Calling The Spirits: Delving Into The World of Ghosts and Séances with Lisa Morten

0:30

Welcome to Haunted History Chronicles, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of the past, one ghostly tale at a time.

I'm your host, Michelle, and I'm thrilled to be your guide on this eerie journey through the pages of history.

0:46

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Get ready for a ride through the corridors of time where history and the supernatural converge, because every ghost has a story, and every story has a history.

And now, let's introduce today's podcast or guest.

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Welcome dear listeners to Haunted History Chronicles, where we delve into the mystifying realms of the supernatural.

Tonight, we embark on a journey with our distinguished guest, Lisa Morton, as we explore the ethereal landscape of calling the spirits, the history of seances and ghosts a haunted history.

2:46

Gather round as we summon the spirits of the past, asking the age-old question Is anybody there?

Join us as Lisa sheds light on the fascinating history of our attempts to communicate with the dead, unveiling the mysteries of necromancy and the beliefs that fuelled our early connection with the otherworldly.

3:07

Discover how the Victorian era became a breeding ground for spiritualism, with mediums, captivating audiences and the birth of the Seance.

Lisa is here to guide us through the belief in ghosts across cultures and time, from ancient perceptions of ghosts to the evolution of ghosts in Western and Eastern beliefs.

3:28

So dim the lights and brace yourselves through a spine tingling conversation with Lisa Morton.

Stay tuned as we navigate the realms of the supernatural, asking the spirits to guide us through the mysteries of the beyond.

3:55

Hi, Lisa.

Thank you so much for joining me this evening.

Oh, thank you for having me, Michelle.

Do you want to start by just introducing yourself and telling the listeners a little bit about your background?

Sure.

I am Lisa Morton.

I am a writer of both fiction and nonfiction.

4:14

In both of those regions, I've written a lot of horror and supernatural and ghost material.

My nonfiction books include Trick or Treat, A History of Halloween Ghost, A Haunted History Calling the Spirits, A History of Seances, And most recently, just out last October was a big coffee table art book called The Art of the Zombie Movie.

4:38

Oh gosh, I'm going to have to add that last one to my list of books that I must read.

I have very eclectic reading taste, but that one sounds intriguing and I'm a huge fan of that kind of zombie movie genre, anything from the old classics to the more modern material.

4:57

So yeah, I think I'm going to have to add that to my collection as soon as possible to read.

Thank you.

And it was a really fun book to put together.

It has over 500 illustrations, It is a door stopper and it was my first big coffee table art book, so it was also quite a learning experience.

5:16

Well, we're going to focus on two particular books I think in particular, which are two that you've mentioned, calling the spirits, the history of seances, and hopefully ghosts are haunted history so that we can talk all about ghosts, mediums, the history of seances.

5:34

You know, those early forms of spirit communication.

Before we, I suppose, dive into those books and the topics, do you want to share some of your insights in terms of what inspired you to delve into the history of seances and ghosts and communicating with the dead?

5:52

So much of it happened by accident, I know.

One of the things I get asked most frequently is how I became a Halloween expert, which is something I definitely AM, and that was completely accidental.

Back in the early 2000s, I had done a film book with a publisher, and they asked me if I wanted to do another book with them.

6:12

And I looked at some things they had just brought out and they had just published a Christmas encyclopedia.

So I said, hey, no one's ever done a Halloween encyclopedia.

And I mean, obviously I always loved Halloween.

I always loved horror and all things ghostly and so forth, but I never planned on becoming an expert in any of these things.

6:34

After doing the Halloween encyclopedia, I amassed so much information gathering material for that, that I rolled that over into two more books on Halloween.

And then after that, my editor at the publisher Reaction Books, asked me if I would like to do first the Ghost history book, which I obviously said yes to, and then the Seance book came a few years after that.

7:00

So it has all been kind of people asking me to do things for them, but all subjects that I just naturally loved.

And they go so, so well together, don't they, hand in hand really it's it's almost a a natural progression I think.

