Séances and Spiritualism: How Talking to the Dead Became a Movement

Modern Spiritualism has an unusually precise origin story. In March 1848, in a rented farmhouse in Hydesville, a hamlet in western New York, the Fox family was kept awake by knocking sounds. On the night of March 31, according to the family's account, the younger daughter, Kate, then about 11, snapped her fingers and challenged the noise to copy her, and it did. Her sister Margaret, known as Maggie and about 14, joined in, and the family worked out a code in which the raps answered questions. The raps were said to come from a peddler who had been murdered in the house.

Neighbors came to listen and word spread fast. The girls' much older sister, Leah, took charge of them, and on November 14, 1849, the sisters demonstrated the rappings before a paying audience at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, often described as the first public Spiritualist event. Within a few years, rapping, table tipping and trance speaking had spread across the United States, and mediums were holding séances in parlors from New England to the Midwest.

Spiritualism's central claim was that the dead survive and can communicate through sensitive people called mediums, and it offered something many people badly wanted: direct, personal evidence that a lost child, parent or spouse still existed. It arrived in an age of high child mortality, and then of the Civil War, which killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Mary Todd Lincoln, grieving for her son Willie, who died in the White House in 1862, invited mediums to hold séances there.

The movement had a radical side, too. It had no fixed creed or ordained clergy, and many of its most celebrated mediums and trance lecturers were women, who could speak in public about politics and religion when they spoke for the spirits. Historians such as Ann Braude have traced close ties between Spiritualism and the abolitionist and women's rights movements of the mid-1800s. It crossed to Britain in the 1850s, where séances became a fashionable pastime, and it enjoyed a second surge after the First World War, when the novelist Arthur Conan Doyle became its most famous advocate. Spiritualist churches and communities, such as Lily Dale in New York, founded in 1879, still exist today, and for their members Spiritualism is a religion, not a parlor game.

A typical nineteenth-century séance was held in a darkened or dimly lit room, with sitters around a table, often holding hands. Mediums produced a range of effects: raps on the table, the table tipping or turning, messages spelled out letter by letter, trance speech in a spirit's voice, writing that appeared on slates, and, in later decades, physical manifestations such as floating trumpets, glowing hands and ectoplasm, a substance said to stream from the medium's body. Spirit photographs, showing faint faces beside living sitters, became a business of their own.

Investigators showed that every one of these effects could be produced by trickery, and many individual mediums were caught. Ectoplasm photographed in good light turned out to be cloth, gauze or paper; spirit photographs were double exposures; slate-writing mediums were caught with slates prepared in advance. Darkness, the rule that sitters hold hands, and a curtained cabinet in which the medium sat out of sight made deception easier and checking harder. None of this proves that every medium was a conscious fraud, and some appear to have believed sincerely in what they did. But no physical effect from the séance room has ever been demonstrated under conditions that persuaded the scientific community it was genuine.

One of the first scientific tests was aimed at table turning, a craze in Britain in 1853 in which sitters rested their hands on a table until it began to rotate. The physicist Michael Faraday suspected the sitters were pushing it without knowing, and he built simple apparatus to find out, including layers of card placed under the sitters' hands that could slip against one another and so record whether the hands moved before the table did. The hands led. When he added an indicator that let sitters see their own push, the table stopped turning. Faraday published his conclusion in a letter to The Times in June 1853: the cause was an involuntary, unconscious muscular action by the sitters.

A year earlier the physiologist William Carpenter had given that kind of movement a name, ideomotor action: movement driven by an idea or expectation rather than a conscious decision. The ideomotor effect explains table turning, the swing of a dowser's pendulum and the glide of the pointer on a Ouija board, a device patented in the United States in 1891 and sold as a parlor game. Each sitter honestly feels the movement is coming from somewhere else, and that sincerity is what makes the effect so convincing.

The Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882 with the philosopher Henry Sidgwick as its first president, set out to study mediums and apparitions with scientific care. Its members included both believers and some of the movement's sharpest critics, and over the following decades its investigators exposed many mediums while arguing for years over a few who were never caught.

Magicians made especially effective investigators, because they knew how effects were produced. Harry Houdini, who as a young performer had staged fake séances himself, spent much of the 1920s exposing mediums' methods, published A Magician Among the Spirits in 1924, and served on a committee for Scientific American, which offered a prize to any medium who could produce genuine physical phenomena under test conditions. Its most serious candidate, the Boston medium Mina Crandon, known as Margery, was refused the prize in 1925 because the committee could not rule out trickery. Houdini had agreed a secret code with his wife, Bess, so that she could recognize a genuine message if he reached her after death. After he died in 1926 she held a séance every Halloween, the anniversary of his death, for ten years. At the last, in 1936, on the roof of a Hollywood hotel and carried live on radio, no message came, and she put out a candle she was said to have kept burning beside his photograph for a decade.

The sisters who started it all had hard later lives, marked by poverty and alcoholism. On October 21, 1888, Margaret Fox appeared on stage at the Academy of Music in New York, with Kate present, and told a crowd of about 2,000 that the rapping had been a trick from the beginning. Her signed confession was published the same day in the New York World. She said that as children they had begun by bumping an apple on a string to frighten their mother, and had then learned to make the raps by cracking the joints of their toes, and she demonstrated, producing raps that could be heard across the hall with her bare foot resting on a wooden stool.

Spiritualists pointed out that the sisters needed money and that the confession had reportedly been paid for. A year later, in November 1889, Margaret retracted it in a newspaper interview, saying she had been under pressure and in financial distress. Kate died in 1892 and Margaret in 1893. Skeptics regard the confession and the stage demonstration as decisive about the original raps; believers point to the retraction. Either way, the movement had long outgrown its founders, and by 1888 Spiritualism no longer depended on what had happened in Hydesville.