In March 1874, in a London drawing room, an engineer named Cromwell Varley wired a young woman to a galvanometer. The young woman was the medium Florence Cook. Varley fixed platinum electrodes on her arms, ran them out through a battery, and connected them to a mirror galvanometer of the type he had helped design for the Atlantic telegraph cable nine years earlier. From an outer room, sitters watched the galvanometer needle deflect on a graduated scale. While they watched, the cabinet in the next room produced what was called the materialised body of “Katie King.” When the figure withdrew, Cook came out of trance and the wires were undisturbed.
The experiment was a literal physical instance of telegraph instruments being used in a séance. The same hardware Varley had taken to the floor of the Atlantic in 1865 was now wired to a medium in Hackney, watching for the dead.
This article is about a long episode. From the Hydesville rappings of 1848 to the death of Conan Doyle in 1930, the Victorian and post-Victorian Spiritualist movement organised itself in the vocabulary of the telegraph. The press named the medium’s code after Morse, the newspapers named themselves after the cable, the engineers ran their séances with the same instruments they ran the wires with, and the philosophers at Cambridge coined the word “telepathy” in lockstep with the wired imagination of communication at distance. The fraud in the séance room was real and well documented, the believers were people of intellectual stature, and the pattern that bound the two together was the technology of the day.
The Hydesville rappings, March 1848
The line that started it all is Friday, 31 March 1848, in a small wooden cottage in Hydesville, New York. The family of John D. Fox, a farmer, had been hearing inexplicable rapping sounds in the house for several nights. On the 31st his daughters, Catherine (age 11) and Margaretta (age 14), proposed a code. They would clap their hands a number of times and ask the rapping presence to copy them. The raps came back, in matching count. They asked the presence its age and the counting answered in raps.
The girls’ older sister Leah, hearing of this in Rochester, took them in and the séances expanded. Within eighteen months the household was holding public demonstrations. The Corinthian Hall demonstration in Rochester on 14 November 1849 drew hundreds.
Samuel Morse’s electric telegraph had gone public four years earlier, on 24 May 1844, with the famous transmission “What hath God wrought” from Washington to Baltimore. By the late 1840s the wires were spreading across the United States and the press was full of them. The vocabulary of dots and dashes and counted clicks was new and electric, and it was a metaphor the public could reach for. By 1851 the Spiritualist press was describing the rappings as spirits “enabled through these mediums, or conductors, to produce rappings, like the magnetic telegraph, corresponding to letters of the alphabet.” The metaphor was explicit. The Fox sisters were the medium and the alphabet was the code, and the spirits were broadcasting on the wire.
One technical detail rules out the modern image of “Spiritualist Morse code.” The Hydesville and Rochester code was alphabetical position-counting: A was one rap, B two raps, C three raps, and so on through twenty-six. It was not dot-dash. The connection to the telegraph was rhetorical, not technical. But the rhetoric stuck. By the time the movement began publishing its own newspapers in 1852, “telegraph” was the word.
The Hydesville cottage stood in a region that had already produced more religious innovation per square mile than anywhere else in nineteenth-century America. Western New York, the so-called “Burned-Over District,” had nurtured Joseph Smith and the Mormons in the 1820s, William Miller’s Adventists in the 1830s, the Shakers, and the Oneida community of John Humphrey Noyes. The Fox sisters were the next wave. By 1850 the movement counted believers in every major American city.
The press coverage was breathless. Horace Greeley invited Kate Fox into his home in 1850 for testing. The New York Tribune published. P. T. Barnum hired the sisters to perform in his hotel. Within a few years the movement had its own circuit of speakers, mediums, and conventions. By 1854 the Society for the Diffusion of Spiritual Knowledge was meeting in New York City as the first formal American Spiritualist organisation.
The newspapers
In May 1852 the first sustained American Spiritualist weekly began publication in New York. Its name was The Spiritual Telegraph. The editor was Samuel Byron Brittan, a former Universalist minister who had drifted out of the church into Spiritualism. The publisher was Charles Partridge. From the first issue the paper organised the movement in print. It carried letters from mediums across the country, accounts of sittings, theological speculation, exposures of fraud (when the editors thought it useful), and announcements of meetings. By the late 1850s the print run had reached an estimated several thousand subscribers. The paper ran until 1860, when it was absorbed by Andrew Jackson Davis’s Herald of Progress. Bound volumes survive at the Library of Congress (catalogue number sn93062939) and at the Internet-based archive of the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals.
