Much of the obsession with séances and communicating with the dead during the Victorian period came from the many scientific discoveries that were happening during the Victorian era. Up until the mid-1800’s most of the beliefs surrounding death and dying were tied to religion, but as scientific understanding and Darwin’s evolution theory gained popularity, these beliefs were challenged, and people attempted to incorporate science into religious beliefs.
With the amount of death around them, it was difficult for Victorians to think that there was no afterlife and that they would never see their loved ones again. This could explain the increased fascination with spiritualism, and their attempts to try to contact those from beyond the grave. Many saw the ability to communicate with those beyond the grave through a medium as tangible proof of an afterlife, which gave them comfort.
Many historians trace the start of the Spiritualism movement to two sisters living in New York, the Fox sisters. Margaret and Kate Fox were two teenage girls who, in April of 1848, claimed to have spoken to a ghost of a peddler that had been murdered in their home before they lived there. They claimed that the spirit communicated with them via a series of rapping sounds. Their parents, and neighbors were quickly convinced, and it was written about in the local newspaper. When their older sister Leah, who had moved out of the family home, heard about it she went home to investigate the supposed rappings. She quickly realized that her sisters were playing a trick, and even though Margaret and Kate admitted to their sister that they had figured out a way to crack their toes with no movement, yet allowing it to still be loud enough for it to sound like it was coming from another world. However, instead of exposing them, Leah quickly saw that it was a way to change the fortune of the Fox family. Leah quickly started charging for people to attend séances with her sisters, and soon they were performing séances to packed theaters. Quickly other people began claiming to having similar experiences and powers as the Fox sisters, and spiritualism quickly took off at a fever pitch.
Although the average person often enjoyed the séance, many notable people also believed in the power of a medium to connect them with their loved ones beyond the grave. Some of these notables are First ladies Mary Todd Lincoln and Jane Pierce. Queen Victoria apparently hired a medium to attempt to make contact with her dead husband Prince Albert. Inventor Thomas Edison, and prominent abolitionist and journalist William Lloyd Garrison were both proponents of spiritualism. In fact, many leading scientists also quickly became avid followers of spiritualism. This may seem odd to us at first, but remember all of the changes taking place in the Victorian world. In the 1840’s and 50’s, advances in science and technology seemed to be erasing the world that people knew. Railroads and the telegraph expanded the country, mass production and mass immigration was transforming the character of society, and Darwin’s theories were questioning the most basic assumptions about life and death. As science challenged the old sureties, spiritualism offered a way of clinging to the past; far from rejecting science and rational thinking, spiritualists believed they were on the cutting edge, using scientific methods to prove the existence of God and the afterlife. Americans struggled to see that here was anything more outlandish in spiritualism than in other scientific marvels that were transforming their world. The very sound of rapping echoed the sound of the new telegraph machines that, seemingly by magic, allowed people in New York to instantaneously communicate with people in Boston, Los Angeles, or even the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
As spiritualism grew in popularity, one of the most popular ways to connect with those beyond the grave was during a séance with a medium. Women were considered better mediums because they were thought to be more spiritual than men. Being a medium often gave women power that they normally would not have had in the Victorian era. Spiritualist culture held possibilities for attention, opportunity and status denied elsewhere. In certain circumstances it could also provide a means of circumventing rigid nineteenth class and gender norms. More importantly, it did so without mounting a direct attack on the status quo. Spiritualism had the potential, not always consciously realized, for subversion. Perhaps one of the greatest examples of this was the oldest Fox sister Leah. Before her sisters started their rapping’s, she had been a single mother, hampered by social restrictions that came with simply being born a female. Through spiritualism, she acquired wealth, social clout, and opportunities that usually would not have been afforded someone of her background. Over the next decades, she would become a venerable society lady, married to a Wall Street Banker.
The classic séance consists of a spiritualist or physic, several of her cohorts, a wooden table, perhaps a table with a cloth and crystal ball, and the loved ones trying to contact the great beyond. During séances, mediums received messages from departed loved ones, fell into trance like states, were taken over by entities, used props like Ouija boards or planchettes (for automatic writing) and even had spirits turn tables. However, mediums were clever in their methods, and these so called doings by spirits, were nothing more than the medium. Low light, apparently better for ghosts, helped conceal the true nature of the
con; total darkness was even better. Mediums encouraged the participants to keep their eyes close, allowing them to reach out and touch people ‘ghostly hands’, or even with their shows to create the illusion of levitation. Con artists produced a wide variety of gimmicks, including phantom knocking, painted balloons masquerading as ghosts, objects ‘floating’ around with the help of fishing lines, violins with weighted bow which appeared to play notes by themselves, or ‘phantom music’ from a hidden gramophone. At many séances, the medium would insist that the sitters actually examine their spirit cabinet to make sure that they had nothing hidden inside and no implements with which to carry out fraud. While this seemed to be a noteworthy effort to show that no fraud was being carried out, it was easily gotten around. One of the sitters in the séance would actually be a cohort of the medium and as the sitters are told to examine the cabinet, the cohort is the last one out and leaves behind the required tools. More sophisticated sitters would demand that the mediums be restrained in some way, perhaps by ropes or in their cabinets so that there would be no chance of them wandering about the séance room in the darkness. Of course, many mediums were known to be adept escape artists and so restraints were seldom effective. Other mediums offered the sitters to remain ‘hands on’ with them during the séance to “prove” that could not have caused the phenomenon that occurred. However, mediums typically had ways of getting themselves free of the hands holding them, without the attendees realizing it.
Through the later 1800's Spiritualism took over the country, with the number of Americans considered believers to be as high as 1-2 million people. However, with it's increasing popularity the expectations of spectators grew, causing mediums to be bolder with their interactions with spirits, and blurring the lines between reality and make believe.
In the fall of 1888, Maggie Fox would publicly admit that her spiritualism was a fraud, no more than a joke that was taken too far. Advocates blamed this confession on the fact that for some time, Maggie and Katy, had been slipping into alcoholism. Even though Maggie would recant her confession a year later, the damage to the credibility of the Fox sisters was done, and eventually they fell into obscurity. Katy died of end-stage alcoholism in July of 1892, and Maggie March of the following year.
Spiritualism would last well into the 1920’s using séances, mediums, spirit writing, and photography in order to communicate with or capture proof of ghosts. Belief in spiritualism varied from person to person. Some did it simply for entertainment, and some took it as gospel. One example of taking spiritualism too far that can be seen today is the Winchester Mystery House. Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester Rifle fortune, build the house, and kept on building it when a spiritualist informed her that she had to do so in order to appease the ghosts of people killed by her family’s guns. The San Jose California house would end up with seven floors, staircases to nowhere, 40 bedrooms, 47 fireplaces. The house is now a historic house museum the can be toured.
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