GHOSTED: A History of Ghost Hunting, and Why We Keep Looking, by Alice Vernon
In 1908, the Irish journalist W.T. Stead lost his beloved son, Willie, to illness. A year later, Stead published a book about the communications he had experienced with Willie via a medium. Willie spoke to him just as he had in life, he said, revealing personal details only known to the family. “After this I can doubt no more,” the father wrote.
Doubt, however, is at the very heart of Alice Vernon’s engaging but scattershot “Ghosted.” The author, a university lecturer in parapsychology, sleep disorders and horror fiction, takes on our enduring need to commune with the undead — and pin them down.
While the concept of the revenant specter has existed as long as its mortal counterpart, Vernon, who confesses her own skepticism, is primarily concerned with “ghost-hunting,” the relatively modern effort to record contacts with the undead.
Vernon’s story begins with Spiritualism, the 19th-century religious movement based on the belief that consciousness survives beyond the body. Spiritualism flowered in the morbidly-minded Victorian era, and from its earliest days was tested both by charlatans eager to exploit the bereaved and by equally passionate debunkers.
Needless to say, America was home to all manner of gleeful hucksters, starting with the Fox sisters of upstate New York, who kicked off a global craze for “table-rapping” in the late 1840s. However, their primitive frauds were swiftly eclipsed by mediums exploiting forces of “animal magnetism,” levitation and psychic powers — for a fee — to pierce the veil, a business that boomed after the massive losses of the Civil War.
In 1868, the British Spiritualist Emma Hardinge Britten outlined her “Rules to Be Observed for the Spirit-Circle.” These included a cool, well-ventilated room, a wooden table for optimal conductivity and, crucially, dim lighting. (Chronically ill and boring people were also discouraged.)
But a crowded bereavement market meant constantly upping the eerie ante: By the 1870s, writes Vernon, “table-tilting was already old hat, and people were dissatisfied with receiving messages from their loved ones through the creaking of wooden boards.” Mediums began conjuring phantoms who’d interact with onlookers and communicate messages from the beyond.
Later generations would evolve to producing dramatic lengths of “ectoplasm,” acquire vaguely “Oriental” or Native American guides, conjure the voice of Shakespeare and, when ghost photography came on the scene, provide images of Abraham Lincoln (albeit with a suspiciously mitten-like hand) and hazy figures who, in a pinch, could pass for a dead loved one.
And as in all things, fashions changed: At certain moments, the vogue was less for the globe-trotting ghosts who showed up for séances than homebodies (hauntings) or malignant, body-snatching poltergeists.
If all this seems goofy to the modern reader — and Vernon can’t help poking fun at the more outlandish stunts, or at some of the truly bizarre theology — it’s worth remembering that plenty of contemporaries were equally unconvinced.
Magicians, in particular, felt both competitive and proprietary when they saw mediums using their conjuring tricks to extort the vulnerable; Harry Houdini became a committed debunker. Some investigators also had no patience with what they saw as quack science and took to infiltrating, and then disrupting, London séances.
To others, speaking with the dead seemed no more improbable than telegraphs and electricity; many serious thinkers, including the psychologist William James, would spend years attempting to treat Spiritualism with the dispassion of scientific method.
Doubters sometimes fell into the trap of wanting to believe. In the 1870s, the well-respected chemist William Crookes observed the teenage London medium Florence Cook, known for going into a cabinet and materializing a spirit called Katie King, who’d emerge and prance around the darkened room. Crookes became a fervent believer, even after a fellow scientist grabbed “Katie King” mid-séance and found her to be Florence Cook wearing a bedsheet.
Investigators could take such liberties with often young, often female mediums, using the excuse, in Vernon’s words, “to poke, probe and, in short, harass them in a way that seemed to be acceptable conduct in the séance room.” The fact that some mediums were frankly orgasmic when in trances presumably only added to the titillation in an otherwise rigid sexual climate.
“Ghosted” is at its best when the author explores the shifting balance of power between mediums and investigators — the traumatized grief of desperate World War I parents giving way to the macho nerd-dom of the modern “ghost-hunter,” out for spectral scalps and YouTube hits.
At other times, the subject feels too vast for the parameters of the book. Vernon takes distracting detours into stunt journalism; elsewhere, she indulges tantalizing theories — Thatcherite housing policy leading to teenage possession; the guilt of colonialism manifesting as poltergeists — only to drop them.
But ghost stories are never dull. And perhaps Vernon’s real subject is the basic need to believe, as true now as at the turn of the last century. Indeed, perhaps it’s more vital — and human — than ever before.
GHOSTED: A History of Ghost Hunting, and Why We Keep Looking | By Alice Vernon | Bloomsbury Sigma | 304 pp. | $28
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