Dan Snow's History Hit - A Short History of Seances

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

From their origins in necromancy to their ritualisation in the religion of Spiritualism, seances have long been a staple in the occultist's toolbelt. Purporting to call forth spirits and allow communication with the dead, they exploded in popularity in the nineteenth century, attracting great scientists, writers and thinkers to their cause. Dan is joined by Lisa Morton, an expert on Spiritualism and author of Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances to talk about where seances came from, what they mean, and the frauds behind them.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and Beth Donaldson and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History at this very spooky time of year. We're obviously doing some Halloween history podcasts, and this one is about seances, about mediums, about necromancy, talking to the dead. It's obviously a load of old nonsense, but it's got a long and important history, going all the way back to the ancient Greek myths of Homer and Odysseus, who I think cut the throat of a sheep or a goat he was travelling with and the warm, life-giving blood attracted in the spirits to death when he went down to Hades.

Anyway, ever since then we've been talking to the dead, asking them questions, hanging out because we miss them. We're bereaved. We want insights. Maybe we should try a bit of fun with a Ouija board and freaking out our friends in student house parties. In this episode, to learn more about seances and mediums, I'm talking to Lisa Morton. She's a screenwriter. She's an author. She is apparently a world-class Halloween and paranormal expert.

class Halloween and paranormal expert. She's written books about calling the spirits, about seances, and about the frauds that perpetrate them on their gullible, gullible clientele. So close the curtains, lights and candles, and get ready for a podcast in which we interrogate the dead to shine a light on the living. It's not a seance, folks. It's history. Enjoy. living. It's not a seance, folks. It's history. Enjoy. Lisa, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. I guess people have been talking to dead people since the beginning of people, right? We see it in the earliest myths. We see Odysseus going down chatting with his, did he meet his dad? I can't remember, but he goes down to the, he meets Tiresias, doesn't he, in the underworld. Talking to the dead is a big thing. Yes, and you did indeed nail that correctly. It is Tiresias. He's gone down to talk to this prophet

who he hopes will guide him home. And in the process of that, he calls up dozens of dead people. It doesn't quite go the way it was supposed to. And I guess the idea is the dead know more than we do, right? I mean, why are we interested historically in talking to dead people? Is it because we wish to see loved ones, or is it to gain knowledge? Both. In the past, when it was basically performed as necromancy, which was a form of magic, it was done for either reason. If you were a magician, you were usually doing it to find some sort of treasure. And it was a very involved ritual. It involved these incredibly arcane grimoires and going to certain places and using very strange

items. And it was essentially impossible, in other words. What about other cultures? Ancient Egypt. Talk to me about the kind of role that necromancy has played. Ancient Egypt had a very complicated belief system regarding the afterlife. And we don't have a lot of recorded information on how they might have talked to the dead. We have more from the Greeks and the Romans. And then, of course, from the whole medieval era. Of course, the Bible talks about necromancy in very bad terms. It was completely proscribed

in most of the situations in the Bible. And of course, we have the famous story of the witch of Endor, who Saul goes to consult, even though he has banned consulting witches. So the Catholic Church did not like necromancy, but did that stop it happening in the Middle Ages? It did not. And there were a number of these magical texts that were thought to be prominent in the Middle Ages, and some of them were actually based on biblical figures. King Solomon, for example, loaned his name to some of the most important of the magical texts that appeared during the Middle Ages, the Lesser Key of Solomon, the Greater Key of Solomon.

