- April 2, 2025
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The desire to contact loved ones who have left the Earthly plane has been around as long as human life itself. So have the mediums, magicians and hucksters who have presented themselves as conduits to such supernatural communication.
During the mid-19th century, Upstate New York became a hotbed of Spiritualism, utopian communities and new religions. It was the birthplace of the Church of the Latter Day Saints as well as the home of the Fox sisters, young and attractive practitioners of seances that employed “table rapping.”
Even today, the region dubbed the “burned-over district” because the mania for Spiritualism spread like wildfire, attracts thousands of visitors annually to a hamlet called Lily Dale, not far from Buffalo.
Billed as the “town that talks to the dead,” Lily Dale was first called Cassadaga. It’s technically an assembly where residents must pass an exam proving their powers in order to live there. Some of its original residents and their descendants joined other snowbirds in discovering the warmer climate of Florida, where a new Cassadaga was formed.
Cassadaga was also the monicker given to the wooden cabinets used by the Davenport Brothers of Buffalo, New York, during seances, derived from the French word for “session.”
As one might suspect, not everyone who claims to communicate with folks on “the other side” has been in earnest. Public practitioners are often more akin to entertainers than spiritual advisers. That’s why the exhibition, “Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic and Mediums” has found a perfect home at The Ringling, a legacy of circus magnate John Ringling.
Like carnivals and vaudeville shows, circuses were a form of popular entertainment designed to bring spectacle and wonder to the masses. So were the public seances by Maggie and Kate Fox of Rochester, New York.
Not all of Spiritualism’s fellow travelers were of like minds. The Ringling’s entertaining and educational exhibit points out that the magician Houdini unmasked charlatans who deceived grief-stricken audiences willing to empty their pockets to hear a message from beyond the grave.
Houdini’s crusade against hucksters brought him into conflict with his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes detective stories. Unlike the magician, the author believed it was possible to communicate with spirits.
It is difficult to explain the power of such celebrities in the days before radio, TV, Hollywood and the internet. The comparison isn’t perfect, but imagine if magician David Copperfield was arguing with Stephen King about whether aliens exist.
Since not all spirits have good intentions, it’s also appropriate that the new exhibit, “Conjuring the Spirit World” came to The Ringling through a partnership with the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, the site of witch trials in Colonial America.
The hysteria that characterized Salem in the late 1600s was captured brilliantly in Arthur Miller’s 1953 play “The Crucible,” an allegory for efforts to identify communists during the McCarthy era. More recently, witch hunts have played out on TV talk shows and courtrooms, where parents and child care workers were accused of sexual abuse through “recovered” memories coaxed from children by psychologists.
Some of those accused of communism and child abuse were guilty; others were innocent. But these recent events demonstrate how quickly mania can spread through a classroom, a community or a even a country the way that Spiritualism did in the mid-1800s.
One of the more fascinating aspects of The Ringling’s exploration of the magicians and mediums who tried to communicate with the dead is the tools of their trade.
Alongside beautiful posters used to advertise the traveling performers, costumes, paintings and books, the exhibit contains devices, furniture and objects used to contact spirits.
The fledging fields of photography and film produced new instruments in the late 19th century that helped create optical illusions such as the appearance of a specter in a photo, on screen and even on the stage.
Some of the medium’s tools exist more than a century later as games for amusement. The seance participants who sat around a Victorian table with their hands touching are the spiritual forebears of kids who play with the modern-day Ouija board, a Hasbro game that traces its roots to the automatic writing of ancient Chinese.
As seen in The Ringling’s exhibit, a heart-shaped planchette moves around the alphabet on the Ouija board to spell out words in answer to questions. When I asked the oracle, “Will I die in Florida?” I didn’t get an answer. (“Not soon” would have been nice to hear.)
For many, creating and streaming TikTok videos have replaced the simpler pastimes of trading ghost stories and playing games at a slumber party.
Those who enjoy videos won’t be disappointed by The Ringling’s exhibit. In one interactive exhibit, a deck of cards with words printed on them is quickly flashed on the screen. Viewers are asked to choose a word and remember it. Later, that same word materializes on a chalkboard at the video station.
A group of three people watching the video were all surprised when the word “home” appeared on the chalkboard. “That’s the word I was thinking of,” each of the three exclaimed during a recent visit.
When they tried it again, “love” was the word that appeared on the chalkboard. Once again, that was the same word each of the three viewers had chosen from the flash cards that whizzed by in the video. How does it work? Sorry: No spoilers here.
The Ringling’s exhibit is accompanied by a handsome book with scholarly articles by Ringling curators Jennifer Lemmer Posey and Christopher Jones, among others. Priced at $25, it’s sold in the gift shop.
Along with beautiful pictures, the book discusses the social conditions that helped ferment Spiritualism.
In the 19th century, life expectancy was much shorter than today. Before widespread vaccination and the development of antibiotics, children often died young, leaving behind bereaved parents desperate to contact their offspring. It was a morbid era when survivors employed the new medium of photography and even death masks to preserve images of the dead.
In the early days of Spiritualism, respectable women weren’t allowed by parents and husbands to take the stage. Along with the suffragist movement, which also got its start in Upstate New York around the same time, Spiritualism helped women find their voice.
After their time in the spotlight, the Fox sisters confessed that their seances were hoaxes. It turns out the rapping noises were made by their joints cracking, not by spirits. But then at least one of the sisters flip-flopped, perhaps to earn money.
Early in the 20th century, the Fox sisters appeared to be vindicated. Their careers as mediums allegedly began when they heard rapping sounds in the area where a peddler had disappeared and had presumably been murdered. Years later, a buried box of bones was discovered near the house where the Fox sisters lived earlier in their lives.
But the story didn’t end there. The bones, which are in a Lily Dale museum, were later identified by a researcher as belonging to a chicken, not a human.
Believers remain deterred. Crowds flock to Lily Dale each summer to attend free public sessions with the assembly’s mediums, who use them to attract clients.
Was a man told at one public session that his dead father appreciated the watch secretly dropped in his coffin in cahoots with the medium? Most assuredly, he was not.
The fact remains that millions of grieving people have been duped by con artists into believing they are talking to the dead. The Ringling’s “Conjuring the Spirit World” explains how and why it happens.
