Spirits in the Material World

A helping of Halloween heebie-jeebies from The Ghosterity Kitchen

Emanuel Swedenborg arrived famished to a London inn late one April night in 1745. The dinner set before him he devoured, pausing only to savor its aroma. "How pleasant the food smells!," he remarked. “How wonderful the flavor!" After cleaning his plate he sank back in his chair. "I've never enjoyed a meal more," he sighed.

The Swede's enjoyment quickly turned to horror. A strange languor overtook him. His vision grew hazy and he felt himself held fast to his chair as if by powerful invisible hands. From his pores issued a vapor. Snakes wriggled and frogs flopped at his feet.  In one corner of the room appeared a shadowy figure. "Eat not so much," it commanded and then faded away.

Swedenborg obeyed the figure's command. For the rest of his life as a celebrated mystic, a career some say he began that very night at the inn, he observed an austere diet of bread, milk, and coffee. In this he was not unique. Because things mystic and gastric so often commingled, seers of all stripes hewed to one dietary regime or another.

They had good reason to do so. Swedenborg's celebrity sparked a fad for communing with the dearly departed. German philosopher Immanuel Kant dismissed Swedenborg as "a spook hunter," but not before he read all eight volumes of the mystic's Heavenly Mysteries. Napoleon claimed to be visited often by a ghostly "little red man" whose gloomy premonitions he took to heart, and Czar Alexander II wined and dined spiritualists in grand style. Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's fascination with the undead so annoyed her husband Robert that he felt moved to pen a satire entitled "Mr. Sludge, 'The Medium.'"

Alexandre Dumas fils received a visit from none other than dear old Dad, who bade him be "a good boy and love your mother." Defending spiritualism became something of a cause for German philosopher I.H. Fichte, who no doubt had something like the wisdom of Victor Hugo in mind to spur him on his crusade. "Those that depart still remain near us," wrote Hugo. "Sweet is their presence: holy is their converse with us."

In time, the yen for holy converse reached America’s shores. In 1848 the teenaged Fox sisters began hearing rapping sounds in their Hydesville, New York home. They replied in simple code, ending each message with the command, "Hear, Mr. Splintfoot, do as I do," their correspondent a 31-year-old man murdered some five years before. By the time the sisters got up the nerve to root around the premises for the victim's bones (these along with a few teeth they reportedly found), the entire Eastern seaboard was abuzz with tales of ghostly knocking. The messages often proved timely. Spirits contacting Abraham Lincoln rapped their demand that the country's four million slaves be freed. Harriet Beecher Stowe had dictated to her from beyond the entire text of Uncle Tom's Cabin. As perhaps only befitted one whose mind could conjure a headless horseman, Washington Irving found the raps reaching his ears a comfort. He claimed they were proof that "those we once loved [are] permitted to return and watch over our welfare." Longfellow echoed this sentiment. The avenues to those loved ones lie "all about us," he believed.

Though some among the dead preferred to address living relations, many chose to speak solely through mediums. Strange souls, mediums were a breed apart. Feeble-minded females who avoided meat made the best ones. Indeed, vegetarianism was deemed essential to the vocation. Members of the Theosophical Society felt it furthered their cause of promoting the "universal brotherhood of man," living and deceased. (The society’s founder, Helena Blavatsky, however, may have privately held a different opinion. No ascetic herself, her corpulence was such that she had to be hoisted aboard ships and other conveyances by a chair attached to a rope and pulley.) Other spiritualists likewise found that herbivory helped them commune with all creatures great and small. "The vegetarian diet is the most favorable to purity, chastity, and to perfect control of the appetites and passions," opined R. Swinburne Clymer, who enjoined "all true Spiritualists and Mystics" to do "all in their power" to abolish meat-eating, which he thought a "horrible crime."

Vegetarian or no, mediums seldom enjoyed an uninterrupted meal. Astronomer and philatelist James Ludovic Lindsay recalls a dinner he once shared with renowned medium Daniel Dunglas Home. No sooner had everyone tucked into the first course than "a chair came up to the table with a rush." A series of faint raps followed. The table then began to vibrate before rising some 15 inches, making finishing the soup course impossible. The raps continued, meanwhile, growing from faint to thunderous. Rays of color emitted by a crystal ball formed a vision of the sea as seen from a high cliff. In a ghostly sky stars twinkled.

Visions ran the gamut, appearing heavenly one night, hellish the next. A dinner party given by a medium named Moser saw its host seized by a disturbing presence. Taking up pen and paper, a possessed Moser drew a horse and truck. Below these he scrawled, "I killed myself --- I killed myself to-day -- Baker Street ... killed myself to-day under a steam roller." An article in that evening's edition of the Pall Mall Gazette later established Moser's vision as fact: A man had flung himself down before an approaching steamroller that bore an image of a horse.

As elated as a convincing spiritualist could leave witnesses, a dubious one could leave them flat. Frauds abounded. One British medium's powers, it was discovered, owed to nothing more than some muslin, a bottle of phosphorus, and a fake beard. The "spirit hand" of another medium operating in Boston turned out to be a cleverly carved piece of animal liver. In Berlin police wrestled a medium to the ground and pried from her petticoat items that would materialize during her séances -- some 157 flowers and a few dozen oranges and lemons. And in 1888, Margaret Fox appeared before an audience to demonstrate how she produced spirit rapping by cracking her toe joints. An essay she later published in the New York World contained the bald assertion, "Spiritualism is a fraud and a deception." Renowned Victorian illustrator George Cruikshank did Fox one better by imputing malicious intent to the trickery. He insisted that a "large and serious amount of suffering and injury" resulted from "belief in ghosts."

Whether gulling harmed those gulled is difficult to know. Suffice it to say that being taken in by a clever faker rates as one of the lesser injuries a body might suffer in the 19th century. Injurious or not, spiritualism fascinated Victorians. By 1897 more than 8 million people in the United States and Europe professed to be spiritualists. The movement's popularity poet Gerald Massey attributed to its power to "make religion infinitely more real" by translating "faiths into facts." For an age enamored of science, spiritualism offered skeptical minds irrefutable proof of an afterlife. That this proof was often ridiculous mattered little. Against glimpses of a luminous, more meaningful future existence, present material reality didn't stand a ghost of a chance.