7:17

And like you mentioned they are topics I think that there are a lot of people very much interested in.

And it's fantastic that you know you've you've put together the body of work and highlighted some really interesting material and it's it's very easy to read.

7:33

There's a lovely timeline to both books that makes it them very easy to follow and very informative for anyone, I would say, in terms of whether they come at reading the books with a huge amount of knowledge or coming at the books with very little knowledge about the paranormal and ghosts and the history of some of the material that you're covering.

7:53

I think they are books for anybody of any kind of level, if that makes sense.

Oh that does, and I'm really pleased to hear that.

Thank you.

And one of the things too, I wanted to make them entertaining as well as informative.

And I think there's a kind of common misconception among a lot of my writer friends at least, that writing non fiction is something completely different from writing fiction.

8:16

To me, your goal in both is the same, which is to tell a great story and keep your reader entertained.

Absolutely.

And I think that's why these ones are particularly easy to follow in the sense that you do get almost a story because you get this wonderful journey that does flow very, very nicely.

8:35

They're very, very logical and put together and very well constructed and thought through.

That just makes them very easy to go from one chapter to the next, one section to the next.

It has a lovely rhythm to it, just like you get normally with a fiction piece of writing.

8:51

So yeah, I applaud that.

I think that's a real skill as a writer, I would say, to be able to to put that together in the way that you have.

Thanks.

Yeah, absolutely.

Like I said, my one of my biggest goals was to make these very accessible, very entertaining.

9:06

And also the publisher I work with, Reaction Books, is kind of pseudo academic.

So you do have to do a lot of the kind of MLA style, footnoting, that kind of thing, citing your sources.

But I definitely wanted to make them entertaining and very accessible to the reader who maybe is not an academic.

9:28

So it was kind of a bit of an interesting bridge to have to cross there.

So if we start maybe with Calling the Spirits The history of seances, that book explores quite early on.

The early spirit, communication, you know, necromancy and so on.

9:46

Do you want to just take us back to some of those early practices and what was involved?

You know the beliefs around communicating with the dead.

Yeah, it was very different before the 19th century.

Usually in the classical world, for example, communicating with the dead was something that was a sort of mystical thing that was usually attempted by a single person.

10:12

They might be seeking the help of an Oracle before they went out, for example.

I'm thinking of this story of Odysseus and he consults with Searcy the famous sorceress and she tells him a very complicated ritual for communicating with the dead.

10:30

He needs to talk to the dead seer Teresius to find his way home and it the the ritual is very complicated it involves slaying a black lamb and a black ram rather in a very particular way and and the blood has to run into a certain through and he has to he has to do this at the mouth of Hades and so that kind of carried over into the middle-aged Middle Ages of necromancy which again are very complicated things that must be performed by solo magician.

11:06

These were the kind of things where they would call for dressing yourself in a girdle made of lion skin, and you would go out to the crossroads at a certain time of night and recite these arcane words and draw these sigils in the ground and so forth.

11:21

And it was all essentially impossible, I think.

But there was also a common belief in the ancient world that you might be visited in your dreams by the ghost of especially loved ones who perhaps you have sought them by going and sleeping on their grave and they might visit you as you slept on the grave.

11:45

A famous story about this is Achilles being visited by his friend after his friend has died in the Trojan War, and his friend is concerned about the fact that he didn't receive a proper burial.

Receiving a proper burial is a common theme as well in a lot of the ghost stories from the classical world.

12:03

What's great that these elements are part of the book is that it really does blow that myth or that perception out of the water that somehow communicating with the dead really started with the Victorians and the seance table.

And it's it's not true.

12:19

As you know you've pointed out, we've got examples of communicating with the dead in very early civilizations in a variety of different forms.

Whether it's belief in them visiting the living through dreams, as you mentioned, or, you know, very specific rituals and practices and going and communicating with someone who they perceived was an expert in communicating with the dead.

