Modern American Spirit Communication began in an innocuous setting: a very small cabin-like structure in rural Hydesville, New York. This was the home of a Family named Fox. The daughters of the uneducated rustic married couple who lived in the house caused quite a stir: First locally, nationally and ultimately, internationally.

31 March 1848—

This date is considered by some to be the proper birthday of the Spiritualist Movement. The rapping heard in the Fox Family home began on this date. The family believed that the rapping was actually the sound produced by the spirit of a peddler who had been robbed, murdered and buried in the Fox’s basement by a former occupant of the home. Other citizens of their village also heard these sounds and were also convinced that they were produced by an unhappy spirit.

1848, 1849—

The Fox Sisters became a sensation due to the association people made between the girls and the Spirit World. They seemed like unlikely candidates to be discounted as frauds because they were very young girls (Kate Fox was only ten years-old when the phenomena first began and Margaret Fox was just two years older than she). Since the children were from a small village and their parents were unlettered they may have seemed too unsophisticated to appear as participants in some great deception or racket. However, there were three Fox sisters. The third was a woman more than twenty years older than Kate and Margaret. It is widely accepted as fact that this elder sister, Leah Fox, took on the business of managing her juvenile sisters’ careers and made herself a considerable amount of cash in so doing.
During these years the two Fox girls were shuttled all over their home state and then to other parts of the nation. They were exhibited in large halls where people would crowd in together to see the first mediums— two little girls— summon up spirits and have them produce rapping sounds. The youngsters were ultimately brought to Europe to perform their “act” there, as well.

Early 1850’s—

Spiritualism, which is a religion, was birthed out of the excitement revolving around these two girls. The development of a religion from the attention these girls attracted happened when local Quakers entered the picture and attempted to assuage any anxieties which members of the Fox Family might have felt initially, when nobody could explain the thuds and rapping they heard about their home. Mrs. Fox has been referred to in books as a very fearful, superstitious woman who felt that there was something diabolical about the raps and the way the girls could “command” unseen forces to produce these noises. The Quakers and Leah Fox seemed more willing to accept that these manifestations could be of a divine, and not a devilish, origin.

The first true Spiritualists were a liberal lot and detested slavery. Most Spiritualists, in the early years were devoted abolitionists. They were also concerned with women’s rights and supported suffrage and Utopian ideals.
They usually met at the homes of friends who were also interested in séances and summoning the dead in order to receive messages. It is interesting to note, however, that the Universalist Church had many Spiritualists amongst its congregation in those times. Before Spiritualists could build their own churches, they were allowed by the Universalists to use their church structures.

1853 –

In England, if you received an invitation to tea at the home of a fashionable friend, you would likely engage in “table-turning” or “table-tipping.” Table-tipping was a popular method employed to contact spirits during those times, as well as today.

1855—

The acclaimed medium Daniel Dunglas Home arrived in England from the United States. Mr. Home was a baffling and enigmatic man and was the greatest example of a “Physical Medium” ever to have lived. Today, people still to question how he did some of the feats for which he was famous, including levitation and temporarily elongating his limbs. Physical Mediums were associated with fraud, but Home was never proven to be a charlatan. Definitive “proof” backing up the appalling feats Home was credited with performing stands far too slender a chance of ever being uncovered. Thus, his particularly grandiose displays of physical mediumship will necessarily be looked at as inexplicable and vexing curiosities.

American Civil War Years—

The Spiritualist Movement was a fad before it was a viable religious movement. By the time the United States Civil War had begun, mediums were working virtually everywhere, because the clientele was everywhere. Spiritualism had developed an unfortunate problem by the time the War began: It had become entertainment—its serious nature was being overlooked. The séance was a chic, somewhat macabre diversion for the upper classes. Yet, simple table-turning was no longer getting anybody excited. The number of mediums who promised “apports,” “ectoplasm” and Spirits “playing” musical instruments grew corresponding to the number of people who were willing to pay for this kind of a show. Needless to say, mediums who promised apports and the like were certainly frauds.
In response to the burgeoning number of false mediums, societies dedicated to either proving that mediums could—or could not—contact spirits were formed because people who seriously believed in communication with the Spirit World had a strong desire to keep the fraudulent mediums from practicing their trickery and from sullying the reputations of true mediums.

