Talking to the dead: a history of Spiritualism

When you think of séances and Spiritualism, do spooky Victorians in candlelit scenarios spring to mind? Well, you might be surprised to learn that though founded in 1872, the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain still exists and offers private 30-minute sittings daily at 341 Queenstown Road, Battersea, London.

Furthermore, The Fraudulent Mediums Act only came about in 1951, making it illegal for people to pretend to act as spiritualistic mediums for money or other reward. While this act was repealed in April 2008, fraudulent mediums are now covered by The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, suggesting spiritualism and séances continue to be popular to this this day. The Spiritualist’s National Union has 11,500 subscribing members throughout the UK.

So what is Spiritualism?

Spiritualism is a system of belief based on the concept of communication with the dead, mostly through mediums – people who are able to contact the deceased.

Where did Spiritualism come from?

Well, there’s some truth to the spooky Victorians cliché. In 1848, the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York created a sensation when they were supposedly able to communicate with a spirit in their home through a series of knocking sounds. They even said the spirit belonged to a peddler who was buried in the basement. While tests in 1851 suggested that the sisters were in fact frauds, this didn’t slow down the rise in popularity of Spiritualism, and by the 1860s it had taken off, with a range of methods to communicate with the deceased available, including spirit photographs, lectures and séances that became increasingly sensational. They could involve ghosts materialising, messages writing themselves, and mediums excreting ‘ectoplasm’ – a gooey substance some believed to surround ghosts.

There were a number of societal reasons for this explosion in spiritual belief. There was a very high mortality rate during the Victorian period – approximately one in every three children born in 1800 did not make it to their fifth birthday. A large proportion of early believers in Spiritualism were women, and grief over the loss of their children may have been a cause.

There were also great strides being made in the scientific world, and Spiritualism was felt to combine both empirical methods and religious ideas of the afterlife.

So how did Spiritualism cross the pond?

You might call Spiritualism in the UK an American import. In 1852, Marla B Hayden arrived from Boston, spending a year in London, bringing her skills as a medium with her. For only a guinea per person, she passed on messages from spirits through table rappings and knocks. Through her work as a medium, a series of local mediums set themselves up throughout the country, holding séances for willing believers.

Spiritualism soon became fashionable throughout society – even Queen Victoria and her husband, Albert, hosted regular séances at Windsor Castle. Following the death of Victoria, her daughter continued to host séances at the palace to receive messages from her family on the other side. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an advocate, going so far as to say he hoped he would be remembered for his work on Spiritualism, rather than his celebrated novels.

“The physical basis of all psychic belief is that the soul is a complete duplicate of the body, resembling it in the smallest particular, although constructed in some far more tenuous material…At death, however, and under certain conditions in the course of life, the two divide and can be seen separately.”

- Arthur Conan Doyle,

The Vital Message, 1919

The first Spiritualist church in the UK opened in 1853 in Keighly in Yorkshire, and the first spiritualist newspaper, The Yorkshire Spiritual Telegraph, was published there two years later. The first national Spiritualist meeting in the UK was held in 1890.

Ouija – a brief history of the board

While the Ouija board often conjures up feelings of terror in users, the first was first actually created as nothing more than a popular parlour game, even used by children. Brought to the commercial market by business man Elijah Bond in 1890, the “wonderful talking board” promised “never-failing amusement and recreation for all the classes.”

William Fuld took over production of the game in 1901 and named it Ouija – the board apparently naming itself. Fuld’s family carried on the business until 1966, when they retired and sold it to Parker Brothers. Parker Brothers was sold to Hasbro in 1991, who still produce it to this day for a range of audiences, including children.

It wasn’t until the 1950s that concern grew around the possibility of channelling evil spirits, following reports of a boy known only as Roland Doe who became possessed by the devil after playing with his aunt’s spirit board. Roland’s story was eventually adapted into The Exorcist.

World War I and Spiritualism

While the Spiritualism movement lost some popularity in the early 20th century, the advent of World War I (WWI) saw a considerable resurgence that coincided with a great loss of faith in organised religion. With deaths on a scale never seen before, no one was untouched by the catastrophic effects of the new form of mass killings seen on the battlefields of WWI, with one million deaths attributed to the conflict across the British Empire. This was followed closely by the devastation of the Spanish Influenza epidemic that saw a huge loss of life across Europe, killing over 220,000 people in Britain alone.

In February 1920, the Bishop of Durham, Dr. Moule, addressed a congregation in Gateshead regarding ‘the growing popularity of spiritualism’:

“…in these desolating years many had lost those whom they loved, and were hungering for contact with them. This accounted in part for the great spread of spiritualistic beliefs and ideas.”

Britain was a population dealing with unprecedented loss. People were vulnerable to the comfort offered by Spiritualism, allowing them to believe fathers, sons, and husbands were still with them.

In January 1921, Lady Glenconner made contact with her eldest son, Edward Wyndham Tennant, known as ‘Bim,’ who was in the 4th Grenadier Guards and died in the Battle of the Somme. Using a series of ‘book-tests,’ Lady Glenconner then published her experiences in a book entitled The Earthen Vessel. The so-called ‘book tests’ were conducted under the auspices of ‘professional medium’ Mrs Gladys Osborne Leonard, in which, whilst she was in a trance and guided by the spirit of her great-great grandmother, inquirers were ‘directed…to passages in certain books.’ It was, apparently, ‘impossible for her to have known’ the position of these books.

It is clear that a collective sorrow following the enormous losses of WWI led to a resurgence in the popularity of Spiritualism as a comfort and solace to those left behind. In the late 1920s and early 1930s there were around one quarter of a million practising Spiritualists and some two thousand Spiritualist societies in the UK.

The last séance

It is possible to trace the decline in Spiritualism and the use of séances through the work of the great crime novelist, Agatha Christie, who saw the era to its close. Her earliest collections Poirot Investigates (1924), The Tuesday Club Murders (1932) and The Hound of Death (1933) show she had exposure to spiritualism and its practitioners.

While it would be only rarely that the ghostly would appear in her work after 1939, her 1946 work Taken at the Flood includes mention of a Madame Elvary, a medium who employs a Ouija board to produce a message from the dead, suggesting that in the wake of World War II Spiritualism found popularity again.

Spiritualism in popular culture

Séances have been very effective in capturing the popular imagination from Spiritualism’s inception, right up to the present day. Speaking of Agatha Christie, have you seen Kenneth Brannagh’s A Haunting in Venice, based on her novel Hallowe’en Party? It features a fantastically theatrical séance set in the 1940s.

The spooky and macabre have the perfect showcase at Halloween, including in recent children’s films such as The Haunted Mansion, Coco and The Book of Life. Mexico’s Day of the Dead and its iconography grows in popularity, with sugar skull masks and La Catrina skeletons often making appearances as Halloween party fancy dress. But the holiday offers Mexican families a connection to their deceased loved ones, leaving a place at the table for them to sit with them in the land of the living once a year on November 2nd.

Spiritualism and grief

While spiritualism may have taken off through its sensational characters and captured audiences with its showmanship, it is clear that a shared collective grief has at times led to finding solace through séances, and continues to this day.