These are books which are primarily used to call forth and bind demons, although they could also be used to call forth a spirit. And that spirit in these texts would then reveal the location of a treasurer to the necromancer. There were a number of famous necromancers who arose during this period. Agrippa was one. Towards the end of the period, one of my favorites is Cagliostro. Cagliostro was thought to be an alchemist and a necromancer who traveled throughout Europe. He performed for major courts. traveled throughout Europe. He performed for major courts. He was repeatedly debunked even then, but I suspect he, again, was such a gifted performer that kings and queens and lords and so forth were dying to see him in action. And then, of course, there's also the story of John

Dee and Edward Kelly. Kelly was probably the more fraudulent of the two there. John Dee was a respected mathematician and was very interested in alchemy. He was probably taken in by Kelly. Again, they ended up touring and performing for the great kings and queens of Europe, but were eventually run out of the courts. And Kelly was imprisoned and ended up trying to escape from prison, dying in prison. Dee returned to London, but never quite had the same amount of respect that he had had before his adventures with Kelly. What about when we start coming to Ouija board and seances, you leave that kind of big word necromancy behind and you get to a sort of more modern understanding of talking with dead spirits, I suppose.

When does that transition occur? It's a very specific year, which is interesting. It's 1848 and the seance is an absolute mind-blowing event in terms of talking to the dead because it's the first time that people do it in a group. Before that, it had been a very solitary activity. It was always performed either by a magician or by one person who was seeking to communicate with the dead. And when you get to the seance, which comes about in 1848 after two teenage girls, Kate and Maggie Fox, have been addressing spirits in their farmhouse and people come to see this, it is completely new.

What happened after they had been talking to these spirits in their farmhouse was their older sister, Leah, who lived in Rochester, New York, which was not very far from their little farmhouse, brought them to stay with her and started charging for people to come in and participate in these seances. And they were held around Leah's big dining room table. And they were situations where a group of people gathered with these girls acting as mediums with the very specific intent of communicating with the dead. And that was really the first time in recorded human history that we know of that happening. Wow. And so there's a commercial aspect to it straight away there, right? Absolutely. And there's also a fraud aspect to it.

Well, you think? Tell me more about that. When I was researching my book, Calling the Spirits a History of Seances, when I started working on it, I wasn't prepared for the amount of fraud I was going to encounter. I ended up halfway through thinking it should have been subtitled A History of Fraud. The original mediums who were part of the spiritualist movement in the UK and in the US during the late 19th century were very skilled practitioners of a variety of ways to fool people. I am often asked by experts in paranormal belief systems if I thought any of them were true or were actually skilled mediums. I have not encountered one who I believed was real at that time. The Fox sisters revealed that their skill was cracking their toe knuckles in a way that created such a loud rapping sound it could be heard throughout an auditorium.

Others, of course, used various mechanical devices like a telescoping rod with a pencil on the end that they would use to make a mark on the ceiling. And then they would say, I floated up when the lights were down and made that mark. They would use phosphorescent inks covering things to make things glow in the dark. It was really astonishing. The Fox Sisters, do they just go from strength to strength or do they get debunked? The Fox Sisters are, to me, the most tragic story in the whole history of seances and spiritualism. They were very, very popular. They were the superstars of their day and of this whole spiritualist circle. They were the superstars of their day and of this whole spiritualist circle. And for a while, they were wealthy.

They had patrons who would pay them thousands of dollars even at the time for their services. But they didn't end well. By the 1880s, they were impoverished. Both Katie and Maggie were drinking. They had serious alcohol problems. And in 1888, Maggie confessed that it was all fraud. And she confessed this both to newspaper reviewers and to a large audience in a lecture hall. She talked about using their toes to crack the knuckles, make the loud rapping sounds. And she and Tatey both died shortly after that 1888 confession. And they both died in poverty and essentially from alcoholism.

Jeez, poor things. Their sister led them down the path they shouldn't listen to. Let's talk about some more Victorians. How about William Crookes and his muse, Florence Cook? Oh, I love talking about William Crookes and Florence Cook. Florence is kind of a classic fraudulent medium. I think she was a pretty, very young girl. She was a teenager when she became a star in British Victorian spiritualist circles. in her was an incredibly esteemed scientist named William Crookes. Crookes would go on to be knighted in the early 20th century, but at the time he was investigating chemistry and math and physics and so forth, and he was absolutely a true believer in terms of spiritualist. And he would test a number of the superstar mediums at the time and would almost invariably conclude they were legitimate. His testing of Florence was his most questionable act. It actually did put his reputation slightly in danger at the time because he brought this teenage medium to his house to

