the.com/spiritualism
Victorians asking the dead stock questions and billing it as religion.
means The belief that the dead can communicate with the living, usually through a medium, treated by its followers as a genuine spiritual practice or religion.
from Rooted in 'spirit' (Latin spiritus, breath), spiritualism as a movement traces to the 1840s, when two young sisters in upstate New York claimed mysterious rapping noises in their house were messages from a murdered peddler's ghost. The 'Rochester Rappings' made them celebrities, séances became parlor entertainment, and a belief system sprang up around the idea that the dead were reachable by anyone willing to sit at a table and ask. Decades later one sister admitted it had been a trick done with her toes — by then the religion had long outgrown its origin story.
- peak era
- 1840s to 1920s, grief-fueled by mass deaths
- origin story
- two teen sisters faking toe-cracking ghost raps
- celebrity believer
- Arthur Conan Doyle, oddly immune to deduction here
- downfall
- Houdini spent years publicly debunking its mediums