MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS?

Trevor Hamilton, Arthur Balfour’s Ghosts: An Edwardian Elite and the Riddle of the Cross-Correspondence Automatic Writings. Imprint Academic. 

Over the years, I’ve rather gloated over my standard reply to the sceptics’ usual line: ‘There’s not a shred of evidence for an afterlife’. Not being remotely a sceptic myself – because of some personal experiences that aren’t strictly relevant here – I’d reply, ‘Oh, so you dismiss the Cross-Correspondences, do you?’ 

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SPIRIT LEVELS

Lisa Morton. Calling the Spirits; a History of Séances. Reaktion Books, 2020.

The desire to communicate with the dead has been a human obsession for millennia. Lisa Morton demonstrates this by beginning her review of the séance phenomenon, not as one might expect in the nineteenth century with the Fox sisters and the birth of Spiritualism, but by going back to examine the actions and beliefs of ‘necromancers’ from earlier millennia. 

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SEEING THE LIGHT

Matt Wingett. Conan Doyle and the Mysterious World of Light. Life is Amazing Publishers, 2020. 

People frequently comment, when discussing Conan Doyle’s belief in the supernatural, how could someone who created the ultra-logical character of Sherlock Holmes also defend such a clearly fraudulent phenomenon as the Cottingley fairies. This book goes a good way to answer that question, but leaves us at a vital moment and with many questions.

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THE FIGHT OF THE CENTURY

Joel Martin and William J. Birnes. Edison vs. Tesla - The Battle over their Last Invention. Skyhorse Publishing, 2017.

If you were asked, right now as in a conversation, who do you think were the greatest inventors of all time, who would come in the top places of your list? It is a good bet that Thomas Edison would come top, or thereabouts, on most people's lists. Nikola Tesla would be there too.
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STARS OF STAGE AND SEANCE

Simone Natale. Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016.

Today we see the prepackaged corporate entertainment business as somehow separate from science, religion and daily life but in the Victorian period things were very different. 

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ELIMINATING THE IMPOSSIBLE

Stefan Bechtel and Laurence Roy Stains. Through a Glass Darkly: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Quest to Solve the Greatest Mystery of All. St Martin’s Press, 2017.

When Canadian medium ‘Margery’ produced the voice, seemingly of her dead brother, even when her mouth and nose were covered by a sceptical investigator, the said spirit demanded, ‘Now, Doctor, isn’t that convincing?’ To which the man replied, with utter seriousness, ‘How do I know you don’t talk through your ears?’

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PAYING THE PRICE

Paul Adams The Enigma of Rosalie: Harry Price’s Paranormal Mystery Revisited. White Crow Books, 2017.

On the evening of Wednesday 15th December 1937, in a house somewhere in London, that may or may not have been in Brockley or equally may or may not have been in Kensington, the then famous psychical researcher Harry Price had an experience for which the word “amazing” is far too trite.

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MEDIUM WAVE

Erlendur Haraldsson and Loftur R. Gissurarson. Indridi Indridason: The Icelandic Physical Medium. White Crow Books, 2015.

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Zofia Weaver. Other Realities? The Enigma of Franek Kluski’s Mediumship. White Crow Books, 2015.

The stories of Indridi Indridason (1883-1912) and Franek Kluski (pseudonym for Teofil Modrzejewski (1873-1943), give us an extremes example of apparently rational and sober people reporting events which by currently accepted views of the world, just could not have happened, and indeed it is difficult to imagine any world view at all in which such things could be possible.

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GROPING IN THE DARK

David Jaher. The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction and Houdini in the Spirit World, Crown Publishers, 2015

This book provides a fascinating insight into a lost world, the post-apocalyptic 1920s, a decade in which the world was crawling back from the twin catastrophes of the Great War and the nightmarish influenza epidemic, Between them these two nightmares had taken at least 100,000,000 lives, and left families shattered.
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WORLD OF THE SPIRIT

Christopher M. Moreman (editor) The Spiritualist Movement: Speaking With the Dead in America and Around the World. Three volumes. Prager, 2013
Volume 1: American origins and global proliferation;
Volume 2: Belief, practice and evidence for life after death;
Volume 3: Social and cultural responses.
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ART AND THE OCCULT

Charles Colbert. Haunted Visions; Spiritualism and American Art. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

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Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker and Gian Casper Bott (Eds.). Séance; Albert von Keller and the Occult. University of Washington Press/Frye Art Museum. 2011.

In 1855 the American artist William Sidney Mount received two letters from another artist, encouraging him in his work, and giving advice as to the manner in which his paintings should develop. Although critical of the “sameness of design” in some of Mount’s paintings he acknowledged the originality of much else of his work.

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SEX, DRUGS AND SÉANCES

Marlene Tromp. Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs and Self-transformation in Victorian Spiritualism. The University of New York Press, 2006

Concentrating on a forgotten group, the Victorian female materialisation medium, Marlene Tromp explores how they constructed liminal personalities and behaviours. There was the séance room with its atmosphere of suppressed sexuality, one of the few places where men and women could actually touch each other in the dark, and the materialised spectres produced by these mediums.
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THEATRE OF TRANCE

Amy Lehman. Victorian Women and the Theatre of Trance: Mediums, Spiritualists and Mesmerists in Performance. McFarland and Company, 2009.

There is a growing academic interest in the spiritualist movement and its alleged phenomena as a means of artistic expression, We have reviewed in the past several studies which have reviewed 'spirit photographs' in the context of the art and history of photography and their use of the conventions of photography and related visual arts. Now it is the turn of the performing arts.
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