test her in person, and she lived with him and his wife and their children for six months. And many years later, Florence confessed that she was having an affair with William Crooks. Crooks ended up photographing their seances, and he produced something like 44 photographs. Florence's skill was supposedly to be able to manifest her spirit guide, Katie King, in an actual form that could walk among people. She would go into a spirit cabinet, they would chant and sing and so forth. And a few minutes later, Katie King would emerge in this white outfit and move among them in a very dimly lit room. And of course, the fact that Katie and Florence happened to look exactly alike didn't

seem to deter anyone from believing in this at the time. And there are even photographs of Katie keying the spirit arm in arm with William Crooks. And some of these photos were actually destroyed because there was such a fear that it would endanger Crookes' reputation. He never confessed to any sort of ill doings with Florence, but there were several people who reported later on that she had told them this. Tell me about the Davenport brothers. The Davenports were a pair of American brothers who had started as magicians, but they started touring during the rise in spiritualism, and they found out that they were more successful presenting onstage seances. And they would use something

called a spirit cabinet. The spirit cabinet was essentially an enclosed box. It was raised slightly off the floor so people could see underneath it. Oh, look, there's nothing underneath it. And they would go into the spirit cabinet at the beginning of the seance, and they would supposedly produce things. These things might be loud sounds, hands sticking out of corners of the spirit box. Instruments would float up out of the spirit cabinet and would play over the heads of the audience. over the heads of the audience. This was one of their most famous tricks, but they ran into trouble when they were touring the UK. At one point, a UK audience got angry with them and tore their spirit cabinet apart and chased them out of town. But at least unlike the Fox sisters, they ended well. They made a significant amount of money, which they had put away, and they were pretty okay, even after they gave up the whole spiritualist thing. And one of the two brothers, in fact, ended up having a

lengthy conversation with Houdini later on and told Houdini exactly how they had done everything. And that was a sort of core part of Houdini's knowledge of spiritualism. And what tricks are there around convincing? I speak as someone who's had many friends go to these things and walk away very moved. They feel that we're in some way in contact with beloved relatives that have passed. What are the sort of psychological tricks, looking back at history, that they would have been able to deploy? Well, there is a method called cold reading. and a lot of people have a slightly mistaken idea of what cold reading is. They hear that term and they think it means that someone who is very good at reading your expressions or your gestures. Well, is the type of thing where you start with a very broad question and then you sort of move in a circular way with those questions, narrowing it down until you get

to what did your grandfather's name start with H? Oh my God, yes, it was Henry, you know, that kind of thing. And then of course, there are some mediums who will even research a client before they go in with the reading. So they might say, you love gardening. And you'll say, oh my God, how could you have known that? Well, I knew that because I went to your Facebook page and saw all of your gardening photos. You listened to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about seances.

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Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. It's been enduringly popular and some of the, there's been some very famous adherents right here in the UK. We talk about Arthur Conan Doyle and I guess Houdini as well. Tell me about their journey towards, and we should call it spiritualism. Is that right? The idea that there were spirits that you could interact with? Yes. The spiritualism belief came about as a result of the Fox sisters. They were directly linked to the creation of that name, which happens about 1852. It became an actual religion.

It is still an actual religion, although one of its central tenets when it began was the belief that it could be proven scientifically. They thought they were the only religion that could be proven. And the fact that they were repeatedly disproven didn't seem to bother them at the time, but that has now been removed from the religion's central credo. And in terms of Conan Doyle and Houdini, they are my absolute favorite relationship in the whole history of seances. They began as friends who had a great admiration for each other, even though one was a skeptic and one was a true believer. But as their relationship deepened, they started to become much more antagonistic towards each other.

