitted. The accusations ended his career, but spirit photography continued to be popular for decades.
Debunkers and skeptics
When spiritualism first emerged in the late 1840s, it attracted its fair share of skepticism. In the 1850s British scientist Michael Faraday debunked “table-turning”—an activity in which spirits supposedly moved, tilted, or rapped a table around which participants were seated. Faraday would covertly insulate the table so it could not be affected by so-called electrical or magnetic forces from the spirit world. He then demonstrated that movement was being generated where participants placed their hands, which strongly suggests that people were unconsciously affecting the table themselves, a phenomenon known as an ideomotor response.
Skeptics also demonstrated mediums’ manipulations: Dim light creates sensitivity to sound, and people under such circumstances become highly suggestible, especially when experiencing grief. The accumulation of such exposés partly prompted Maggie Fox to admit that her and her sister’s séances were a fraud. In 1888 Fox admitted that the rapping sounds were just the sisters’ cracking their knuckles and other joints.
Houdini exposes the trick
Perhaps the most sensational denunciation of spiritualism was put forward by American escape artist and illusionist Harry Houdini. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and an avid spiritualist, became friends with Houdini in 1920, and Lady Doyle, a practicing medium, claimed to be producing written messages from Houdini’s late mother. To Houdini, the letters sounded nothing like his beloved mother, and he publicly denounced spiritualism, which cost him Doyle’s friendship.
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Houdini became a dedicated debunker of psychics and mediums. His background as a magician gave him keen insight into the tricks of the trade, which he chronicled in his 1924 book, A Magician Among the Spirits. After Houdini’s death on October 31, 1926, his wife Bess practiced yearly Halloween séances to reach him. To weed out frauds, she and her husband created a secret code before his death to use if his spirit was able to reach out from the great beyond. Her séances continued for 10 years, but he never contacted her. Spiritualism’s popularity has greatly waned since the 1920s, but believers still linger, including those who still hold annual Halloween séances in the hopes of contacting Houdini.
