Séances and spiritualists grew popular across the United States and Europe in the 19th century despite the skeptics.
This “scientific religion” quickly gained followers. It soon spread to Britain, and from there, to the European continent. Believers ranged from rural dwellers to urban middle classes, to intellectuals, scientists, and aristocrats.
In America spiritualism experienced a boom with the Civil War as many of the bereaved turned to séances to contact fallen soldiers. According to one estimate, the war added two million new believers to the spiritualist movement. By the 1880s the movement had eight million adherents in the United States and Europe. In the first decade of the early 20th century, popular interest in spiritualism waned but was revitalized by the twin devastations of World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic.
Some spirits allegedly communicated through the mouth of a spiritualist. The most famous of these so-called trance mediums was the Bostonian Leonora Piper. Piper channeled the famous—including Johann Sebastian Bach—and the obscure, especially a mysterious Frenchman named Dr. Phinuit. Her voices elicited much scientific interest, led by American psychologist William James.
Skeptics also demonstrated mediums’ manipulations: Dim light creates sensitivity to sound, and people under such circumstances become highly suggestible, especially when experiencing grief. The accumulation of such exposés partly prompted Maggie Fox to admit that her and her sister’s séances were a fraud. In 1888 Fox admitted that the rapping sounds were just the sisters’ cracking their knuckles and other joints.
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