On July 23, 1924, the editor of Scientific American, O.D. Munn, and six members of a scientific investigative committee gathered in a small room on the fourth floor of 10 Lime Street, Boston. It was hot and uncomfortable, after all, the city was experiencing a heat wave. But if there was any unease among the committee members, it was not because of the weather but rather the reason for their meeting.

The scientists had come together to witness the skills of a 36-year-old flapper called Mina Crandon who had divided public opinion for some time. Crandon, known as “Margery” to her supporters, or the Blond Witch of Lime Street to her opponents, was the most celebrated medium in the country. With the help of the spirit of her deceased brother, Walter, Crandon could allegedly demonstrate a variety of psychic abilities that had stumped believers and non-believers alike.

Crandon’s performances were so compelling, in fact, that she had been recommended to Munn by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories and known advocate for spiritualism. Doyle felt confident that Crandon’s abilities were so genuine that she would be able to verify the existence of ghosts, thereby winning the $5,000 prize offered by Scientific American for anyone who could demonstrate the reality of the paranormal.

However, the scientists were not alone on that hot day. Among their number was the renowned magician, Harry Houdini, who had joined them to assess Crandon’s claims.

What followed is one of the most heated and famous confrontations between a skeptic and a supposed medium. Houdini soon replicated Crandon’s tricks and performed them on stage without a hint of supernatural aid. This eventually left Crandon’s career in ruins.

But while the showdown between Houdini and Crandon is well known today, one feature is often overlooked: it was not the committee of scientists who caught the medium in the act, it was a magician. Although it is unclear, it seems the investigative committee was inclined to believe in Crandon’s performances until Houdini discredited her. Even then, they urged him not to publicize his denunciation as they remained divided on the issue.

Today, we like to think that science and spiritualism have always been deeply opposed – one dealing with credible, rational thinking and the other representing the theatrical mainstay of the credulous and fraudulent – but this is not the case. In reality, the spiritualist movement of the mid- to late- 19th century was taken seriously by many scientists, some of whom believed it was a new branch of science in itself, one that would finally prove the existence of the afterlife.

“The age of science”?

The 19th century is often described as the “age of science”. It was a time when the workings of the cosmos were increasingly being described in natural laws, when technology was advancing, and medicine was becoming a standardized, progressive scientific discipline. But if we focus on these developments alone, we lose sight of something curious taking place within the wider culture.

In the same decade that James Prescott Joule made significant contributions to the Law of the Conservation of Energy (1843), and anesthetics were successfully used in surgery for the first time (1846), three sisters from New York were supposedly communicating with the dead in front of amazed audiences. Although the Fox Sisters eventually admitted their séances were fake, it was too late. Their exploits had inspired a whole new religious movement.

By the 1850s, when Darwin was publishing On The Origin of Species, explaining his theory of evolution by natural selection, spiritualism had spread across America and Britain and then onto Europe. On either side of the Atlantic, audiences made up of the general public, as well as scientists, philosophers, and artists occupied séance rooms to witness the supposed miracles of mediumship for themselves.

Science Vs. Superstition, Skeptic Vs. Believer, or something else?

Rather than being opposed to the scientific ideals of the age, spiritualism actually complimented them. After all, anyone who championed the power of empiricism and first-hand experience could see it for themselves if they wanted to. In a sense, the séance was a special laboratory where interested parties could observe “experiments” with unseen forces.

Christian theology seemed too abstract, dogmatic, and bleak (think Eternal Damnation), and the sciences seemed too nihilistic and materialistic (because they seemed to deny that there was a soul).

Richard Noakes

At the same time, spiritualism could be taken seriously as a subject of scientific inquiry because the nature of what constituted “science” was more fluid in the 19th century. As such, its methods could be applied to topics we might consider dubious today because the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable research were less established. 

In fact, many pseudoscientific ideas circulating today owe their genesis to outdated scientific ideas of the 19th century, subjects like Mesmerism, Phrenology (which still influences popular psychology), homeopathy, cryptozoology, and racial theory are a few examples.

“For many 19th century people, applying scientific methods to what were effectively religious and philosophical questions (e.g. the afterlife of the soul) was greatly appealing,” Richard Noakes, Associate Professor of the History of Science and Technology at the University of Exeter, told IFLScience.

“Neither orthodox Christianity [nor] the increasingly powerful sciences offered satisfactory answers – Christian theology seemed too abstract, dogmatic, and bleak (think Eternal Damnation), and the sciences seemed too nihilistic and materialistic (because they seemed to deny that there was a soul).”

Spiritualism therefore presented an opportunity that worked with, as opposed to reacting against, the progressive ideals of the time.