And it reached a peak on the day that Conan Doyle's wife invited Houdini to sit down for a seance. She had taken up mediumship, and she proceeded to engage in automatic writing, which is where the medium is supposedly taken over by a spirit who writes through them. And she produced page after page of material that she said was from Houdini's mother. Houdini was obsessed with his mother, and this infuriated him no end. He looked at the pages and said, my mother didn't even speak English, and these are all written in English. And this infuriated him no end. He looked at the pages and said, my mother didn't even speak English and these are all written in English. And from that point on, they were bitter enemies. And it got to the point where they were even doing conflicting lecture tours with Conan Doyle going on the road to talk about how this was all true and Houdini going often to

the same cities to say, no, it's not. And here's how it's all done. So I guess you're right. So cold reading is tougher as the medium found when Houdini didn't have a Facebook page, right? So it's got easier. The internet, social media has made this a lot easier, I expect. So I'm just unclear. So one was interest in seances, one was interest in spiritualism. Is that true? Can you just help me out a pact with his wife that when he died, he was going to try to come back and he gave her a code word. And that code word, if it was uttered during a seance, would be the clue that it was actually him and only she would know the code word. And that code word was indeed uttered at a seance a few years after Houdini's death. But

what his wife, Bess, had forgotten was that she actually had given that code word was indeed uttered at a seance a few years after Houdini's death, but what his wife Bess had forgotten was that she actually had given that code word out to an interviewer. The Houdini seances were held every year on the anniversary of his death, which is Halloween, and they are continuing to be held even today. They hold a Houdini seance every year on Halloween. Come back to that Facebook point, which I'm now dwelling on. Presumably they would just try and fraudulent people would try and just suck up whatever information was in the public domain, right? You made it easier to research people now, but do you think they would do research on their clients before the internet

made it as easy as it is? They would indeed. There are rumors which have never been confirmed, but there were rumors among magicians in the 30s that the mediums actually had something called a blue book. And the blue book would list prominent spiritualists in each city and would give a few facts about them. Now, whether or not the blue book existed is up in the air, but we do know that mediums would often arrive in a city. They would read the spiritualist newspapers, which were in abundance at the time. They would find out who were the big believers in a city, and they would go to the newspapers offices in that city and research the client before they would approach them. And you could get a lot of information from a newspaper in those days. You could get the date of birth and who their parents were and who they were married to. And

if they were in society circles, you could find out who they were friends with and what they were interested in. And I've always been so saddened by the huge upsurge of interest after wars, whether it's the Civil War in the States, the First World War, when people are just desperate to talk to their husbands, their brothers, sons. Do you see a big, huge growth in interest after these wars? Oh, absolutely. And in fact, it's after almost any very, very large traumatic event. In fact, at the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020, I immediately predicted that we were going to see a surge in paranormal belief, and it happened. It is something that people turn to in times of extreme stress or a global event like this. It's interesting that

after World War I, we saw in particular a rise in the use of the Ouija board, because now people could try to contact their missing husband or son or brother in the comfort of their own home without having to even engage the services of a medium. Cutting out the middleman, literally. And do you get a rise in people trying to burst that bubble of prosecutions. Who's providing all these amazing details for you as a historian to go back and look at? There were certainly groups that investigated these thoroughly. The SPR, the Society for Psychical Research, which was in both Britain and the US, started in 1882. Originally, they were not

against mediums. They were more interested in finding out how they were doing it. They believed, excuse me, that ESP was possible, that the mediums were actually reading the minds of people that they were. And magicians were always key figures in debunking these people. Before Houdini, there was a famed British magician named J.N. Maskelyne, who debunked a number of the prominent mediums. And of course, nowadays, we had the amazing Randy, who was a major figure in debunking. And we have huge skeptical associations now that are often debunking these people. Tell me more about some of the extraordinary people that you featured. There's so much chutzpah, these mediums. Tell me about some of the other ones.

