Communicating With the Dead
Seances – attempts to communicate with the spirits – were one of history’s more macabre pastimes. Beginning in the Victorian era, and through the 1920s, a rise in spiritualism led to an increased belief in the feasibility of communicating with the dead. So seances became a growth industry, with a proliferation of mediums claiming an ability to contact and speak with the spirits of the departed.
People have been trying to contact and communicate with the dead since the dawn of recorded history. Those claiming an ability to speak with the departed often elicit extreme reactions. Believers view them as offering comfort to the bereaved, while skeptics view them as despicable predators, exploiting the bereaved. The God of the Old Testament falls in the latter camp, expressly forbidding people from seeking out mediums in Leviticus.
The rise of Christianity caused mediums to nearly vanish for centuries, but they made a surprising comeback in the late 19th century. It was a period when religion and rationality, faith and science, were clashing as never before, and during which new ideas such as the theory of evolution were challenging bedrock religious assumptions. Against that backdrop, many of the religiously inclined turned to the supernatural for reassurance and comfort.
Mediums met that desire for the supernatural with popular performances that included ghostly materialization, ectoplasm, table rapping, and other spooky stuff. And people ate it up. Audiences ranged from big enough to fill huge theaters, eager for a spectacle, to small ones at intimate private gatherings of bereaved family members and friends, desperate to commune with a beloved departed.
Needless to say, the seances were either outright scams by cynical charlatans and con artists exploiting the gullible and the grieving, or pious fraud by spiritualists seeking to enhance faith in their belief by any means available. It started in Upstate New York, in 1848. There, two young girls, Maggie and Katie Fox, convinced their parents and neighbors that they could communicate with the dead, who answered questions with a series of knocks. Of course, the knocks were surreptitiously made by the little girls.
What began as a prank soon turned serious, when an older sister saw the potential for profits, and began booking her younger siblings for sessions with people willing to pay to communicate with their departed loved ones. The girls’ act took off, and soon young Maggie and Katie Fox were touring America. They kept it up for decades, during which other charlatans, seeing the Fox sisters’ success, jumped in on the act by claiming to be mediums themselves.
Finally, in 1888, a guilt stricken Maggie Fox decided to clear her conscience by confessing to the fraud. She followed that up by demonstrating to an audience just how she and her sister had produced the knocking, using her big toe against a poorly balanced stool. Surprisingly – or perhaps not so surprisingly – even after the con’s originator confessed that it was a con, and demonstrated how the con had been performed, the conned continued to believe in the con. Spiritualism and seances took a hit, but quickly rebounded and kept on trucking.