A companion publication, The Telegraph Papers, collected the weeklies into bound quarterly volumes. By 1857 these collections filled eight thick books.
In Boston, Banner of Light ran from 11 April 1857 to 18 August 1906, the longest-lived Spiritualist weekly in the United States. Its editor Luther Colby kept the paper going for forty-nine years. It claimed circulations between fifteen and thirty thousand, though historians treat those figures as inflated. The Christian Spiritualist (New York, 1854-1857) was the organ of the Society for the Diffusion of Spiritual Knowledge. In London, The Spiritualist began on 19 November 1869, edited by William Henry Harrison, and ran until 1882. By the time the British movement had its own organ, the American framework was twenty years old.
Brittan did not pick the name The Spiritual Telegraph by accident. His first issues laid out a programme: the rappings were the code, the mediums were the operators, and the wires ran from this world to the next. Spiritualism in print was the telegraph carried into the supernatural.
Andrew Jackson Davis and the cosmology
The American Spiritualist movement had a cosmology before it had a wire. The cosmology came from Andrew Jackson Davis (1826-1910), a young man from Poughkeepsie, New York, who in the early 1840s had begun entering trance states and dictating speech that his amanuensis Dr. William Levingston wrote down. Davis was twenty-one when his first major book appeared: The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind (New York, 1847). The book is 800 pages of trance dictation taken from Davis by the scribe William Fishbough. It lays out a Swedenborgian cosmology of ascending spheres, with souls progressing after death through stages of moral and intellectual refinement. Davis named the destination “Summerland.”
When the Hydesville rappings began in March 1848, Davis was already known. His framework gave the rappings a theology to fit into. The dead were not gone; they were in the spheres above; communication with them was possible because the universe was a single graded continuum. By the early 1850s Davis had explicitly added the telegraph to the framework. His 1851 Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse used the word “telegraph” for the relationship between living and dead. The metaphor became doctrinal.
Davis was also the bridge to the American women’s-rights movement. The historian Ann Braude, in Radical Spirits (Beacon Press, 1989), has argued that American Spiritualism and the American women’s-rights movement were deeply intertwined and that the same activists circulated through both. The rosters of Spiritualist conventions and women’s-rights conventions overlapped substantially. Spiritualism gave women the only contemporary religious platform with no ordained male clergy gatekeeping the rostrum. A woman who entered trance could speak from the stage with authority.
Davis lived to ninety, long enough to see the movement he had named pass through its first wave of fraud exposures, retreat into psychical research, and re-emerge as a religious organisation. He died in 1910, four years after Banner of Light finally folded.
The British engineering circle
Spiritualism crossed the Atlantic in the early 1850s. By 1855 Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-1886), the most famous medium of the century, was holding séances in London for an audience that included Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and the Empress Eugénie of France. Home was unusual among mediums of his generation in that he was never publicly caught in fraud during a paid demonstration. He was caught privately at least twice. Frederick Merrifield observed him in Ealing in 1855 using what looked like a false limb as a “spirit hand.” Dr. Théodore Barthez observed him in Biarritz in 1857 using his foot to fake effects in front of the Empress, and General Fleury allegedly conducted Home out of the country. Neither incident reached the press in his lifetime. Robert Browning, who detested Home and despised his wife Elizabeth’s enthusiasm for him, wrote his savage 1864 dramatic monologue “Mr. Sludge, ‘The Medium’” in Dramatis Personae. The narrator confesses, “I cheated when I could, rapped with my toe-joints, set sham hands at work.” Browning never personally observed Home cheating. The poem was an act of literary frustration.
The figure who turned Home into a scientific event was William Crookes (1832-1919), the chemist who in 1861 had discovered the element thallium. Crookes was the editor of the Quarterly Journal of Science. In its July 1871 issue he published “Experimental Investigation of a New Force,” reporting a controlled experiment in which Home was placed inside a copper-wire mesh cage with an accordion suspended by one hand at the end opposite the keyboard. The accordion played, with no visible human contact. Crookes thought he had measured a new physical force. The experiment is reprinted in his 1874 book Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism.