12:42

There are really interesting practices dating hundreds of years back in the past that I think sometimes gets a little bit overlooked when it comes to thinking about communicating with spirits and how far back this type of practice really went.

12:58

Yeah, absolutely.

And in fact, I think possibly the earliest example is probably from the story of Gilgamesh, which is a name everyone knows.

And there is one part of the Gilgamesh myth which involves him sending a friend, Enkadu, into the netherworld to retrieve something.

13:20

And Enkadu doesn't follow the rules as is usually the case in these stories, and ends up being trapped there.

And when Gilgamesh is finally able to communicate with his friend, the text is a little vague as to whether his friend is actually a ghost or not.

But it's fascinating that his friend gives him an absolutely heartbreaking picture of the underworld.

13:40

And this is kind of AI think one of the first times that we have a story about someone communicating with a ghost.

There are a few stories also from the ancient Egyptians.

The ancient Egyptians had a very complicated belief in ghosts.

13:57

They believed that the soul was made of eight different parts, and one of those parts was the physical body.

So that's why they believed in mummification.

And if the physical body was tampered with after death, they thought the ghost might come back and ask for repair of, for example, its tomb or even its wrappings, that kind of thing.

14:20

So yeah, we have all these fascinating stories from the distant past about ghosts.

And I think one of the things that makes the Seance so interesting, which comes around in the mid 19th century, is that it's the first time that groups of people got together with the very specific goal of communicating with the spirits.

14:41

And it's also interesting that they kind of thought it was comparatively easy.

And I was just going to say are you know, are there particular parallels in terms of similarities and differences between the practices from the past and what we kind of consider the more modern way of communicating with the dead, starting with the Victorians and the seance table.

15:05

You know, do you think there are other interesting similarities and differences and in terms of how they've progressed from one form to another?

The differences, I think are more striking than the similarities.

The a spiritualist who come around in the mid 19th century.

15:23

We actually can come up with a specific date of 1848 because of the Fox sisters.

They thought that it was something you did as a group activity.

They approached it as something that virtually anyone could do.

Although beliefs varied a little bit in spiritualist circles as to whether anyone could be a medium or not, most people thought anyone could do this and the medium could essentially call forth any spirit.

15:51

I mean, it was kind of both very egalitarian as compared to the past, but also kind of egotistical.

I think that you would expect the spirits to just come because you asked them a question, whereas in the past, with necromancy, for example, it was a very difficult ritual that involved essentially binding this spirit and forcing it to your will.

16:16

Which is just so intriguing.

I mean I read I'm fascinated by these ancient civilizations and their beliefs around death and dying and ghosts.

I mean it's it's truly intriguing and and enduring the way that these same beliefs and similar attitudes around death and what may happen afterwards are still something that endures today is just again something that connects us I think with our past and our present really.

16:43

But it's yeah, it's so intriguing when you start looking at these early civilizations, just how complicated and in depth some of these belief systems really did run, and what they did when it came to honouring the dead and their belief in what happened next with the afterlife.

17:01

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And yes, it's interesting that we, we now seem to have a kind of variety of beliefs that have stemmed from all these different sources.

I think, I mean obviously we still do the group activity, the seance, but we still have existing in many parts of the world that that thought that the spirits will return on certain times or certain days of the year that you need to honor them.

17:29

I think that is another sort of unifying thread that has run through the whole history of spirit communications that you need and to honour your dead.

And like you mentioned earlier, I also think that idea of of having the good burial, the good death, the good send off having the proper burial.

17:48

I think you really start to to see that coming through from the Middle Ages onward when particularly with changes in, you know, one type of religion being the dominant religion to the other end and people having to change religions, you know, to conform, to be safe, to not be persecuted.

18:06

You know, that perception of, well, what did that mean for them as a body if they were were not really practising their, their religion at birth, the one that might be their true religion?

Yeah, there's a lot of.

I think there's a lot of things then that come out of that.

18:22

When it comes to ghost law and ghost ghost stories from the Middle Ages onward, that kind of help to tie that in as well.

