Thanks to the Fox sisters, Spiritualism was also born in that region of New York, known as the “burned-over district.” Upstate New York became a magnet for folks looking for new ways to find meaning in life. Communication with the dead was seen as proof of God.” Most Spiritualists talked about the moral or heavenly impulse behind the afterlife. If you could prove there was life after death, well, that changes the whole game. “It was a profound response to anxieties about God and whether there’s an afterlife. “At the moment of this crisis of faith that was happening all over the Western world, there was this incredible investment in ghost stories,” says Marlene Tromp, author of Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs, and Self-Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism. (From the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University) Rossington published a song about it, via sheet music. Spirit rapping was so popular, by 1853, T. People were becoming disillusioned with the church and, at the same time, felt suspicious of science. In the mid-1800s, the Western World was in flux as more and more scientific discoveries, like the theory of evolution, were undermining the biblical creation story, and by extension, the existence of God. As Mesmer’s medical theories were disproved, his techniques were adopted for spiritual healing purposes, and in 1843, James Braid, a follower of the late Mesmer, invented what we know of as hypnosis or mesmerism. In the century before, a German doctor by the name of Franz Anton Mesmer introduced the concept of “animal magnetism,” the theory that an invisible force or “magnetic fluid” flows through human and animal bodies. Spiritualism, simply defined as the belief that souls continue to exist after death and that it’s possible to talk to them, wasn’t born in a vacuum. These mediums were able to flagrantly violate strict Victorian social taboos and speak unpopular or radical opinions. (Courtesy of )Īs laypeople experimented with these devices at home, others turned to Spiritualist mediums, a job that eventually gave young women-who were thought to be so receptive to the divine they would come to embody the spirits themselves-power they couldn’t have dreamed of before. Then, pop culture comes along and goes, ‘Oh, look what they’re doing over here.’ And entrepreneurs with vision and foresight take these devices, market them, and suddenly, they become a huge parlor hit.”īrandon Hodge, the creator of, with his collection of Victorian spirt-communication devices. “The Spiritualists come up with these devices and use them to communicate with the dead. Hodge says that most spirit-communication concepts started out with serious religious intentions, but eventually got co-opted by popular culture as playthings or curiosities. And by the end of next year, Hodge, a former magician who owns Big Top Candy Shop and Monkey See, Monkey Do! toy store in Austin, Texas, hopes to put out the authoritative book on the subject, tentatively titled Talking Tables & Scribbling Spirits: A Complete History of Spirit Communication Tools, with his collaborator, Ouija board expert Robert Murch. It’s a particularly hot topic at the moment with the recent “Ouija” horror movie-which hinges on the “Ouija boards are evil” meme that makes Hodge cringe. Hodge is a collector of such devices, focusing on “planchettes” or writing tools that supposedly helped the spirits jot down their thoughts. But ingenious Victorians quickly started looking for ways to get the message faster, coming up with all sorts of means and devices to chat with the dead. In the emerging Spiritualist movement, new mediums, including the Fox sisters, started calling out the alphabet, letter by letter, to the rapping ghosts and thereby, spelling out words and sentences from beyond in an excruciatingly slow manner. And these raps would signal ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in a simple binary code.” In the earliest days, you would sit down with a medium at a table, and you would start asking questions out to the ether. “Suddenly, there were mediums everywhere. “Mediums sprang up overnight as word spread,” he continues. (WikiCommons) Top: An image of a ghost at a séance in the May 12, 1888, edition of “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.” (Via ) Above: Margaret, at left, and Kate Fox, with their much-older sister, Leah, right.
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