After the war and the influenza that followed it, a whole generation was in mourning — and the dead had never felt so close. All you had to do to reach them was sit in a dark room and pay the woman at the head of the table.
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We remember the early 1920s for the glitz, the glamor, the champagne and the jazz. We tend to forget that what came just before that hedonistic time was a war that took thousands of young men, followed by a pandemic that took millions more around the world. Nearly every family had lost a loved one. And into that aching grief came someone who offered comfort and relief. The medium.
Spiritualism was not just a curiosity. It was a craze. Grieving mothers and widows paid, often quite a sum, to sit in a darkened parlor in the hopes of hearing their beloved’s voice, or to be given a secret message that only the departed and the grieving could have known. Séances became a fashionable evening’s entertainment, and spirit boards, or Ouija boards, became a popular commodity.
The most remarkable convert to Spiritualism was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the man who invented Sherlock Holmes, the most coldly rational mind in all of fiction. After losing his son not long after the war, Doyle became Spiritualism’s tireless evangelist, touring the world to lecture on the reality of the afterlife. The creator of literature’s greatest skeptic spent his final years as its greatest believer, not only supporting mediums but also evangelizing for them.
On the other end of the spectrum, Harry Houdini, the world’s most famous magician and escape artist, made it his mission to expose the fraudulent mediums preying on the grieving. A master of illusion, he knew all the tricks and tools of the trade: the concealed threads and rods that set furniture moving, the cheesecloth passed off as ectoplasm, or the medium cracking her own toe joints beneath the table to produce the spirits’ rapping. He attended séances in disguise, exposing one medium after another. He even sat on a Scientific American committee that offered a fortune to anyone who could demonstrate a genuine psychic gift under controlled conditions — and no one ever claimed it. “It takes a flimflammer to catch a flimflammer,” he said.