Yeah, and it it might be worth mentioning too, that the early Christian approach to ghost was very different as well.

18:38

And if we look at, for example, at the writings of somebody like Saint Augustine, who was a major figure in the Catholic Church, he believed that there was no ghost, that you did not come back from the afterlife, you went off to heaven or purgatory or whatever.

18:57

In his particular theory, ghosts were demons.

If you were visited by a ghost, it was a demon impersonating the ghost or the person, the spirit of this person.

And there are a number of the major religions of the world that do not believe that ghosts exist.

19:14

They don't believe you come back from the afterlife.

So that particular opinion was a little bit debated as the Catholic Church advanced.

By the time you get to something like 1000 AD, there are people who Mystics and and writers within the church who would say, well, maybe ghosts are actually Saints, coming back to give you good advice or to make you feel better about something.

19:41

And that's kind of been a source of debate within the Church throughout, I think.

I obviously nowadays they're more likely I think to accept the existence of ghosts than they were in the past.

But it was it always put them in a sort of uneasy mode with the spiritualist too.

19:59

In the 19th century there was again a lot of debate over well, is this actually can they contact these spirits or is this some sort of demonic happening and.

If we kind of come forward now to the to the Victorian era, what would you say were the, I suppose the cultural and societal factors that really helped contribute and spark that real fascination with mediums and the birth of the seance?

20:26

Do you think there were particular things happening at that time that really helped to, I think, launch into a into the stratosphere in terms of the numbers joining the movement?

Yeah, absolutely.

I think there's no question that it springs out of the Industrial Revolution.

20:42

And the Industrial Revolution was so materialistic that it left a lot of people feeling kind of unmoored when it came to their spirituality.

And you can see this kind of sideline happening at the end of the 18th century.

20:59

It begins with some odd movements like mesmerism, which people here now and they think that means hypnosis.

At the time, Mesmerism was this belief that your body contained these magnetic points and you could overcome sickness by aligning these magnetic points that you became I'll when they fell out of alignment.

21:23

And it it did end up involving hypnotism as well.

But it was this movement that also got into in as it spread into the 19th century, it involved more belief in spiritualism, in the afterlife, and so forth.

21:38

But it really took these two teenage girls in Rochester, NY, who thought they were communicating with spirits to create what would become the most popular of these movements, which was spiritualism.

And spiritualism was a religion.

21:54

It still.

I mean, it still exists, but in a somewhat different form these days, and it was distinguished by being the only religion that its inherents thought it could be proved scientifically.

And it's interesting that throughout the 19th century we see them maintaining this belief despite the fact that spiritualism and mediumship is continually debunked.

22:20

That's one of the things I enjoyed researching and writing about in the The Seance book in particular.

There are some real characters.

I think that's the the kind of the way to explain some of the people that come through during that period.

There are just some very interesting characters and the things that happened during their seances is just wild.

22:42

I mean it's it would be better than anything you could see in a modern cinema.

I think it's the way to think about it.

I.

Think so.

I just loved finding out about some of these people and and the, you know, any closed group of peers and so forth is going to have the sort of gossips and the scandals and so forth that went on.

23:01

But some of these were just spectacular and were so strange and so interesting.

It was really fun to dig into those and write about them.

Did you have the favorite medium that you enjoyed writing about and researching for the book?

I did.

23:16

My favorite medium is Helen Duncan, and Helen Duncan actually is from the 20th century.

She was this very interesting woman who channelled a spirit called Walter.

Walter was very different from her.

Helen was a a housewife, essentially, who was in need of money.

23:35

Her husband was disabled, They had children.

She needed a way to support them and she took up mediumship.

And when she went into her trance state and produced her spirit guide Walter Walter was gregarious and nasty and would make fun of her and just very entertaining, I'm sure.

23:54

I mean, even people who were skeptics would go to one of Helen Duncan's seances and come back and say, I don't believe any of it, but I had a great time.

