“I was at first very incredulous and never sought the spirits….I am still very suspicious, and seek only for facts and avoid opinions. If I have good witnesses I escape hallucination, and I look sharp and avoid imposture; with those precautions I pursue this new science.”
– Baron Seymour Kirkup
The “Night-side of Nature”–the occult supercontinent of things half-seen and dimly comprehended–has always attracted to itself peculiar explorers. Equipped with refined powers of imagination and curiosity, these expeditionists of the soul become–to quote Edward Bulwer-Lytton–akin to travellers who “penetrate into unknown lands”.
Baron Kirkup, the nineteenth-century “mage of Florence”, fully devoted his life to the spirits; he himself was haunted, and accordingly his riverside palazzo became the thing of dreams, a domain known internationally for its phantasmic manifestations. Likewise, the German doctor Justinus Andreas Kerner, entranced by “the Ghostworld’s clear and wondrous Deep” (as he put it), built around himself a “Spectre’s Castle” in which anomalous psychic activity predominated.
In the long history of ghost-seers and psychic investigators, however, it is the Late Victorian Age that tends to stand out as a period of exceptional creativity, collaboration, and technological advancement. A truly unique era, it engendered a diverse milieu of spirit photographers, mediums, mesmerists, and magicians.
These night-side explorers and their beliefs are the focus of Dr Efram Sera-Shriar’s new book, Psychic Investigators: Anthropology, Modern Spiritualism, and Credible Witnessing in the Late Victorian Age. We caught up with Dr Sera-Shriar to learn more.
The Custodian: What initially led you to study the history of occultism? Were you inspired early on by folktales, or perhaps first- or second-hand accounts of supernatural experiences?
Dr Efram Sera Shriar: Since my childhood, I’ve been fascinated by the history of spiritualism. I had a rather nontraditional upbringing, and my parents were both spiritualists and theosophists. Although I am not a believer in the reality of spirit and psychic forces, my experiences during my youth attending events with my family imparted me with a lifelong fascination for the subject.
Equally significant, even though it may seem silly, was my first viewing of the film Ghostbusters in the early 1980s. I was so blown away by the idea that someone could potentially be a professional ghosthunter, that for much of my childhood I was convinced “ghostbusting” would be my future profession. Eventually I went to university to study anthropology and history. However, it was not until I landed my first permanent lectureship that I finally found the time to start developing my own book on Victorian spiritualism. The fruit of that labour is Psychic Investigators, which is forthcoming in June 2022 with University of Pittsburgh Press.
C: What are the origins of spirit photography? Who were its key innovators?
ESS: There have been many high-profile spirit photographers, especially during the golden age of the movement between 1870s and 1920s. Since the emergence of spiritualism in the late 1840s, proponents of the movement were early adopters of new technologies, which they brought into the séance room. Cameras were part of spiritualist events pretty early on, and the first photographer to become famous for his spirit photographs was the American William Howard Mumler in the 1860s.
Originally based in Boston Massachusetts, he moved to New York City when another well-respected Bostonian spiritualist named H.F. Gardner recognised some of the spirit extras in Mumler’s photos as still being alive.
Things did not get much better for Mumler after his move, and he made some powerful enemies in NYC. One of them was the famous American impresario P.T. Barnum who believed that Mumler was a complete charlatan. Fundamentally, Barnum argued that Mumler was duping vulnerable people, suffering from grief, into paying high fees for fake spirit photographs. Eventually a legal case was brought against Mumler for fraud, and the prosecution’s star witness was Barnum. In an attempt to show how Mumler forged his images, Barnum commissioned the famous photographer Abraham Bogardus to recreate a photograph that appeared to show Barnum with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. The choice of celebrity spirit was significant. One of the more famous images to be produced by Mumler was a portrait Mary Todd Lincoln, the former First Lady of the United States. In the photograph the spirit of her deceased husband Abraham Lincoln can be seen standing in the background. Barnum and Bogardus wanted to show that Mumler’s most renowned spirit extra could be easily faked via double exposure.
Fortunately for Mumler, he was acquitted due to an insufficient amount of evidence showing his guilt. The prosecution could not prove “beyond all doubt” that he was fabricating the photographs through natural or mechanical means. What they presented was compelling and suggestive evidence, but they were unable to fully dispel the possibility of spirit and psychic forces being involved in the process. This was a common problem for many legal cases brought against mediums. The burden of proof always rested with the sceptic,and therein lies the problem. Prosecutors struggled to dismiss the reality of mediumship, which purportedly functioned via extraordinary invisible forces. The famous trial of Henry Slade in 1876 is another good example of a legal case brought against a professional medium. So much of the proceedings were about whether Slade’s feats could be reproduced through normal means. He too was acquitted, though for different reasons. In any case, these trials left open the possibility that the phenomena of spiritualism were genuine because they could not be fully disproven.