In March 1874, three years later, Crookes invited his colleague Cromwell Fleetwood Varley (1828-1883) to apply telegraph instruments to the medium Florence Cook. Varley’s qualifications were unique. He had been chief electrician of the Atlantic Telegraph Company. The first transatlantic cable opened briefly in 1858 and failed within weeks; the durable cable that carried regular traffic was laid in 1866 after a further attempt in 1865. He had personally helped to design the mirror galvanometer that Lord Kelvin used to read the cable’s faint signals. The mirror galvanometer was a small magnetised needle suspended on a silk fibre, with a tiny mirror attached. A current passing through a coil around the needle deflected it; the mirror reflected a beam of lamplight onto a graduated scale; the scale gave the reader the current strength. It was the most sensitive electrical instrument of its day.
Varley wired the same instrument to Florence Cook. Platinum electrodes were placed on the medium’s arms, the wires ran out to a battery, and the galvanometer registered the current passing through her body in the cabinet. Varley sat in an outer room watching the deflection. He reported that the current ran continuously for the length of the séance, and that when “Katie King” appeared in another room the current showed no break. When Cook came out of trance, Varley examined the wires. They were undisturbed.
Varley published his account that year in The Spiritualist. The reading he gave it was that no human substitution could have occurred without breaking the circuit, and therefore the materialised figure could not have been Cook in disguise. Sceptics offered then and offer now the alternative reading: that confederates, false electrodes, false readings, or pre-arranged signals could have produced the same result. The experiment is one of the most carefully documented séance protocols of the nineteenth century, and it remains contested.
Crookes himself extended the work in March, April, and May 1874 with a series of séances at his London home. He claimed photographs of both Cook and Katie King in the same frame. The negatives were destroyed by Crookes; only engravings and prints survive. In 1962 Trevor Hall published The Spiritualists, arguing that Crookes had been Cook’s lover and a knowing accomplice. The argument is not the consensus reading.
The third figure in the British engineering circle was Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940), the physicist who developed the syntonic radio tuner and held the original British patents on radio circuit design. His son Raymond was killed near Ypres on 14 September 1915, eleven days before the Battle of Loos opened. Lodge spent the rest of his life in mediumistic communication with Raymond through the medium Gladys Osborne Leonard. His 1916 book Raymond, or Life and Death (Methuen) was a Victorian best-seller. Lodge believed the spirit world inhabited the luminiferous ether (he was a lifelong holdout for ether physics) and that mediums “tuned in” to the dead the way a syntonic receiver tunes to a transmitter. He was president of the Society for Psychical Research from 1901 to 1903.
Three engineers, three generations, three different relationships to the cable and the wave. The pattern is consistent. The men who worked the wires were unusually drawn into the séance room.
The Society for Psychical Research, 1882
On 20 February 1882, in the rooms of the British National Association of Spiritualists in London, a small group of Cambridge philosophers and Spiritualists founded the Society for Psychical Research. The first president was Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge. The first secretaries included Frederic W. H. Myers (1843-1901), classics fellow of Trinity College, and Edmund Gurney (1847-1888), who had abandoned a career in music to study mathematics at Cambridge. The American branch followed in 1885, with William James as one of its first vice-presidents.
The SPR was an attempt to apply scientific protocols to the séance room. The methods were borrowed from experimental psychology and forensic investigation. Mediums were placed under controlled conditions; séances were timed; sitters were rotated; results were tabulated. The society’s Proceedings and Journal began publication immediately. Edmund Gurney, F. W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore co-authored Phantasms of the Living (Trübner, 1886), a 1,400-page collection of cases. The 1894 Census of Hallucinations, edited by Eleanor Sidgwick, surveyed 17,000 people and concluded that apparitions of the dying coincided with deaths at a rate higher than chance. The methodology has been contested ever since.