And when Helen becomes famous is in 1944, she goes on trial for fraud, committing fraudulent acts during a seance.

24:13

And the reason that she was picked out of all the mediums operating at the time was she had actually held a seance in 1941 where she had identified a British ship that had just been sunk in the war at the time.

And no one was supposed to know that this ship had been had gone down yet.

24:32

And she was on the radar of the British intelligence as a result of that.

And they were kind of waiting to get her.

And they did finally in 44.

And the trial went all the way to the top court in Britain.

It captured headlines for weeks.

24:48

It irritated Winston Churchill, who was very upset that this thing was taking new space away from his war efforts.

And it was tried under the 1735 Witchcraft Act, which is insane.

The trial lasted weeks.

25:05

It was fascinating.

They called dozens of witnesses who had been to her seances and who claimed that they had received messages from dead relatives that Helen could not have possibly known.

Many people talked about how much comfort they got from going to one of her seances.

25:25

But unfortunately, none of that worked.

She was found guilty, she was sentenced to six months in prison, and they did change that law.

As a result of that, they replaced that antiquated witchcraft act with a medium, a fraudulent mediumship law.

25:41

And Helen is remains interesting because now her family and heirs are actually trying to get her pardoned retrospectively and even get a sort of memorial up to her.

I I think her story is fascinating.

25:56

It's wild to me that the Prime Minister was rebuking Parliament and rebuking, you know, the court system, that she'd been taken to a court, you know, a modern trial using this very archaic law in the middle of war.

26:14

I think he was furious.

And you can see that in the note that he wrote, which is now available at Kew Gardens.

I mean, it's fascinating that the Prime Minister was commentating on this instead of what was the height of the Second World War.

It's it's absolutely fascinating, really intriguing story.

26:33

It is, and and Helen was had long been interesting even before that.

She was one of the mediums who was investigated by Harry Price, who I like to think of as the original Ghostbuster and Helen at that point.

This is like the early, I think 1920s.

26:48

When he was investigating her.

She claimed to produce ectoplasm, which is this sort of filmy whitish material that was popular among mediums at the time.

They would produce this material out of like their nose, their mouth, even the side of their body.

27:07

Sometimes people would see faces in this material, and it was essentially cheesecloth or paper that was regurgitated.

Faces were magazine clippings that they would swallow along with the cheesecloth.

27:24

Now Helen, apparently, according to Harry Price, had the ability to regurgitate at will, which to me is every bit as astonishing an ability as being able to talk to the dead.

It's quite a party trick really isn't it too to produce something like that at at will.

27:42

But also the audacity and like you mentioned earlier the ego that they had with some of the images that they would produce as part of this is fascinating because they weren't just illustrations often times from magazines that they would just pass off as genuine and and some of the characters that they would produce was so well known.

28:02

And it's just it's fascinating that they they could do that.

They would have the front to do that and not think that it would be looked at as something strange and peculiar.

It's wild to me, it.

Is, and I mean making a living off of this.

28:18

This wasn't just, you know, a party trick.

This was an actual vocation.

But I think it comes back to something that you mentioned about Helen Duncan's, you know, stage presence.

It was a performance, wasn't it?

The great mediums must have been incredibly charismatic.

The one who was the greatest of the 19th century spiritualist mediums was a gentleman named Daniel Douglas Hume, and we look at photos of him now and there's nothing particularly interesting about him.

28:49

But I can only imagine that, given how people responded to his seances, he must have been just insanely good at it and very charismatic and very good at convincing people of what he was doing.

One of his tricks, apparently, was he claimed to be able to levitate in his seances, and people would claim that they had seen him levitate.

29:13

And you have to imagine that these seances are taking place in very, very low light.

This is the era of gas light.

So they were turning the gas lights down to almost nothing.

And so you're in almost total darkness, just enough light where you can barely make out a shape.

29:31

And we think that what Mr. Hume was probably doing was he would stand slowly in his chair, raise himself up.

