A Victorian Seance

New York is weird, okay? New York is really weird. Where else in the world could I have had my hand kissed by George Washington, befriended a monk, seen a barbershop quartet on the subway, tried durian ice cream that smelled kind of like a corpse (it was as nasty as you're probably imagining), seen a bunch of sculpted Christopher Walken heads just sticking up out of the grass like flowers, and attended a Victorian-style Séance at a place devoted to all things death-like?

Yes, you read that right. On Sunday, the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn held an event advertised as "a traditional Spiritualist message service, a ritual that dates back to the Victorian era."

Obviously I had to go.




Victorian Spiritualism: A Brief Background

Now though I'm using the term "Victorian", referring to the era Queen Victoria ruled over Britain, I'm going to be presenting this from an American perspective because that is what I know and that is where the movement started. (Sorry to my non-American readers. Victorian is just the easiest catch-all term for this time!) Most people credit the beginning of this movement with the Fox sisters of upstate New York, Margaret and Katie Fox, who began communicating with the spirit of a dead man in their home in 1848 via seances where the spirit would answer questions by knocking on wood.

Now whether or not you believe the Fox sisters were really communicating with the dead or if they were a hoax, within a year there were over one hundred spiritual 'mediums' in New York City alone, and even more elsewhere. The spiritualism craze had really taken off and due to a variety of factors it would only get bigger.

First off, part of its appeal was that these seances served a very valid human need. They brought people together, often over a shared grief or scientific curiosity. And - oh, yes - it was considered a science. Mediums believed - or at least said they believed, depending on your beliefs - that they were proving consciousness continued after death. Not through God or Jesus, despite many Spiritualists verbally insisting they were good Christians and despite many seances actually beginning with hymns. But there was no hell in spiritualism, no vengeful God who sent unbaptised babies to hell - death was a natural process overseen by a benevolent creator, and all of the dead went to the same afterlife - one which could be accessed by the mediums themselves, as it existed on a sort of continuum with this living realm.

At this time, at least in America, popular attitudes about death were changing. Science and religion had been clashing more and more as of late. Burial reformers in the early part of the 19th century, in the wake of multiple illness outbreaks, had been pushing the idea of sanitary corpse disposal, which meant the dead were being taken away from their families much more rapidly. Spiritualism offered people a final chance to communicate with these lost loved ones, seeking a closure in seances that had been denied before. This became especially true after the Civil War, when Spiritualism really took off in America - people were dying so far from home and so young that people, especially women, were desperate for this closure.

Believe it or not, we can actually credit our modern-day interest in ghosts to the Victorian Spiritualist movement. Yes, ghost stories were told long before that - as far back as Ancient Greece - but it was the Spiritualists who saw the dead as something that could be communicated with rather than just a threat. In a roundabout way, we can blame Victorian mediums like the Fox sisters for TV shows like "Ghost Adventures"!

And to think it all began with two teenaged girls.

These two

Actually, that's important too. The spiritualist movement was a woman's movement. Victorian society was heavily patriarchal, as were religion and science, and mediumship offered women a voice, especially women who didn't fit an established mold. Many people don't realise this, but the early women's suffrage meetings had quite a few spiritualists among them.

Of course spiritualism didn't cause the drive for women's suffrage, but by giving American women a voice on a large scale, it helped support it. It was only then that the backlash against spiritualism began - the contemporary attitude of Victorian spiritualism as a ridiculous belief has roots in misogynist critics at the time denouncing it as foolish simply because it liberated women from rigid social and religious beliefs.

After a small resurgence after World War One, the spiritualist craze died off in the 1920s, at least in the mainstream consciousness. Part of this was because 1920s women were a lot more socially liberated than their Victorian sisters, and part of this was because spiritualist ideas got absorbed by the parapsychology field and were no longer considered quite so scientific.

But the curiosity about Spiritualism and communicating with the dead lives on.

A Victorian-Style Seance?

It was these thoughts which were circling around in my head as I rode the F-Train to Brooklyn to visit the Morbid Anatomy Museum. It's an interesting place. Downstairs, it's a café fit for even the hippest of Brooklyn hipster.

It's like eating in a Cabinet of Curiosities.

Upstairs there's a small exhibition space (currently filled with taxidermy but they switch it up every now and then) as well as a library with books on death and other morbid subjects and items such as Victorian hair wreaths and pickled punks dispersed throughout the bookshelf.

The séance itself was held in the dark basement. We were served free coffee and donuts. Believe it or not, that's actually pretty accurate to how the Victorians would have done it. These were social events, and sweets were often served to the guests. But unlike with the Victorians, we were not seated in a circle, but in rows. There was a short introduction by one of the museum employees on the history of séances (which was not nearly as in-depth as that ramble I just unleashed on you all), and then we met our two mediums, Lauren and Susan, both of Lily Dale, New York - a spiritualist community founded in 1879 which is apparently still going strong.

To be honest, while it was a very interesting event, it didn't feel very Victorian at all to me. Knowing what I know about Victorian spiritualism, this was a modern event through and through, more like an episode of 'The Long Island Medium' than anything the Fox sisters would have done. I don't know why it was advertised that way. There were no hymns sung (which I was grateful for, actually), there were no knocks on the walls, nothing was made to levitate.

Actually, come to think of it, Victorian séances were kinda silly, weren't they?

The event space - also fit for a small goth wedding service!

Lauren and Susan had two different methods of communicating with those who they called "in spirit" - ghosts, basically. Lauren's was more traditional, I guess. She stood at the front of the room and announced the traits she sensed in nearby ghosts. Like "I'm sensing an elderly woman... about 5'5... she's in an apron, so it's possible she liked to bake in life..." Then, if it sounded familiar, someone in the audience would mention one of their dead loved ones and she would hone in on their energy to see if it was that loved one, and relay any messages they had. I'm making it sound hokey, but in that moment we all believed. She got pretty specific - in one instance she was even able to give the spirit's name, Dorotea, much to the shock of Dorotea's great niece!

Susan's method was a bit more... new-agey? There is no way in hell I'm going to be able to describe this adequately. She did hand-painted visual readings, selecting an audience member first, reading their energy, painting on little cards, then honing in on the energy in the paintings to make contact with a dead loved one of the audience member. I'm not explaining it well at all. But it was a very interesting method to watch, not at all like anything I've ever seen before.

But... watching is all I really did. There were no spirits present that wanted to make contact with me. Secretly, I was a little disappointed until Sarah pointed out that I haven't been on the east coast very long - it's possible all my spirits are still back in California!


All in all, I'm glad I went, if only to say I did. I like the Morbid Anatomy Museum. I hope I get to go to more of their events in the future.

-Nym-