In the spring of 1848, in a farmhouse in upstate New York, two young sisters reported that something in the walls was answering them. When they snapped their fingers it rapped back. When they asked it questions it replied, one rap for yes, silence for no, and before long it was spelling out words as someone recited the alphabet. The rapper said it was the spirit of a peddler murdered in the house years before.
From that kitchen grew a movement that within a decade claimed millions of adherents on both sides of the Atlantic. Spiritualism held that the dead survive, that they can communicate, and that the proof is available to anyone willing to sit in a darkened room and wait. This essay is not concerned with whether the dead were really speaking. It is concerned with how they spoke, and with the curious fact that they have always preferred the newest equipment.
The spiritual telegraph
The timing is not a coincidence. The first long-distance telegraph message had been sent four years earlier, and the country was being wired. For the first time in history, ordinary people were used to the idea that a voice could arrive instantly from a great distance, encoded as a series of clicks, sent by someone they could not see.
Early spiritualists understood the connection perfectly well and said so. Their newspapers carried the word telegraph in their titles. The raps were a code, the medium was an operator, and the spirit world was simply a farther station on the line. A religion that might have sounded like superstition presented itself as the latest thing in communications, and much of its appeal lay there.
The pattern was set. Every subsequent technology of recording and transmission has been tried, by somebody, as a channel to the dead.
A short catalog of channels
- The table
- From the 1850s, circles of sitters placed their hands on a table and waited for it to tilt, rap or turn. Experiments in the same decade showed that the sitters were moving it themselves, without knowing they were doing so. The finding changed almost nothing.
- The photograph
- From the 1860s, photographers produced portraits in which a pale figure, often a dead relative, hovered behind the sitter. The technique was double exposure. Grieving customers paid well and frequently recognized faces that were not there.
- The trumpet and the cabinet
- The professional seance developed its own apparatus: a curtained cabinet in which the medium sat bound, a cone through which spirit voices spoke, a darkness so complete that nobody could see who held it. The confessions of one practitioner, Confessions of a Cabinet Medium, are held in the library.
- The wireless
- In the early twentieth century, inventors and engineers speculated openly about building a receiver sensitive enough to pick up the dead. If the air was full of invisible signals, why not those?
- The tape
- From the late 1950s, people recording birdsong, empty rooms or the hiss between radio stations began to hear voices on playback: short phrases, often their own names. The phenomenon was called electronic voice phenomena, and books of transcripts ran to hundreds of pages.
- The scanner
- The latest devices sweep rapidly through radio frequencies and present the fragments as speech. They are sold in quantity, with instructions.
Who sat in the circle
It would be easy to treat all this as a history of credulity. That would miss what spiritualism was for the people who practiced it.
It was, first, a religion of consolation, and it flourished after mass bereavement. Its great surges followed the American Civil War and the First World War, when there were few families without someone to ask after. A seance offered what the churches offered only in prospect: a message, now, in a familiar voice, saying that all was well.
It was also, unusually for its time, a religion in which women held authority. Most mediums were women, and the seance room was one of the few places in the nineteenth century where a woman could speak in public, to mixed audiences, about matters of ultimate importance, and be paid for it. Many early spiritualists were active in the campaigns against slavery and for women's rights, and saw no division between the causes. Historians of the movement now treat it as one of the routes by which women entered public life. Spiritualism survives as an organized religion, with its own churches and services, and the archive's field guide on how to read a fringe religious movement applies to it as to any other: describe first, judge afterward.
Every channel has noise, and noise invites interpretation.
Exposure and its limits
Fraud was common and was exposed constantly. Stage magicians made a second career of reproducing seance effects under bright lights. Committees of scientists bound mediums hand and foot and found muslin in their sleeves. In 1888 one of the two sisters from the farmhouse appeared on a public stage and demonstrated that she could produce the original raps by cracking the joints of her toes. A year later she withdrew the confession.
None of this ended the movement. Believers replied that some mediums were frauds and others were not, which was true of every profession; that hostile conditions drove the spirits away; that a single genuine message outweighed a hundred tricks. The pattern is familiar from every study of failed prophecy. Disconfirmation tends to strengthen a committed group, and the people who sat in the circles were committed by grief, which is the strongest commitment there is.
The voice in the noise
The tape recordings deserve particular attention, because they reveal the mechanism with unusual clarity. Human hearing is built to find speech. Given enough random sound, the ear will assemble syllables, and the mind will assemble the syllables into words, especially words it is waiting for. This is a form of apophenia, the perception of meaningful pattern in random data, and it is not a malfunction. A hearing that missed a real voice in the wind was more dangerous to our ancestors than one that sometimes heard a voice that was not there.
Every channel has noise, and noise invites interpretation. The essay on tape culture in the library, Signal to Noise, describes the hiss of a copied cassette as a record of the hands it passed through. The listeners for spirit voices heard the hiss differently, as a crowd at the far end of the line. Both were treating noise as a trace of people who were not present. Only one of them was right about where the people were.
What the machines are saying
The most useful lesson of this history may be about the machines rather than the dead. Each new medium of communication has been uncanny when it first arrived. A voice without a body, a face without a person, a message from nowhere: these are ghostly experiences, and the first users of the telegraph, the photograph and the telephone said so. Spiritualism took that feeling literally. It noticed, before most people did, that modern communication is a kind of haunting.
We are now surrounded by voices without bodies, and many of them belong to people who have died: in recordings, in old messages, in accounts that nobody has closed. The question that the sisters' visitors brought to the farmhouse has not gone away. It has only moved into the devices in our pockets. Whatever one believes about the dead, it is worth noticing how quickly we learn to listen for them.