It is important to comprehend how attractive the concept of communicating with the dead truly was. Not only was the topic of interest to the wealthy people who first held séances in their homes; it was relevant to each and every person. Nobody escapes death. Mary Todd Lincoln understood this fact of life very well. She lost children to illness, and she had sessions with a medium while living in the White House. During the Civil War era death was a ubiquitous presence. Because there was a new technology— photography— people were able to view the battlefields, with casualties strewn all over their surfaces. Mediums were sought after during the Civil War for obvious reasons. Since then, studies have reflected that with each war the United States becomes involved in, there is a rise in the number of people who believe in— and pay visits to— mediums.

The 1870’s—

Fraudulent mediums did injure the nation’s appetite for Spiritualism. It remained popular, but the wild popularity of séances was no longer there. However, there were many true believers and it seems that they became as motivated to prove that life continues after bodily death as were those who wanted to prove that the dead are gone forever. Staunch supporters of Spiritualism, and of mediums, were involved in literature, and in science. The author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of Spiritualism’s most active public relations workers. Sir William Crookes, the British chemist, was also dedicated to his belief in the phenomena of communication with people who were alive in the Spirit World. Victoria Woodhull was an anomaly in her day because of her great success on Wall Street. Woodhull had once worked as a medium, herself. Victoria Woodhull was also the first female to run for President of the U.S.A—Years before women even had won the right to vote.

21 October 1889—

Spiritualism was dealt the biggest blow  its credibility  could possibly take when one of its originators and most respected mediums, Margaret Fox, stood before 2,000 people and publicly denounced Spiritualism as nothing more than a lie. She made this shocking declaration in New York City at The New York Academy of Music. After she addressed the audience, she agreed to demonstrate exactly how she and her sister made the rapping noises which she had, until that night, maintained were sounds produced by spirits. She explained that she had merely been cracking her toes, and that her and her sister were both able to crack their big toes in such a way that made an unusually loud sound. She then performed her demonstration– It was a little demonstration which could have taken down the church forever.

The two younger Fox Sisters had once been an overnight sensation. They had also managed to parlay the initial fascination the public felt for them into long careers as mediums. Outwardly, things appeared well, but the reality was that the women were plagued with personal troubles. Kate, who many felt was a better medium than Margaret had married an Englishman. Margaret had fallen in love with an Arctic explorer named Dr. Elisha Kent Kane and was married to him. Kane’s family never accepted Margaret and there are doubts as to whether or not she was actually legally married to him. His family despised her for her humble background, her uncultured way of speaking, and her career as a medium. By 1889, she had also developed a debilitating dependency on alcohol.

November, 1889—

Nearly a year after Margaret Fox shocked the world with her statements about Spiritualism and her own fraud, she recanted. The reasons most often cited for her public denouncement of Spiritualism is that she was approached by a newspaper which offered her cash if she would tell the world that Spiritualism was a lie, and she was nothing more than a fake. This makes sense, because Margaret was so dependent upon alcohol that she was unreliable and was receiving little work as a medium. She needed the money: for food, for alcohol. The money the newspaper paid her didn’t last very long. She knew no other way to make money besides performing as a medium, and so she recanted. The damage to her career and credibility was irrevocable, however, and by 1893 both Margaret and her seemingly luckier sister Kate were both dead. They each died penniless and were buried in pauper’s graves.