The most consequential single act of the SPR’s first decade was a coinage. In 1882, in a paper to the Cambridge “Sidgwick group,” Frederic Myers introduced the word “telepathy.” He took it from Greek roots, tele- (distant) and -patheia (feeling), and used it to describe the apparent transmission of thought from one mind to another without sensory channel. The literary scholar Roger Luckhurst, in The Invention of Telepathy 1870-1901 (Oxford University Press, 2002), has argued that the word could not have been coined a generation earlier. The wired imagination of instantaneous communication-at-distance was a precondition for the concept. The telegraph and the telephone made “telepathy” thinkable; the wireless decade that followed made it propagate. Myers, William James, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, W. T. Stead, Andrew Lang, and the young Sigmund Freud were all entangled in a single discursive network around the word.
Hodgson and his colleagues had a wide investigative reach. Richard Hodgson investigated Madame Blavatsky in Adyar, India, in December 1884 after the Coulomb affair exposed her use of confederates. He published the report in the SPR Proceedings of December 1885, condemning her as “one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history.” Hodgson then took over the Boston investigation of the medium Leonora Piper, whom William James had named his “white crow,” meaning that one genuine medium would disprove the claim that all are fraud.
In August and September 1895 the SPR ran its most famous physical-medium investigation at Frederic Myers’s house in Cambridge, about twenty sittings in all. The medium was Eusapia Palladino. The sitters were Sidgwick, his wife Eleanor, Myers, Hodgson, and Oliver Lodge. They used a balance and a dynamometer to measure forces in the séance room. Hodgson observed Palladino free a hand and use her feet to move objects. The SPR thereafter banned further work with her in Britain. She continued to perform on the continent and to be tested by the Italian and French societies for another twenty years.
Today the SPR archive is held at Cambridge University Library, accepted as an ongoing collection in 1989. It runs to roughly 160 linear metres and covers material from 1749 to 1998. The catalogue is open to readers with a CUL card.
The case file
The investigative cycle of the SPR and its American counterpart produced a long case file. Some figures survived scrutiny; others did not. The pattern across the cases is consistent. The record is not a record of vindication or of exposure. It is a record of careful, contested, sometimes brilliant, sometimes credulous investigation.
Daniel Dunglas Home. The medium who never failed a public test. Crookes’s accordion-in-cage experiment of 1871, the séances with the Brownings and the Empress Eugénie, the levitations witnessed by Lord Adare and others. The contemporary press found nothing. Privately, Home was caught at least twice (Merrifield 1855, Barthez 1857). He died of tuberculosis in 1886, never publicly disgraced.
Florence Cook. The medium whose Katie King materialised in Crookes’s home in 1874. Two seizure incidents seriously damaged Cook’s reputation. The first was on 9 December 1873 at the Cook family home in Hackney. William Volckman, a sceptical sitter, grabbed the materialised Katie King, felt corset and undergarments matching Cook’s, was scratched on the nose, and published the accusation in The Spiritualist. The second was on 9 January 1880 at one of Cook’s séances. Sir George Sitwell, then a 20-year-old Oxford undergraduate (later the eccentric father of the Sitwell literary siblings), grabbed the materialisation called “Marie.” Marie was Cook in her underwear, corset, and flannel petticoat. Cook continued to operate as a medium until her death in 1904.
Eusapia Palladino. The Italian medium investigated by the SPR in 1895 (caught) and by Everard Feilding, Hereward Carrington, and W. W. Baggally in Naples in November-December 1908 (over eleven sittings at the Hotel Victoria, with the published report concluding in favour of genuine phenomena under their controls). On 18 December 1909, Hugo Münsterberg, the Harvard psychologist, hosted a New York séance at which a confederate hidden under the table caught Palladino levitating it with her freed foot. The Columbia University physics laboratory series of January-April 1910, organised by the philosopher Dickinson Miller with the magicians Joseph Rinn, John Sargent, and James Kellogg, confirmed foot-and-hand tricks. Palladino later admitted to an American reporter that she cheated when her sitters “willed” her to.