My personal favorite, I think, is Helen Duncan. And she's actually from the 20th century. She went on trial in 1944 in London for being a medium, and her case was so incredibly compelling and famous that it was taking headlines away from the war at the time, which infuriated Winston Churchill. He actually was writing his ministers and saying, what is this thing with this woman being tried for mediumship? She was tried under a 1785 Witchcraft Act because they didn't have anything else to try her under. And what had interested the authorities in her in the first place was that she held a seance, and I think it was 1941, in which she correctly identified a British ship that

had just been sunken that the news hadn't gone out yet. There happened to be a undercover intelligence officer in her seance when she named that ship, and he reported this back to his bosses. And so they eventually, a couple of years later, they were looking for a way to get her, and they arrested her on fraud, but tried her under this Witchcraft Act. And her trial went on for several weeks in the Old Bailey. It was amazing. And the defense was not able to come up with a lot of things like the judge ruled that she could not produce her spirit guide in front of the jurors for whatever reason. So the defense resorted to bringing forth dozens and dozens and dozens of people who testified to receiving news during her

seances and who testified to being tremendously comforted by her seances. And she was an interesting character to me because she was a sort of acerbic woman. Her spirit guide was a fellow named Walter who would insult her during the seances. So she obviously was very entertaining. She was a skilled entertainer, I think. And she was found guilty in that trial. She ended up receiving the maximum sentence, which was six months. And she was arrested a few years later again. But at least her trial did away with that 1785 Witchcraft Act. They ended up replacing it with a fraudulent medium act. And in what way do you now think that she was fraudulent? Was

she lucky? Was she good at reading people? What was her shtick? Oh, she has possibly my favorite shtick on top of everything else. She was known for producing ectoplasm. And ectoplasm is thought to be a material that mediums can produce that is either part of their own body that gives them the ability to call spirits, or it may be thought to be the stuff of spirits in actuality. And it's usually seen as a sort of filmy white material that exudes from some part of the medium's body, the mouth, the nose, even the torso. She could produce ectoplasm on command from her nose and her mouth. And the thought is that she was regurgitating at will. And she would even apparently do things like swallow a magazine photo along with a length of cheesecloth. And so when she regurgitated this in a semi-dark room, it would look like a face had formed in this white material. And I always say that to me, the ability to regurgitate on command is no less amazing than talking to spirits.

She could have stayed out of trouble with the law if she just made that her thing, right? That was her thing for a while. A very famous investigator named Harry Price tested her in a laboratory. He got a sample of the material, realized it was just cheesecloth. But as is the case over and over with these mediums, it didn't stop the true believers in going and continuing to visit her. We have to associate these with the Victorian and early 20th century practices. And yet you tell me that these seances, these mediums are still alive and well. How have they endured into an age of far more rigorous science and debunking? I like to say that

spiritualism in the 20th century split and went into two different directions. One was that scientific side, that belief that their religion could be proven scientifically. That has given in the 20th century, split and went into two different directions. One was that scientific side, that belief that their religion could be proven scientifically. That has given us the modern obsession with paranormal investigation, which is where we get the television series, the reality shows like Ghost Adventures and Ghost Hunters and people downloading ghost hunting apps onto their phones and so forth. On the other side, we have the trance mediums, and that has become our modern superstar psychic. That's where we get the John Edwards and the late Sylvia Brown and the George Andersons. And they are the people who are, again,

very skilled at cold reading, at being entertainers. I will leave it to each person to decide how truthful they are or not, whether they actually have any skills. But I think that spiritualism split off and became those two different things. Is it universal in all cultures today? Do you see it all around the world? You don't quite. There are a number of religions that are far more opposed to the idea that you can talk to the dead, even than Catholicism or Christianity. And we don't see this form of people sitting around grouped together to communicate with the dead really in any non-Western culture. That is very unique to mainly Europe, US, UK. That is something that has continued to survive since the Fox sisters first did it in 1848.

Lisa, thank you very much for coming. What is your book called? My book on seances is Calling the Spirits, A History of Seances. My most recent release is a collection of classic horror tales called Haunted Tales. you