For the unbeliever, the skeptic, the misanthrope, few movements could elicit greater disdain than the spiritualism that arose in the late 1840s and swept through American society into the 1920s. Its impulse—to penetrate the afterlife and communicate with the departed—is far from extinct, but the fervor of those early adherents and the spectacles its practitioners produced, often the work of illusionists and prestidigitators, are hard to fathom in this more skeptical age. Now through February 2 the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, takes a peek behind the curtain with Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic and Mediums.
In 1848 teenage sisters Maggie and Kate Fox (looking unremarkably demure in a daguerreotype featured in the exhibition) claimed to be able to communicate with the ghost of a dead man buried in the cellar of their Hydesville, New York, home and the two went on to offer their services as mediums. Death was no stranger in those days, and many people were eager to understand what lay beyond. “Public fascination with the afterlife also converged with burgeoning scientific theories and the invention of devices related to vision,” notes Peabody Essex curator-at-large George Schwartz. “New forms of popular entertainment emerged, such as magic lantern shows and illusionary stage techniques. Traveling mesmerists, clairvoyants, and other entertainers had audiences questioning what was science and what was spirit.” Photography, still relatively new and endowed with mystery, was a popular medium for reeling in phantoms. Boston chemist and engraver Howard Mumler was among the first to profess this skill. In 1872 he produced an image of Mary Todd Lincoln in which shadows of the president and the couple’s son hover faintly.
While not exactly mainstream, spiritualism was not quite a fringe phenomenon, either, attracting, as it did, millions of people across the US and Europe. Seances and ghostly gatherings were widely publicized in ads and banners that emphasized the eerie. A poster promoting an appearance by clairvoyant Kitty Baldwin shows her looking cool and regal, as fantastic creatures swirl around her. “Spiritualism was a topic of popular interest for a good eighty years, covered in newspapers and magazines, and something that people of the time had an opinion about one way or another,” relates Schwartz. “The more I dug into the subject, the more this became very clear, and well-known historical figures and people from every walk of life had their thoughts on the movement.”
In the twentieth century escape artist Harry Houdini (ever eager to connect with his dead mother) evinced a spiritualist bent, before deciding quackery was rife. A promotional poster from about 1926 trumpets, “Do Spirits Return? Houdini Says No – And Proves It.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was more thoroughly persuaded, asserting, “So long as you get positive results which are certain, you can afford to regard the negative ones as of no consequence.”
Conjuring the Spirit World draws from the museum’s own collection and showcases a number of loans from private collectors, as well as the Lynn Museum in Massachusetts, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and the Library of Congress. The material on view includes the aforementioned posters and others, broadsides, and paintings; props used by mediums and magicians; gizmos—such as the Spiritoscope, devised in 1855 by chemist Robert Hare to ascertain the legitimacy of a medium’s paranormal ability; and contemporary work by multimedia artist and collector Tony Oursler, whose grandfather was an amateur magician and friend of Houdini. In addition, on Saturdays throughout the run of the exhibition, Anton James Andresen, the Official Magician of Salem, and Boston-area illusion designer Evan Northrup perform on an in-gallery stage.
The age of spiritualism was spun of many strands: faith, grief, curiosity, gullibility. For every person who truly believed an afterlife lay just the other side of daily perception, there was a charlatan ready to offer access. And for those who just loved a good fright, showmen stood at the ready. Tears of joy, squeals of delight.
Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic and Mediums • Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts • to February 2 • pem.org