C: Which nineteenth century psychic practitioner or investigator intrigues you the most and why?
ESS: There are a lot of figures who intrigue me, but one of my favourites is William Stainton Moses. Like many spiritualists, Moses started out as a sceptic. However, after attending several séances and seeing some incredible feats, he became a convert. He also became convinced through his participation at séances that he possessed mediumistic powers. Within a few years he was widely recognised among British spiritualists as one of the most powerful psychics every known. His alleged feats ranged from basic raps and knocks to automatic writing and even levitation. Moses was also a trained Anglican priest, and much of his credibility was connected to his former career as the clergyman. Unlike so many high-profile psychics from the Victorian era, Moses was never caught cheating during a séance. This added further credibility to the claims that his extraordinary powers were real.
A rather quiet and reserved man throughout his life, Moses was extremely selective about who he would allow at his séances. Understandably sceptics saw this as an indication that Moses was potentially a fraud. Why else would he not invite open investigation? After his death in 1892, the psychical researcher Frederic Myers was given access to some of Moses’ private notebooks, where he had recorded many of his psychic experiences. Excerpts from these notebooks were published in the Society for Psychical Research’s journal. Myers found some of this material to be quite compelling, especially in those instances where the testimony could be corroborated by other supposedly trustworthy sources. Thus, rather than dismissing Moses as a fraud, Myers left the case open. To this day, sceptics and believers continue to debate the legitimacy of Moses’ supposed mediumistic powers.
C: Can you tell us more about the Media of Mediumship project? How did it come about?
ESS: The Media of Mediumship is an AHRC-funded project that tells the story of how unorthodox spiritual believers and sceptics alike used new technologies such as photography, radios, telegraphy, tape recorders, etc. to test, affirm, or debunk the existence of an unseen world. We were fortunate enough to partner with the National Science and Media Museum and Senate House Library (both in the UK), who helped us deliver an amazing programme of activities, which included talks, creative performances, documentaries, a radio series, and digital storytelling. All of these activities were designed for a broad popular audience, and aimed to deliver original curatorial perspectives on museum objects whose occult histories of use have long been unknown or misunderstood. You can find out more on our website and even watch recordings of some of the performances via our
YouTube channel.
The project emerged from discussions I held with my collaborate Christine Ferguson from Stirling University back in 2017. We were both leading separate projects on the history of modern spiritualism and realised there was a fantastic opportunity to develop something together. Eventually, we secured a large grant from the AHRC, and the rest is history. Our amazing team member Emma Merkling joined us in February 2021, once the project was launched. We produced some amazing content together, but I am most proud of our recreation of a Victorian séance.
We learned so much from that immersive experience working with professional magicians. In the future I plan to do a lot more work in this area because I think there is much to be gained by recreating the practices of historical figures.
C: Your new book, Psychic Investigators is due out later this year. What excites you the most about it? Is there a particular event, figure, or group that you’re especially happy to get the chance to explore and elaborate on?
ESS: Psychic Investigations provides the first sustained examination of anthropology’s engagement with spiritualism and psychical research during the late Victorian era. As I argued in my book, rather than being a mere footnote to the discipline’s history, spiritualism posed a genuine concern for nineteenth-century anthropological researchers. It required serious and rigorous investigation. If the spirit hypothesis were proven to be true, it would cut to the core of British anthropology’s foundation.
The book was a real labour of love and I enjoyed writing it. What I think is particularly important about my book is how I critically engage issues surrounding how we represent the relationship between scientists and mediums. Far too often spiritualist ideas and perspectives are derided and marginalised in the secondary literature. Many accounts treat spiritualism as either credulous superstition, overt trickery, or delusion. There is little attempt to offer a more balanced historical narrative. This is by no means a suggestion that we should assume all spiritualist claims are true and actually happened. Rather, it is about threshing out the nuances.
Because I was raised in a spiritualist household, it was really important for me to provide a more sensitive portrayal of spiritualist beliefs and practices. By giving more agency to believers there is an opportunity to create a complex historical story that avoids the risk of replicating the problematic divide between the supposed empowered and enlightened “scientific observer” and the subjugated and superstitious “observed other.” Spiritualists, after all, were not passive agents in these investigations, but actively contributed to the construction of knowledge about their culture.
This is reflected in the way Victorian investigators often relied on spiritualists for important insights into the movement. One of those spiritualist believers that I devote considerable attention to in Psychic Investigators is Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection. What is particularly interesting about Wallace is that he was both a firm believer in spirit and psychic forces, and also a leading scientific figure. He is therefore a fantastic example of how the relationship between science and mediumship can be very blurry and not necessarily in opposition to one another.
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