Leonora Piper. The Boston medium William James called his “white crow.” The 1888-1890 investigations by Richard Hodgson found a series of trance “controls” delivering information that, in James’s reading, could not have been gained by ordinary means. The most famous control was the spirit of George Pellew, a real New York lawyer who had died accidentally in February 1892. Within a month a “Pellew” persona began speaking through Piper, claiming to recognise sitters who had been Pellew’s friends in life and to fail to recognise strangers. Hodgson published the case in SPR Proceedings vol. 8 (1892), lightly disguising Pellew as “George Pelham.” A separate phenomenon emerged after Hodgson’s own death in December 1905: a “Richard Hodgson” persona began communicating through Piper. William James investigated and published “Report on Mrs. Piper’s Hodgson-Control” in Proceedings of the American SPR vol. 3 (1909). He did not commit himself either way.
Margery (Mina) Crandon. The wife of the Boston surgeon Le Roi Goddard Crandon. In 1924 Scientific American offered a $2,500 prize for “conclusive psychic manifestations.” The committee included the magician Harry Houdini. Houdini built a wooden box (the “Margery box”) that allowed only Crandon’s hands and head to project, controlled by the committee members. He published a 1924 booklet exposing her techniques, Houdini Exposes the Tricks Used by the Boston Medium “Margery.” The most damaging individual exposure came in 1932. Margery had produced wax thumbprints she claimed were impressions of her dead brother Walter. The psychic investigator E. E. Dudley demonstrated the thumbprint was identical to that of her dentist, Dr. Frederick Caldwell, who had supplied her with sample wax and dental materials.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. The Russian-born co-founder of the Theosophical Society. Investigated by Richard Hodgson at Adyar in December 1884 after the Coulomb affair. The 1885 Hodgson Report in SPR Proceedings vol. 3 condemned her as a fraud. A century later, in April 1986, the SPR published in its own Journal (vol. 53, no. 803) a 50-year SPR member named Vernon Harrison, a professional document-forgery expert and not a Theosophist, with an essay titled “J’Accuse: An Examination of the Hodgson Report of 1885.” Harrison concluded the Hodgson Report was “riddled with slanted statements, conjectures advanced as fact.” The SPR did not formally retract the original report. Harrison expanded his essay into a 1997 book published by the Theosophical University Press. Both the original 1885 verdict and Harrison’s 1986 attack on its methodology are part of the case file.
The case file does not resolve into a single verdict. Some séances were caught immediately, others have never been satisfactorily explained, and the SPR record preserves the contest rather than closing it.
The Houdini-Doyle feud
Two figures fought the most public quarrel of the Spiritualist period in print: Harry Houdini (1874-1926), the magician, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), the creator of Sherlock Holmes and from 1916 onwards a public Spiritualist.
Houdini and Doyle had been friends. They corresponded warmly through 1920 and 1921. The fissure came on Sunday, 18 June 1922, in Doyle’s suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City. Lady Jean Doyle, an automatic-writing medium, sat with Houdini and produced fifteen pages of writing she said came from Cecilia Weiss, Houdini’s mother, who had died in July 1913.
Houdini did not believe a word of it. The pages opened with a Christian cross at the top, and Cecilia Weiss had been the wife of Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weiss. The text was in fluent English, and Cecilia spoke only German, Hungarian, and Yiddish. The séance took place on Cecilia’s birthday, and the “spirit” of his mother had not mentioned it. Houdini sat through the session in respectful silence and left without saying what he thought. The publication that followed showed what he had thought.
In 1924 Houdini published A Magician Among the Spirits (Harper and Brothers, New York). The book is a systematic exposure of Spiritualist mediums of the previous fifty years, with chapters on the Fox sisters, Daniel Dunglas Home, Eusapia Palladino, and a dozen others. He included an account of the Atlantic City séance and of the Doyles’ role. Doyle severed contact upon publication.
Doyle responded in 1926 with The History of Spiritualism (Cassell, London), two volumes. The book is a sympathetic survey of the movement from Hydesville onwards. It does not attack Houdini directly, but it is the answering monument.
Houdini died on 31 October 1926 of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix. Doyle outlived him by four years. After Houdini’s death, Doyle wrote that Houdini had himself possessed psychic powers and had concealed them. The widow Beatrice Houdini, who held annual séances at Houdini’s grave for ten years to test his promise to communicate from the other side, formally ended the practice in 1936. Houdini did not appear.