But the key to it was probably him saying, I'm floating, I'm floating, I'm going up to the ceiling and convincing people of that.

29:47

And some of the mediums also would use things like a telescoping rod with a pencil attached to the end of it.

And so in the darkness, they mark the ceiling.

And then when the lights are turned on, they can point to that little pencil mark on the ceiling and say, see, there's where I was, that's where I floated and made that little mark.

30:08

They they were quite ingenious some of the the means and methods of which they were able to to do what they were doing.

I mean just incredible feats of engineering and and the thought behind it.

But I think you're right.

I think some of it is very much to do with the power of suggestion in the perfect environment with that low level lighting and also the fact that, you know, they weren't exposed to high moving images in the way that we are today.

30:35

They didn't have film, they didn't have big screens with fast moving, bright colourful things.

And I do think that makes a difference.

You know, they were, you know, very much primed for this environment for it to, especially if they were going there to expect something like that to happen.

30:51

And if then if they're being told that it is happening and others are saying that they're seeing it too, it's it's the kind of an environment that's very much going to help produce people feeling like that.

They've seen something spectacular and wonderful.

Because I'm sure to them it was seeing someone regurgitate something would have been really rather miraculous and unknown and and kind of unseen before, really.

31:15

Yeah, if you it's interesting if you read accounts from the 19th century of people who went to these seances.

And again, I think our modern image of the seance is probably framed by, as you mentioned, movies by 100 years of horror films now.

31:30

And at the time they didn't have that kind of framing device.

So a seance to someone going to one in the 19th century was very different.

It was fun.

It was miraculous.

It was full of wonders.

People would come out of these things and say that was the best night of my life, or I had so much fun.

31:52

The seances involved, things like singing that was very common at the beginning of the seance.

Everyone would gather together around the table and they would sing and they they might sing a popular song of the day.

And the singing actually served a couple of purposes.

32:10

I mean, one was that it made it fun, it made everyone feel very a part of a group, but it also gave a little bit of a noise cover to the mediums.

The lights are down.

The mediums are probably doing things like removing their ties that have been used to tie them or bind them to a chair or something like that, and the singing is going to cover any of the sounds of that.

32:36

Again, it was all very carefully constructed, wasn't it?

It was just, I mean, I think it's very much almost like that circus routine of it's something very well rehearsed and practiced and thought through.

And it is a performance.

It's a it's a person almost like a ringleader in front of their audience, knowing exactly what to do and when in order to get the right kind of response and and how to kind of keep that momentum going for the event.

33:04

Yeah, absolutely.

And and one of the things that I enjoyed talking about in the book too was that there is kind of a reason so many of the big mediums in the 19th century were women, because this offered a very attractive alternative to what their prospects were.

33:22

For the most part, women in Victorian society could essentially look forward to a life as a wife or maybe in a factory.

You know?

There weren't a lot of career opportunities to them.

So if you were someone who was charismatic, who liked to perform, mediumship offered a real alternative to what you had to look forward to.

33:46

And some of the superstar mediums were performing for kings and Queens, they were touring Europe.

They were highly acclaimed.

People absolutely loved them.

So in a way, they were almost like the rock stars of their day.

Yeah, the modern celebrity, weren't they in terms of popularity and just the fact that they could endure and do that, do the work that they did often for quite some time, especially with the the the level of competition that there was there in that field.

34:16

But some of them really did very well and and quite lucrative amounts of money doing it.

It was a real profession.

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34:33

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37:15

Now back to the supernatural stories you won't want to miss.

What's coming up next?

One of the first teams of mediums to kind of tour around where two brothers, the Davenport brothers.

37:31

And when they reported their takings from one of their tours of the UK and Europe, it was astonishing.

I mean it would be millions in contemporary dollars and they ended up retiring quite well.

And in fact, I think it was IRA.

37:48

The one brother ended up being a friend of Houdini's and confessing many of their secrets to Houdini.

