Peering into the History of Turn of the Century Spiritualism and Fraud

mooreacorrigan
Oct 20
3 min read

Curiosity #10

Originally posted on Substack, September 29, 2025

With October merely days away, I am delighted that this curiosity post will focus on another “spooky” subject: spiritualism!

I cannot remember the first time I was introduced to the concept of the living communicating from the dead. Fictional fortune tellers populate modern media—from Disney films to horror movies—and many of the motifs we associate with these figures originate with the rise of spiritualism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Crystal balls, special effects triggered by hidden wires or strings, and spooky sounds are all tricks of the spiritualist’s trade, as uncovered by legendary magician and fraud-hunter Harry Houdini. Although I was exposed to these things for my entire life, I did not understand the link with the spiritualism movement until I took a course on horror and mystery literature at my third year at Uni.

https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2020/10/houdini-and-the-spirit-realm-transcribe-hockleys-world-of-the-beyond/

So, what is spiritualism? According to Encyclopedia Britannica, it is “a movement beginning in the 19th century in America and Europe based on the belief that departed souls can interact with the living.”¹ In the wake of the Civil War and World War I, there was an understandable increase in the desire to connect with those who died with unfinished business. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle² of Sherlock Holmes fame was already inclined towards Spiritualism when he lost his son after the Battle of the Somme. From there, he became a prominent and vocal force in the movement.³

Unfortunately, the history of seances runs parallel with the history of fraud. The movement is often traced back to sisters Kate and Margaret Fox, who claimed to be in contact with the dead through mysterious rapping in their house in Upstate New York. It was later revealed that the rapping was coming from the girls toes, which they were able to click inside of their shoes in time to speak with the “spirits.”⁴ Conan Doyle would host seances, staring psychic mediums such as Eusapia Palladino, Mina Crandon, and Lily Loder Symonds, all of whom were later exposed as frauds.⁵ These seances Houdini and Doyle, once friends, fell out over their differing opinions regarding the supernatural.

It may seem silly to us now that an esteemed man with a medical degree would put so much stock into his belief of the supernatural, but we must take into account the era in which these men lived. General acceptance of germ theory was barely fifty years old, the first successful expedition to the North and South Poles happened in the late 1900s and the early 1910s, and new technologies were coming out at an unprecedented speed. If these new discoveries were being made by new technology, it was theoretically within the realm of possibility that the spiritual world might exist beside the living world, unseen due to insufficient tools.

That said, the tools that psychics and spiritualists used during this time period have not produced sufficient evidence of ghosts to prove that such a world exists.

Examples of such tools are:

Spirit boards, such as a Ouija board
Channeling through a medium
Crystal balls
Automatic writing
Table-turning (when people sitting around a table would feel it move in accordance with the alphabet)⁶

I do not mean to entirely discount these beliefs here. Belief in the supernatural is nothing to be ashamed of, and many people believe in ghosts, aliens, and other supernatural/paranormal phenomena (although I am a skeptic myself). It is fun to play in the world of the supernatural from the safety of our drawing rooms, but I do believe that there are many ways in which trusting people can be taken advantage of by bad actors, even in the modern day. I suggest taking a look at this Last Week Tonight segment where John Oliver looks deeper into the darker side of modern fraudulent psychics.