Talking to the Dead (30 page)

T
HE YEAR
M
AGGIE DIED
, 1893, Spiritualists formed the National Spiritualist Association, an enduring institution that today is known as the National Spiritualist Association of Churches. Lily Dale, one of the many summer retreats organized by Spiritualists in the 1870s, is still in existence after more than a century. A picturesque Victorian town near Buffalo, New York, Lily Dale is now a year-round community of Spiritualists. Nonresident mediums and others concerned with spiritual matters visit from around the world to socialize, study, and attend seminars and seances in a peaceful lakeside setting. With its reputation as a town that talks to the dead, Lily Dale also attracts thousands of curious tourists annually.
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Lily Dale, the National Spiritualist Association of Churches, and other Spiritualist organizations notwithstanding, by the end of the nineteenth century the movement known as Modern Spiritualism, defined in part by the precept that “communication with the so-called dead is a fact, scientifically proven by the phenomena of Spiritualism,” was already on the wane in the United States. At the movement's fortieth anniversary cele
bration in 1888—also the year of Maggie's confession—one speaker lamented that “though there are many millions of nominal Spiritualists in America, the active, faithful workers number but a few thousand.”
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There are many reasons for the movement's decline. Perhaps most important, life expectancy increased and infant mortality rates dropped after 1880, a dramatic change produced in part by improvements in preventive medicine, public health, and sanitation. As more children lived on into adulthood, there were fewer tragic and untimely deaths to be mourned.
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Insofar as mediumship provided an interesting and lucrative living, women had more varied opportunities by the end of the century both to go to college and to find work. They were hired for positions once exclusively male, such as salesclerks, and for jobs newly created, such as typists. Although women wouldn't be granted the vote until 1920, magazines touted the new “working woman” who enjoyed stepping out to her job.

Spiritualists' own resistance to organization also contributed to the decline of the movement. Under the outside world's scrutiny, many Spiritualists in the last quarter of the nineteenth century disavowed phenomena such as the raps and materializations. Socially conservative Spiritualists criticized their more radical colleagues for their positions on issues such as free love and marriage reform. Theological differences and debates on subjects such as Christianity's view of the spirits also divided the membership.

Some of what had seemed most exciting about the movement came to seem less revolutionary in due course. Liberal ministers of mainstream churches co-opted some of Spiritualism's teachings, not only promising salvation to those who did their best to earn it, but also, in some instances, banishing hell altogether. The conflict between science and religion endured, but the dilution of Calvinist doctrine and the temporary lessening of evangelical fervor made the contradictions seem less acute.

The love affair with technology that helped give rise to Spiritualism may have played a role as well in its decline. Although Thomas Alva Edison was so intrigued by the movement that he hoped to build a machine to facilitate communication between the worlds, the invention of electric
lights slowly but steadily began to banish shadows from the corners of many seance rooms. Metaphorically and literally, it became easier to exile many ghosts simply by illuminating the cause of the haunting.
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The American Medical Association, in concert with crusading journalists and federal bureaucrats, eventually restricted the availability of previously legal drugs such as morphine and opium. Insofar as these played a role directly or indirectly in creating altered states of consciousness or visionary dreams, the opportunity to indulge grew less frequent.
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The Society for Psychical Research and the American Society for Psychical Research clearly had an impact on the fortunes of Spiritualism. The investigations these groups conducted became more rigorous and methodical, and increasing numbers of mediums were trapped in acts of outright fraud. Cabinet mediums, their trick knots untied, were caught playing musical instruments with their own mortal fingers; apparitions turned out to be real people garbed in gauze and slipping about in the dark; spirit hands changed into flesh-and-blood appendages, coated with phosphorescent paint; mediums were found to be using their feet to lift objects while unwitting investigators confidently held tight to empty shoes, ones weighted for verisimilitude with lead. Investigators increasingly made a distinction between mental mediumship, which included feats of clairvoyance and telepathy, and physical mediumship, which involved manifestations such as raps, table levitations, and apparitions. Physical mediumship fell out of favor not only among Spiritualists but also with the public, and even mental mediumship became suspect.

When Spiritualism began, with its murdered peddler and its poltergeists, it had fed on an older fascination with occult powers. But Spiritualism as shaped by and in response to the Fox sisters had emerged as something sunnier, more democratic: one did not, after all, summon up the spirits by manipulating secret bodies of knowledge; one gathered a group of friends or hired a large hall to welcome the immortal beings. While benign spirit guides weren't necessarily unknown in other parts of the world, they descended like uninvited but cheery guests on nineteenth-century Christian America, whose inhabitants generally believed that miracles only happened in the long ago and that any spirit who spoke to a mortal had to be either a demon or a delusion.

As Spiritualism lost its hold on people's imaginations, however, the movement—even as it waned—helped revitalize interest in occultism. And as the nineteenth-century revolutions in transportation and communication diminished distances between continents, the religious traditions of other cultures increasingly influenced American thought.

One of the individuals responsible for creating both an occult revival and a cosmopolitan spiritual synthesis was Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. A charismatic Russian immigrant who came to the United States in 1873, she claimed to have traveled around the world and to have studied under Tibetan masters. After flirting briefly with Spiritualism—she was said to have been gifted in the arts of physical and mental mediumship—she formed a lifelong friendship with a government official turned lawyer named Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, a man of enough stature to have served as one of three investigators appointed by the government to look into Lincoln's assassination.