And again, I think this is one of the fascinating parts of the the book that comes through is that not only do you talk about some of these very interesting lively characters, but you also get some really informative information about some of the other key key figures who like you mentioned just now Harry Houdini, you know, figures who were either trying to advocate what was happening and to affirm the psychic powers of people like Florence Cook with William Crooks.

38:24

But then you've also got others trying to debunk.

And so you've got different people falling into different camps and friendships and rivalry and you know rifts forming between people because of where they where they sat alongside those belief systems.

38:42

And and I think again the book that helps to convey some of that history and that information really well as well as the characters that we've mentioned.

Yeah, and in fact, my one of my favorite parts of the book is the the relationship between Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

39:00

I.

That's one of the most interesting relationships I've ever heard of.

They were started as wonderful friends.

Houdini loved writers.

He was so happy at having Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a friend that he had a special box, made a little velvet lined box to hold their correspondence in.

39:24

But Conan Doyle made a terrible mistake.

I think it's 1922.

He invites Houdini to a seance that is conducted by his wife.

Lady Doyle had recently taken up mediumship and Houdini was obsessed with his mother.

39:40

He called her his sainted mother, and he would have loved to have believed that mediums were real, because he would have given anything to be able to communicate with his mother again.

And he went to this seance on this afternoon in I think they were in Atlantic City, where they were both vacationing and sat in a room with the Doyles.

40:02

And Lady Doyle proceeded to engage in something called automatic writing, which was the idea that the medium channelled.

The spirit and would write down messages from them while they were in a trance state, and she handed these pages to Houdini.

40:19

And he was absolutely mortified because his mother spoke no English and these messages were plainly not from his mother.

And it severed their relationship.

And at that point they go from being friends to absolutely bitter rivals.

40:35

They are.

There are points where they are conducting lecture tours in the same cities on corresponding nights kind of thing.

Because Conan Doyle was a huge believer in spiritualism.

And he would tour and he would lecture about it.

40:51

And then there's Houdini the next night, maybe in the same city, telling you how everything was done and that it's all fake and it was just a really kind of tragic relationship, but so interesting.

The impact that both of them had in terms of the public perception of spiritualism, you know, very much one way or the other.

41:12

I mean, they were both very charismatic men who had quite a lot of sway.

And so that rivalry I think is quite a significant one in terms of not only their own relationship, but obviously the impact then on the public and those that followed them, those that were interested in what they had to say.

41:29

Yeah, I think absolutely it was.

And Conan do people may not know that I I obviously everyone knows the Sherlock Holmes stories, but he wrote a significant amount of non fiction about spiritualism as well.

He was.

He was a really big figure in spiritualist circles.

41:47

These are key people that I think it's really important to realize just the place that they had in the spiritualist circle, whether it was because they were trying to advocate it or if they were trying to debunk it, you know, they they played a really large part of this, this movement during this period.

42:06

And because they are fascinating individuals that have so much other things that they were doing as well, sometimes this part can sometimes get lost unless you are part of the paranormal community community and have heard of them.

But their, their influence, their role that they played, I think are quite significant because so much happened during that the Victorian era in terms of just the number of people joining and the number of people interested.

42:34

And then you've got institutions like the Society for Psychical Research, you know, lots and lots of things kind of coming into play in quite a short amount of time.

I think looking at all of these questions around Ghosts, mediums and all the other things that they were looking at.

42:53

Yeah, it really paved the way for where we're at now.

I I often say that spiritualism I think, which has survived as a church, although they obviously no longer tout being able to prove it scientifically.

I think it branched into two different things that are going on in our modern culture.

43:12

One is the superstar psychic and the other is the paranormal investigation, the modern paranormal investigation that relies heavily on gadgets and so forth.

Because the that scientific side of spiritualism did involve some interesting gadgets and some top scientist of the day.

43:33

And you mentioned William Crooks.

Another one was Michael Faraday.

And Michael Faraday is one of the sort of premier early geniuses behind theories of electromagnetic frequencies and electricity and so forth.

