The spiritual medium exposed mid-seance in 1882
There are few things I want more in this world than for ghosts to be real, I know it sounds macabre, but it’s true – the idea of death not being the end compels me more than any other concept in horror, but the harsh truth is that it is, and the even harsher truth is that any so-called medium who tells you otherwise is conning you.
If it were real, being a spiritual medium would be one of the best jobs in the world – grieving people come to you for comfort, and you moderate one final moment of connection between them and the person they’ve lost… In the fiction, you’re nothing short of a saint, a person with a truly miraculous ability who is sharing it with the entire world, and while those who call themselves mediums are only too happy to take that praise as well, that’s not for the reasons we want them to.
After all, it’s exactly that. A fiction. In fact, a fiction might be putting too nice a word on it. A fiction is an agreement between the audience and the storyteller to suspend their disbelief for a moment and immerse themselves in something that both sides agree isn’t real. That is not the case when it comes to spiritual mediums. They will lie to your face, tell you that you’re actually talking with the grandma you lost over a decade ago and get you to pay up for the privilege.
What’s more, these con artists are using techniques that were pioneered centuries ago, the first time that a fascination with the occult became an acceptable hobby in the eyes of mainstream society – it’s true, this is far from a new phenomenon, it’s one that first came to prominence in Victorian England with the rise of spiritualism, the framework that most people in the West still think about ghosts to this day, despite one crucial flaw.
People were getting exposed as frauds then, too.
Who was this spiritual medium?
To be fair, it was a lot easier at the time. The vision of the medium you probably have in your mind now, a man in a suit on stage, brow furrowed, repeating the words “I’m getting a J, maybe a Jeff?” until some punter takes pity on him, isn’t quite what we’re talking about in the Victorian era. No, the things that Victorian mediums feel like nothing less than immersive theatre shows, but with more distressing racial politics.
These were full-on productions where small groups of people would sit in the darkness, and “spirits” would leap out of them dressed in all kinds of culturally insensitive getups. One of the people infamous for this was Catherine Elizabeth Wood, born in Newcastle in 1852. Her medium act consisted of being tied to a chair, all the lights turned down, and then “manifesting” the spirit of a Native American child called Pocka. This came to a head in 1882, when Wood was called upon to hold a seance at the home of Robert and Isabella Catling.
The Catlings were active in the spiritualist community, but weren’t the gullible souls most were. Or at the very least, they were gullible in a slightly different way. You see, they thought that the spiritualist community was filled with frauds and that you had to rat out the charlatans to make way for the genuine spiritualists. They wanted to test Wood’s mettle, and she failed with flying colours. The lights went down, Pocka was summoned, then a friend of the Catlings grabbed her, the lights were turned back on to reveal Wood, who’d freed herself from her chair with basic escapology and changed into a white muslin dress.
The jig was emphatically up. The Catlings wrote about their experience in the press, and one would hope that Wood went back to Newcastle to rethink their life. However, Wood continued her work as a medium. They always do. No matter how much they’re exposed, these frauds always find a way back into the world of “spiritualism”. Why wouldn’t they? The easiest coin you’ll ever make involves putting all humanity and empathy aside and targeting the desperate and grieving.
And there will always be hundreds of thousands of desperate and grieving people in the world.