Edison’s spirit phone and the radio era
Thomas Edison was 73 years old in October 1920, when he gave an interview to the financial journalist B. C. Forbes for American Magazine. The interview ran in volume 90, number 4, under the title “Edison Working on How to Communicate with the Next World.” In it Edison made the most consequential single statement on technology and the dead in the twentieth century. He told Forbes he had been at work for some time on an apparatus that might detect any personalities which had survived bodily death and could still register on instruments. He dismissed the existing Spiritualist apparatus, calling its common methods “unscientific nonsense.”
Edison framed the project as scientific instrumentation, comparable to the microscope or the telescope, and kept his distance from organised Spiritualism. He speculated that human consciousness might consist of “infinitesimally small units of life” that could persist after bodily death and that an apparatus sensitive enough might detect them. He never said the device existed. He said only that he was working on it.
In the years after his death in 1931, the question of whether Edison had built such a device became a minor industry of speculation. In 1948 the philosopher Dagobert D. Runes edited The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison (Philosophical Library, New York) and included a final chapter, “The Realms Beyond,” that elaborated the spirit-phone idea. The chapter was redacted from later American editions. In 2015 the French journalist Philippe Baudouin discovered a 1949 French translation, Le Royaume de l’Au-delà, at a flea market and republished it. The Rutgers University Edison Papers, the standard scholarly archive of Edison’s notebooks, contains no schematics or laboratory entries supporting an actual prototype. The current historical consensus is that the 1920 interview was a publicity provocation. Edison enjoyed publicity provocations.
What the 1920 interview did do, regardless of any device, was move the metaphor from telegraph to wireless. By 1920 the wired imagination of the 1850s had been replaced by the wireless imagination of the 1900s. Marconi’s first transatlantic radio signal had crossed the ocean in December 1901. The First World War had used radio at scale. The popular framing of communication-at-distance had shifted from “wire” to “wave.”
Sir Oliver Lodge had already done the bridging. After his son Raymond was killed near Ypres on 14 September 1915, Lodge sat for séances with Gladys Osborne Leonard and reported the results in Raymond, or Life and Death (Methuen, 1916). The book treats the spirit world as part of the luminiferous ether and treats mediumistic communication as syntonic tuning. In Lodge’s framework, the dead were broadcasters and the medium was a receiver. The metaphor that Cromwell Varley had grounded in the telegraph in 1874 had become wireless by 1916.
One popular line about Marconi is wrong. Marconi is widely quoted as having said that radio waves never die and that he wanted to listen for the voices of the dead, even hoping to hear angels in Bethlehem. The Italian biographer Marc Raboy, in his 2016 Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World (Oxford University Press), characterises Marconi as a skeptical rationalist toward telepathy and Spiritualism. The “voices of the dead” sentence is not in his record. It is a posthumous attribution.
The 1888 confession and the recantation
The defining moment of Spiritualist self-criticism came in October 1888. Margaret Fox, then 55 years old, walked onto the stage of the New York Academy of Music on the evening of Sunday, 21 October. The audience numbered about 2,000. Her sister Kate sat in the front row in support. Margaret read a signed confession that was published the following day in the New York World. In the version printed by the World, she explained that she made the statement as a duty and a mission to expose the fraud, and she told the audience she had been a young child when the deception began and a chief instrument in its later spread.
She then demonstrated. Doctors from the audience were brought to the stage. Margaret cracked her toe joints in the rhythm of the rappings. The doctors verified the sound was generated by her foot. Forty years of Spiritualist communication had begun, on her account, in the toe joints of two girls in a Hydesville cottage who had wanted to frighten their mother.
Roughly thirteen months later, in November 1889, Margaret Fox issued a written recantation. She said the confession had been coerced, that she had been paid, that the demonstration was a desperate act by a destitute woman in her later years. The recantation is as well documented as the confession. Both stand in the archive.
She died in poverty in 1893. Kate had died the year before. Leah, who had organised the original Rochester demonstrations and had taken her younger sisters into her household in 1848, lived until 1890. The defining episode of the movement is itself contested.
