The Birth of the Spiritualist Movement

My Dad always used to say, "If you do not know where you've come from, then you don't know where you are." Modern Paranormal Investigators have their roots in the Spiritualist Movement. This will be the first of many posts I hope to make on the subject.

The Spiritualist Movement was prefigured in the writings of trance-healers like Emmanuel Swedenborg and Andrew Jackson Davis. These individuals helped establish the theoretical and practical basis of Spiritualism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. However, the Spiritualists truly came into their own on March 31, 1848. That was the day the Fox Sisters, in rural New York state, publicly claimed that they were able to communicate with a spirit in their house. In countless demonstrations, they asked the spirit questions and were answered with ghostly knocking of a seemingly unknown origin. Later, one of the Fox sisters claimed it was all a parlor trick, but the celebrity they enjoyed seems to have catalysed a movement that swept across the United States.

Spiritualism grew rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially among middle and upper middle class. Numerous charlatans took advantage of the burgeoning movement. These so-called mediums entertained theatergoers through spectacle. Many (though not all!) were later exposed as frauds, but no amount of debunking could extinguish the enthusiasm. Spiritualism sought to connect the living with the dead and in the aftermath of the American Civil War, when so many people lost sons, it is easy to see how this movement found fertile soil.

Today, armed with a more scientific outlook, Paranormal Investigators do not rely on theatricality or wishful thinking. But, we should remember that this desire to communicate with "the other side" has it's roots in centuries past.