How Seances Work

The Victorian era was as much a world of spirits and the supernatural as it was steam trains and suspension bridges. With infant mortality high and disease rife, con artists were only too happy to profit from grief, using clever tricks to make bereaved families believe they could contact the deceased. Check out our video to see these séances really worked…

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Spiritualism – the belief that ghosts exist and we can communicate with them – came into being as a movement in 1848, when mediums began to spring up all over the United States and then in Britain.

Whilst some might have been well-intentioned, genuinely convinced they could contact the dead, most were frauds, using hidden accomplices, slight of hand and ingenious contraptions to hoodwink the vulnerable. Here are some of the ingenious tricks they used…

With the lights turned down or put out completely, the medium invites the participants to hold hands, or hold the wrist of the person to their left or right, to prove there’s no foul play. Pretending to enter a trance to communicate with the spirits, the medium twitches and jerks one hand loose. Scrambling for it in the dark, the participants either side don’t realise they’ve been tricked into taking the same hand. Using either their own hand, a waxwork replacement, a stuffed glove or a telescopic rod to reach across the table, the medium can now pretend a spirit is touching the audience.

One account from 1925 detailed a ghostly farmer being summoned from the grave. The sound of him pumping water was produced by a collapsible trumpet being surreptitiously opened and closed. Should the ghostly tradesman have required it, the sound of sawing wood could also be made by dragging the trumpet across the floor or moving the collapsible sections up and down within each other.

In other séances, the trumpet would be the centre of attention rather than a sneaky secret, channelling spooky whispers from the beyond – either the medium was a ventriloquist or he had a hidden accomplice. Most distressingly, one account recalls a medium sneaking a bowl of water onto the table and blowing through a straw to simulate drowning. He added, “Help me! Help me!” for good measure.

Mysterious glowing orbs, objects or even faces could be produced by adding a dab of luminous paint to the end of a stick, which allowed them to hover above the table in a ghostly manner.

Sadly, many people were only too willing to believe these mediums really could contact the dead. With technology advancing so quickly in the Victorian era, anything seemed possible, and so many people fell for these dastardly tricks and handed over a handsome fee.