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A mixed audience of believers, curious, skeptics, and investigators gathered in the domestic interior of the Victorian sitting-room to witness the spectacle of spirit communication. Nothing but the presence of the medium herself.īetween 1848 and the late 1920s, haunted houses spread throughout Europe and the US as a popular phenomenon. Nothing in the room, an ordinary Victorian sitting-room, seemed exceptional. Every cabinet, piece of furniture, piece of clothing, even every orifice in the body of the medium had been thoroughly explored before the séance. Ultimately, if the conditions allow for it, the sitters witness the epitome of the spirits’ manifestation: ectoplasm, extruded from the medium’s body. In the dark, some feel caresses, kisses, or the touch of unearthly hands. Then the lights go down again, and music starts coming out of the gramophone.
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During the course of three hours different phenomena take place, intermittently: lights flash, fluorescent messages are displayed in the air, along with rustlings, flower scents, abrupt temperature changes… At one point, the spirits ask for the lights to be turned on: some of the sitters have been offered a floral crown. Then, the medium gradually falls into a trance. Just a soft red glow is permitted, the only light suitable for spirits. The séance usually starts with the Lord’s Prayer. The sitters gather around a wooden table and hold hands. The last light of day shyly brightens the furniture of the parlor: bookcases, chintz curtains, a large sofa, and a record player. Due to the hyper-abundant and multiple forms of haunting this work centers on a very determined timeframe and location: the birth and expansion of Spiritualism in the United States’ East Coast between 18, and the psychic mediums that popularized itįurniture and Prosthetics in the Victorian Haunted HouseĮvenings at home in Spiritualist Séance 1 Haunting is a multifaceted phenomenon that has developed differently throughout the United States territory, too. Spiritualism, as many have noted, builds on previous histories of witchcraft, mesmerism, hoodoo, divination, and other cultural precedents. *The following work acknowledges that the phenomenon of haunting is neither uniquely Western nor exclusively related to the Spiritualist movement. Featured image: Seances, a popular entertainment in the late 19th century, under a red light.