1912—

A shy, southern housewife named Pearl Curran experimented with a Ouija board one evening with a friend. During their session with the board, a powerful personality began to spell out messages of a quirky, wry nature—all in Old English. Mrs. Curran nor her friend had any knowledge of Old English. Curran developed a close relationship with the spirit who had come through: a woman who identified herself as “Patience Worth.” Patience Worth was a fine writer and Curran served as a secretary for her. Together, they published books of poetry. Professors familiar with the style Patience Worth wrote in are baffled at how a woman with no understanding of any of the rather unique features of that particular era’s speech could write such beautiful verse in so accurate a voice.

1920’s—

The famous magician Harry Houdini begins his personal attack on mediums. Subsequent to his mother’s death he became extremely embittered towards all mediums.

1935—

In Boston, Ma. Beacon Hill socialite named Mina Crandon (wife of renowned surgeon Leroi Goddard Crandon; at one time known as “The Witch of Beacon Hill”) was evidently quite close to proving that she was a true physical medium. She was ultimately discredited, though there was one judge who disagreed with his colleagues. Trickery was discovered when Mina attempted to fool a panel of scientifically-trained judges into believing that her Spirit Guide, who she claimed was the soul of her late brother Walter, had somehow managed to push his thumbprints into plaster or resin. The clever Crandon nearly got away with her game and would have won a magazine’s financial prize and enjoyed status as a truly tested, legitimate physical medium. Her hopes and reputation were soon dashed, then decimated when it came to light that the prints belonged to a man still very much alive—Crandon’s dentist. He furnished his own prints willingly or not. Most likely, he was her knowing accomplice. Crandon became reclusive, was ostracized by Boston’s Social Scene and was derided as a fake and as a pathetic shell of her former self. She died years later, and was seemingly completely forgotten. She had become the ghost her brother had already been, though she was still living.

Only when she died were the details about her past foibles as a paranormal fraud re-circulated as the newspapers printed up her obituary. Meantime, details about the blue-blooded “medium” and her elaborate hoax came out in the press. Almost immediately after she received this posthumous attention, she faded from Boston’s collective memory altogether.

1970—

Jane Roberts publishes a revolutionary book, Seth Speaks. Like Pearl Curran, Jane Roberts did not take credit as the author of this book, but claimed to have served as the channel for an entity calling itself Seth. Seth refers to himself, according to Roberts, as an “energy personality essence no longer focused in physical reality. Like Pearl Curran, Jane Roberts also met her “author friend” while using a Ouija Board.

1977—

JZ Knight claims to have had her first encounter with “Ramtha” who she claimed was a highly evolved, incredibly wise Spiritual Being who had led many lives, but preferred to appear and speak (she began to “channel” his voice while in trance) in the persona of a warrior who had lived on Atlantis many thousands of years in the distant past. She began publicly channeling him after that and was known as the most famed channel in the country throughout the 1980’s. Although she was essentially doing trance mediumship, the terms “channeling” and “channel” were quickly coined and these terms (as well as the concept to which they referred) became staples of New Age jargon and eventually wormed themselves into the much broader pop-cultural lexicon.
Knight was a highly effective channel or performer and she won the respect of influential people, most notably actress Shirley MacLaine. Much later on, in the 1990’s, Knight also went into court in order to prevent another woman from channeling Ramtha. She won this case, bizarrely—thus setting a precedent concerning ownership rights of the alleged soul, or spiritual being, of a long-dead man by a living person.

1990’s—

Mediums such as Rosemary Althea and James Van Pragh are popular guests on television talk shows and mediums write successful books. At the end of the decade, the medium John Edward had begun producing his own television show “Crossing Over,” which brought new attention to the concept of Spirit Communication. However, his success also brought out many critics, and it would appear that the idea of communicating with spirits is always going to be one which people will feel strongly about—one way or another.

The current decade has shown a huge increase in the public demand for mediums. The recent developments have truly opened doors for many psychics and mediums. More on this in my next blog!

With my Most Sincere Wishes for Health and Prosperity, Jeffrey Justice
26 July 2009