Together Blavatsky and Olcott founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. Unlike Spiritualist institutions, the society was hierarchical in structure and esoteric in approach. The mysteries taught by its masters were said to take years to learn, and rituals included a secret handshake and a password. But a more important aspect of the organization, one that influenced the direction of popular religion in the twentieth century, was its integration of Eastern mysticism with traditions of Western spirituality.
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In the early part of the twentieth century the educated middle class in Europe and England remained deeply engaged with the question of paranormal abilities. The poet William Butler Yeats, briefly a member of the Theosophical Society and later of the Society for Psychical Research, belonged to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an organization that attracted mystics and others devoted to the study and practice of medieval and Renaissance magic. Yeats and his wife, Georgie, filled volumes of notebooks with automatic writing, which they claimed flowed from the spirits.
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Another influential figure, the psychologist Carl Jung, attended seances as a young man and believed that consciousness—or the unconscious—was potentially capable of extraordinary powers such as telepathy and that the claim to such powers did not necessarily represent delusion or mental illness.

Just as the carnage of the Civil War produced a surge of interest in Spiritualism in the United States, so too did World War I in England. More than seven hundred thousand British soldiers—almost one in eight—died under brutal circumstances, some of the men blown to bits on the battlefield. They were the “unburial bodies,” wrote the poet Wilfred Owen, that “sit outside the dugouts all day, all night.” At such a time elaborate funerals seemed not only inadequate but also callous, whereas attempts to contact the spirits made a certain amount of intuitive sense to many of those who mourned.
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As the number of Spiritualists in England increased, the focus of research into the paranormal shifted once again back to the nature of mediumship. A very public battle of wits and tests took place between two famous adversaries in the Spiritualist debate: the author Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the master sleuth Sherlock Holmes, and the magician Ehrich Weiss, otherwise known as Houdini. Doyle's own son, Kingsley, had been wounded in World War I and died of influenza in 1919, not long after peace was declared. In September of that year Doyle heard Kingsley's ghostly voice say, “Forgive me,” an event that transformed the author's faith in spirit communication into absolute certainty.
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Houdini's fascination with Spiritualism developed after his mother's death in 1913, but the seances he attended convinced him that mediums were not only frauds but something worse: inferior magicians. Since he knew how to accomplish by magic many of the manifestations attributed to the spirits, he exposed some of the most prominent mediums of his day.

Houdini's unlikely friendship with Doyle began in 1920 and quickly evolved into a race in which each strove to prove his point. Their friendship withered after Doyle's wife produced a message purportedly written by Houdini's mother. No one doubted Mrs. Doyle's sincerity; however, the magician protested that his foreign-born mother, who spoke no English in life, in death had produced a model of perfect English prose.

Houdini trapped many mediums in conscious or unconscious acts of fraud, but he was less successful in destroying the stubborn and age-old appeal of the supernatural. Older occult organizations persisted after World War I, some of them having splintered off from the Theosophical
Society or been influenced by it, others drawing on Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism for their ideas. New groups arose as well. Interest in alchemy and astrology and other bodies of esoteric lore were commingled, particularly in Austria and Germany, with a mythology manipulated to stress racial superiority, secret rites of initiation, and a millennial expectation of a new world order. Groups such as the Ariosophical societies, which proposed the existence of a psychic energy perfectly realized in what the organizations' members called the Aryan type, represented a small but significant factor in the rise of Nazi ideology.
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The desire to find scientific proof for psychic phenomena, one of nineteenth-century Spiritualism's major concerns, never entirely died out, and by the 1930s it had given rise to the new discipline of parapsychology, a field that attracted particular attention in the United States. Parapsychologists believed that if phenomena such as telepathy existed, incidents should be reproducible in a laboratory setting. Researchers turned to accumulating specific data on extrasensory perception, ESP, which the leading pioneer in the new field, Joseph Rhine, divided into three categories: telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. Rhine considered psychokinesis—PK, the movement of objects in the absence of any apparent force—a separate but equally vital subject for investigation. He grouped these various paranormal powers under the umbrella term
psi.
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Both psychologists and parapsychologists at different times have entertained the theory that PK events such as poltergeistlike phenomena may be related to the release of unconscious psychic energies, particularly those produced by the stresses of puberty. Youngsters around the ages of Kate and Maggie at the time of the Hydesville raps, it's been suggested, are particularly prone to triggering plates flying in the kitchen, mysterious fires raging at the prom, or frogs falling from the sky.

The field of parapsychology to some extent has come full circle. Some scholars now question whether it's possible to conduct limited, controlled experiments within a laboratory setting. Perhaps, they say, there is no way to reliably test the powers that exceptional individuals may manifest spontaneously.

Psychologists as well as parapsychologists continue to try to find a framework for understanding phenomena such as trances, altered states of
consciousness, and mystical visions. A new field of study, neurotheology, explores the possibility that certain religious and visionary experiences—for example, a sense of oneness with the universe or union with a greater power—may originate within a particular part of the human brain. Curiously enough, a phrenologist named Joseph Rhodes Buchanan posited a not dissimilar theory in 1841: he identified a specific spot on the human head that when stimulated, he wrote, produced visions of spirits.

Today the National Spiritualist Association of Churches claims fewer than four thousand members, but even nineteenth-century Spiritualists recognized that organizational membership isn't a reliable indicator of how many people believe in spirit communication.
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Twenty-first-century Spiritualists say their influence is wider than ever before. They may be correct, if their impact on the rise of the so-called New Age in the United States is taken into account. The New Age, the name given to the efflorescence of interest in spirituality and the occult that began in the 1960s, draws on many traditions, both Eastern and Western. The movement is notable for the widespread belief it has fostered in faith healing, reincarnation, and channeling. But insofar as its benign, intimate, and affectionate spirit guides are its hallmark, the New Age is the legitimate heir to Spiritualism.