The pattern is the technology
The Society for Psychical Research is still in operation, still publishes a journal, and still investigates anomalous phenomena. The Cambridge University Library accepts the SPR archive as an ongoing collection. The catalogue runs to roughly 160 linear metres. The names that recur in the catalogue are still familiar: Sidgwick, Myers, Gurney, James, Lodge, Crookes, Hodgson, Doyle, Houdini, Price.
The cultural historian Jeffrey Sconce has argued, in Haunted Media (Duke University Press, 2000), that the pattern Cromwell Varley demonstrated in 1874 is still running. Every new electronic medium since the telegraph has been received in the same paranormal idiom of “electronic presence.” Telegraph in the 1840s, wireless in the 1900s, broadcast radio in the 1920s, television in the 1950s, internet from the 1990s onwards. Each technology reaches the popular imagination wearing the same clothes. The ghost in the wire, the voice in the static, the figure on the screen, the message from the unknown number. The cultural form survives the technology.
Sconce’s reading does not ask whether spirits exist. It asks why this particular cultural form attaches itself, again and again, to whatever distant-communication technology is new. The answer is partly grief. Lodge wrote about Raymond. Houdini’s mother had died in 1913 and his fight with Doyle was about her. Frederic Myers founded the SPR in 1882 in part because his cousin Annie Marshall Eliot had drowned herself in 1876 and he wanted to know whether she could still hear him. Trevor Hamilton’s Immortal Longings (Imprint Academic, 2009) makes the case that the science of psychical research was inseparable from the bereavements of the people who founded it. The wire was a way of asking.
For the Renaissance precedent in the same project, see John Dee in Bohemia: The Angelic Covenant of 21 April 1587. For the eighteenth-century background of esoteric organisation, see The Invisible College: An Introduction to Rosicrucianism and Cagliostro: Alchemist, Trickster, Prophet of Light.
Cromwell Varley’s mirror galvanometer survives in museum collections of Atlantic cable equipment. The Hydesville cottage was moved to Lily Dale, New York, in 1916 and burned to the ground in a fire in 1955. The Fox sisters’ graves are in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn. The Spiritualist Church of Lily Dale still meets every summer. The instruments and the archives are what survive. The question they were built to answer is the one we still have not closed.
Image Sources
- Hero (Varley’s galvanometer experiment, 1874): original dark-romanticism interpretation by The Crazy Alchemist, generated with Google Gemini 3 Pro Image (Nano Banana Pro), May 2026.
- The Hydesville rappings, March 1848 (Fox sisters lithograph, 1852): Mrs. Fish and the Misses Fox, the original mediums of the mysterious noises at Rochester Western, N.Y. Lithograph published by N. Currier of New York after a daguerreotype by Appleby of Rochester, 1852. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62-98532). Public domain. Source file via Wikimedia Commons.
- The 1888 confession at the New York Academy of Music: original dark-romanticism interpretation by The Crazy Alchemist, generated with Google Gemini 3 Pro Image (Nano Banana Pro), May 2026.
- Edison portrait, 1922: photograph by Louis Bachrach (Bachrach Studios), c. 1922. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-DIG-cph-3c05139). Public domain. Source file via Wikimedia Commons.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Capron, E. W., and H. D. Barron. Singular Revelations: Explanation and History of the Mysterious Communion with Spirits, Comprehending the Rise and Progress of the Mysterious Noises in Western New York. Auburn, NY: Capron and Barron, 1850
- Capron, E. W. Modern Spiritualism: Its Facts and Fanaticisms. Boston: Bela Marsh, 1855
- Davis, Andrew Jackson. The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind. New York: S. S. Lyon and Wm. Fishbough, 1847
- Davis, Andrew Jackson. The Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse. New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1851
- The Spiritual Telegraph. New York, weekly, 1852-1860, edited by Samuel Byron Brittan and Charles Partridge. Library of Congress catalogue sn93062939
- Banner of Light. Boston, weekly, 11 April 1857 to 18 August 1906, edited by Luther Colby and William Berry
- The Spiritualist. London, fortnightly to weekly, 19 November 1869 to 1882, edited by William Henry Harrison
- Crookes, William. ‘Experimental Investigation of a New Force.’ Quarterly Journal of Science, July 1871; reprinted in Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism. London: J. Burns, 1874
- Varley, Cromwell Fleetwood. ‘Electrical Experiments with Miss Cook when Entranced.’ The Spiritualist, 1874
- Browning, Robert. ‘Mr. Sludge, “The Medium”.’ In Dramatis Personae. London: Chapman and Hall, 1864
- Hodgson, Richard. ‘Account of Personal Investigations in India, and Discussion of the Authorship of the “Koot Hoomi” Letters.’ Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 3 (December 1885): 201-400 (the Hodgson Report on Madame Blavatsky)
- Gurney, Edmund, F. W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore. Phantasms of the Living. London: Trübner, 1886, 2 vols.
