Ghosts by Roger Clarke

Author:Roger Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466857865
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

The Thrilling of the Tables

I have reason to know that the power at work in these phenomena, like Love, ‘laughs at locksmiths’.

– Sir William Crookes

From the 1840s, in the north of England, the newly emergent spiritualist church was a working-class, proto-socialist movement. The town of Keighley happened to be the place where this new faith of spiritualism took root, and its adepts routinely linked it with a ragbag of anti-establishment positions, including votes for women and anti-vivisection. Down in London, things were very different. In the salons of the wealthy, in the plush Piccadilly hotels where the air was as light as champagne, in the well-upholstered Hyde Park residences and East End domiciles banked with the bawdy efflorescence of the music halls, séances were very much about one thing: sex.

The darkened room, the mixing of classes, the whispers, the secrets and lies – all had the markings of an assignation. Physical intimacy was part of the process of the séance as skin brushed skin in the rooms in which they were held. Flirtation, states of heightened awareness and excitement were commonplace.

Séances weren’t sexy when they first arrived from America. They were formal and functional. The Canadian sisters Maggie and Kate Fox, inventors of the séance, were in 1848 living with their father in a small farmhouse in Hydesville, New York. Within hours of moving in, they started to hear things: bumps and rattles that disturbed their sleep, the sound of footsteps walking down into the cellar, and then, finally, a horrifyingly ice-cold hand brushed against the face of one sister as she lay in bed. Kate named the ghost Mr Splitfoot, a folk name for the Devil. In one incident that was to have enormous ramifications, she began asking the ghost to copy her handclaps and then started asking questions and requesting a response in knocks, either to signify letters of the alphabet, or a simple yes or no.

This was a radical departure for modern Western culture. For centuries, the accepted practice had been not to talk to the dead, but to fear them and banish them from the home by any means necessary. They were an infestation. Roman Catholics conducted formal exorcism and cleansing ceremonies, but even the Protestant churches came up with ways of banishing ghosts, even if it was simply reading psalms aloud for many days. The ultimate banishment for the undead, or demons pretending to be the dead, was exile to the Red Sea.1 It was Alcatraz for the worst offenders of the paranormal sphere.

Word got around. Soon the Fox sisters had been recruited by the great showman P. T. Barnum to appear as fortune tellers in his busy New York venue, the American Museum. They sat there in neat dark frocks and white collars and charged a dollar a time. The author of The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper, came to visit them there and was unnerved by their replies about his dead sister. Soon, the sisters were being investigated by committees who wanted to test their ‘powers’ under controlled circumstances.

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