It is also important to note that spiritualism was not always understood as being “supernatural” per se. As Noakes explained, many “spiritualists resisted the idea that the phenomena they were studying were truly ‘super’ natural (i.e. ‘above’ nature); rather, such phenomena were simply undiscovered parts of the natural order that scientific methods would bring to light.”

This is not to say that everyone ascribed to these ideas, but neither can we simply reduce the situation to a binary dynamic between believers or skeptics; things were more complicated than that.

“Like so many other 19th century people”, Noakes said, “[scientists] occupied a range of (often changing) positions on the question. Some, like Alfred Russel Wallace and Cromwell Varley, were self-declared spiritualists, and upheld the evidence for the phenomena of the séance and the evidence for the survival of the human personality following bodily death.”

On the complete other end of the spectrum, you had big names like T.H. Huxley and Edwin Ray Lankester who were hostile to spiritualism, and found the whole movement to be “dangerously delusive”, as Noakes put it.

But there were others who were less convinced either way. For instance, John William Strutt (Lord Rayleigh) and Joseph John Thomson were two distinguished scientists who “never accepted spiritualism’s teachings or ‘truths’, but considered further investigations eminently worthwhile.”

The ghost and the machine

As mentioned above, spiritualism was not a backward-looking reaction to the scientific spirit (excuse the pun) of the age. Rather, the success of science had a significant impact on the population’s imagination. In the same year Queen Victoria ascended the throne, in 1837, William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented a system that used electromagnetic pulses to move needles on a dial that pointed to specific letters of the alphabet. At the time, others were working on their own versions of the electrical telegraph, which, by the 1840s, had transformed communications.  

For the first time in history, information could be communicated across vast distances almost instantaneously. To contemporaries, the world had shrunk, but if it was possible to send a message across the world (the first transatlantic telegraph was sent in 1858) using an invisible force, could the same be done across “realms”? Or to put it another way, could this concept be applied to communications between the living and the dead?

“This mattered to spiritualists because it suggested non-material means of information flow were possible, and this made communication from spirits via fluids, powers, etc even subtler than electricity seem more credible,” Noakes said.

“Spiritualists reasoned that if the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ worlds (North America and Europe) could be connected via the electric fluid, why not the earthly and spiritual worlds via the subtler ‘celestial’ telegraph as they often called it.”

Within the shadowy confines of the séance room, the telegraph dial could be reconceptualized as the alphabet presented on the tabletop. In fact, the invention of Morse Code, by Samuel Morse in 1837, may have provided inspiration for mediums who asked their ghostly visitors to communicate with “yes” and “no” answers by tapping or knocking.

Advances in the understanding of forces such as electromagnetic waves and cathode rays suggested that the world was influenced by unseen and intangible forces. It was only a small step to imagine ghosts could be made of similar invisible energy. What was needed, of course, was the right instrument to see them. This is where the development of camera technologies became so important, and in many ways symbolic, for spiritualist investigations. 

Many spiritualists argued that since photography could capture other things invisible to the eye then why not spirits of the dead.

Richard Noakes

Caught somewhere between being a tool of “science” and objectivity as well as artistic expression, early camera technologies promised a way to capture what was really there without prejudice or bias. If this technology could be leveraged towards the hunt for ghosts, then a phantom caught on camera would be proof enough for anyone, at least that was the hope.

Noakes said, “[s]ome of the most iconic images we have of 19th century spiritualism are ‘spirit photographs’ and many spiritualists argued that since photography could capture other things invisible to the eye then why not spirits of the dead.”

Of course, seeing is not always believing and despite the excitement surrounding photography in the mid-19th century, it was soon clear the camera could be fooled. As the technology became more affordable, photographers like William H. Mumler and Frederick Hudson found ways to create spectral figures in their photos that could be passed off as the ghosts of the deceased.

As the century wore on, the enthusiasm for spiritualism started to fade, but the ideas it encompassed – evidence of life after death and the supposed psychic abilities of some humans to communicate with the deceased – remained plausible to many esteemed scientific minds well into the early 20th century. 

However, spiritualists and mediums were increasingly discredited, and their trickery exposed. At the same time, cultural attitudes were changing, and “orthodox” science became more guarded against the subject of the supernatural.

Instead, research into psychic forces and ghosts moved increasingly towards the fringes of the scientific community. Gradually, fewer were willing to defend the enterprise, and those who did were taken less seriously as the boundaries of modern science became firmer. But it is always worth remembering that, for several decades in the “age of science”, eminent scientists believed in the power of science to make the supernatural natural. It may make us uncomfortable today, but the ghosts of the past should be understood, not hidden from.