- Hodgson, Richard. ‘A Record of Observations of Certain Phenomena of Trance’ [the Pellew investigation]. Proceedings of the SPR, vol. 8 (1892)
- Sidgwick, Eleanor M. ‘Report on the Census of Hallucinations.’ Proceedings of the SPR, vol. 10 (1894)
- Hodgson, Richard. ‘A Further Record of Observations of Certain Phenomena of Trance.’ Proceedings of the SPR, vol. 13 (1898)
- Lodge, Oliver. Raymond, or Life and Death. London: Methuen, 1916
- Bird, J. Malcolm. Margery the Medium. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1925 (the pro-Margery Bird volume)
- Houdini, Harry. A Magician Among the Spirits. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924
- Doyle, Arthur Conan. The History of Spiritualism. London: Cassell, 1926, 2 vols.
- Forbes, B. C. ‘Edison Working on How to Communicate with the Next World.’ American Magazine, vol. 90, no. 4 (October 1920)
- Runes, Dagobert D. (ed.). The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948 (final chapter ‘The Realms Beyond’ redacted from later American editions; rediscovered in French translation by Philippe Baudouin in 2015)
- Price, Harry. The Most Haunted House in England: Ten Years’ Investigation of Borley Rectory. London: Longmans, Green, 1940
- Price, Harry. The End of Borley Rectory. London: Harrap, 1946
- Dingwall, Eric J., Kathleen M. Goldney, and Trevor H. Hall. The Haunting of Borley Rectory: A Critical Survey of the Evidence. Proceedings of the SPR vol. 51, part 186 (1956); also London: Duckworth, 1956
- Margaret Fox. Confession at the New York Academy of Music, 21 October 1888, published New York World, 22 October 1888; written recantation, November 1889
- Feilding, Everard, Hereward Carrington, and W. W. Baggally. ‘Report on a Series of Sittings with Eusapia Palladino.’ Proceedings of the SPR, vol. 23 (1909): 309-569
- James, William. ‘Report on Mrs. Piper’s Hodgson-Control.’ Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, vol. 3 (1909)
- Harrison, Vernon. ‘J’Accuse: An Examination of the Hodgson Report of 1885.’ Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 53, no. 803 (April 1986): 286-310; expanded as H. P. Blavatsky and the SPR, Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 1997
- Society for Psychical Research archive, Cambridge University Library (accepted 1989; ~160 linear metres, 1749-1998)
- Oppenheim, Janet. The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985
- Owen, Alex. The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. London: Virago, 1989; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004
- Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989; 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001
- Carroll, Bret E. Spiritualism in Antebellum America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997
- Cox, Robert S. Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003
- Gutierrez, Cathy. Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009
- Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000
- Luckhurst, Roger. The Invention of Telepathy, 1870-1901. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002
- Thurschwell, Pamela. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001
- Connor, Steven. The Matter of Air: Science and the Art of the Ethereal. London: Reaktion, 2010
- Hamilton, Trevor. Immortal Longings: F. W. H. Myers and the Victorian Search for Life After Death. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2009
- Hall, Trevor H. The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. London: Duckworth, 1962 (the contested Crookes-Cook reading)
- Noakes, Richard. ‘Thoughts and Spirits by Wireless: Imagining and Building Psychic Telegraphs in America and Britain, circa 1900-1930.’ Article available via ResearchGate / Academia.edu
- Raboy, Marc. Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016
- British Postal Museum and Archive, Atlantic cable instruments collection (including mirror galvanometer of the type used in 1865-66 expeditions)
