T.J. Laverne
author of supernatural historical fiction
Communicating with the Dead
For thousands of years, people have been speculating about the existence of ghosts and how/why some people return as ghosts and others do not. (Or do all of us become ghosts?) The obsession is perfectly natural. I think all of us would like to know what happens to us to after we die. Is there an afterlife? Do we have souls? If we do, can we come back to Earth after we die? What would we look like if we could?
Beliefs about ghosts have varied drastically over the millennia and across the globe. There’s the idea of the ghost seeking revenge, and the ghost who is held prisoner on Earth for committing bed deeds in life. There’s also the ghost who sticks around as the result of a tragedy, and the ghost that appears as an omen of death. The notion of unfinished business is an extremely modern one, but it’s the theory that resonated with me the most. My biggest fear is being robbed of life before I’ve done everything I’ve wanted to do.
The Victorians had their own ideas. As stodgy and uptight as they were, there was a surge of interest in the macabre and the morbid during the Victorian Era. Gothic novels became all the rage, featuring a wide variety of supernatural and gruesome figures: vampires, murderers, monsters, devils—and, of course, ghosts. This fascination with Gothic fiction paved the way for another attraction during the Victorian Era: the séance.
In a Victorian Era séance, guests sit around a table in a dark room, led by a medium, and attempt to communicate with the dead. The first séance was introduced by the Fox sisters in 1848 in New York. The Fox sisters quickly became a sensation, conducting hundreds of séances. Other people followed, also claiming to be mediums, and by 1850 the popularity of the séance had spread to England. “Mediums” used a variety of tricks to emulate communicating with ghosts, from rapping to spirit trumpets to rotating tables, and other special effects and magic tricks.
This obsession with communicating with the dead didn’t stop with the séance. Thomas Edison, inventor of the telephone, hoped that with the use of science, one could find a way to communicate with ghosts. In 1920, Edison claimed that he had been building a machine to communicate with the dead, one that never came to fruition: the spirit phone. It is uncertain if he ever completed his spirit phone, or if anyone ever saw it, but most people agree that it probably did not work.