43:50

And he created ways to test the mediums at the time involving electrical circuits and so forth.

And so that I think that scientific side has become our modern obsession with things like K2 meters and infrared cameras and so forth.

44:06

But I think that, you know, something else that the book does really well is to kind of start to chart some of that problematic history that we also have with some of these gadgets and techniques and things that you mention.

I mean one of them that springs to mind immediately from the book is obviously the use of Ouija boards and that type of communication with spirits and how there was a very turbulent period where that was very, very problematic in terms of the narrative around that.

44:35

And I think that's something that we see now kind of coming back thanks to again movies.

But we do have these kind of periods where certain things have gone in and out of of popularity or favour and have been problematic in terms of public perception, if you like.

44:53

Yeah, the Ouija board is certainly a fine example of that.

The Ouija board was actually patented as just a parlor game.

The patent that was applied for at the end of the 19th century makes no mention of using this to communicate with spirits.

45:10

It wasn't until really World War One that the Ouija board acquired that reputation and became a very popular device.

And one of the reasons for that is that something that we see over and over in history is whenever there is a mass traumatic event like a war or a COVID pandemic, belief in the paranormal spikes.

45:36

And one of the things that also happens in these times is that you may lose a loved 1:00 on the other side of the world.

You have no sense of closure.

If you can communicate with them in some way, you're going to take that opportunity.

And the Ouija board in in association with World War One, offered an easy way for people to do that in the comfort of their own homes.

45:59

They didn't have to go out and and pay a medium.

They could do it right in their own living room.

And it became very popular.

And because it became so popular, the Catholic Church had issues with it.

They put out a book in 1919 called The New Black Magic, which absolutely tried to destroy the Ouija board and and actually had it's.

46:22

It's kind of a horrifically amusing read now.

I mean, it literally says things like using the Ouija board will make you an imbecile.

And that kind of paved the way for that uncomfortable thing with the Ouija board, which as you noted, continues to grow as movies make more use of it.

46:43

And the one movie, of course, that really turned the Ouija board bad for good was The Exorcist in 1973, where using the Ouija board is what opens the little girl to demonic possession.

I think this is where, you know, you can really see how some of these aspects really do get polarized in terms of public perception based on something that is put out either in terms of popular film culture or just how influence of certain groups within society, you know, and a narrative that they want to project can have.

47:20

But I think the one thing that remains is this enduring need to communicate, to understand, you know, these beliefs in in what happens afterwards, thoughts as to what happens.

The questions that people have somehow still endures despite all of that, as we kind of mentioned at the start, something that has existed for centuries.

47:45

Yeah, and it's universal.

I mean, it is the great mystery of human life.

None of us know what will happen after we die.

And so anything that offers even a glimpse at a possible answer becomes very popular.

And I do think that the we saw an interesting boost in that in the early 2000s with the arrival of reality television, which suddenly made the gadgets very popular.

48:12

The sort of dude bro teams going out and investigating dark scary places.

And it created a a huge demand for things that like AK 2M, which is nothing but a device that measures an electromagnetic frequency.

48:31

It was designed for use in your home so you could find out if you had an appliance that was leaking electricity.

But now, of course, the belief is that it might detect a ghost because they are supposedly made of energy, and I find it fascinating that that has become something that is so popular now in terms of our desperately wanting to know about an afterlife.

48:54

And I think that is precisely it.

It's this gravitation towards what?

What is it that we can use, what, what's the next thing that will help to answer that question?

And yeah, I think you're absolutely right.

I think the 2000s saw this real the explosion again almost.

49:13

I won't say it's, it's exactly the same because I think the spiritualist explosion is, is really quite unique in terms of how that really did just go off on another level.

But I think you saw in the 2000s this explosion on the TV screen of groups going out and doing precisely that of investigating, exploring locations and that did create that kind of need for the gadgets, didn't it?

49:40

And the next thing, the next technological thing that could be used and it's become a bit of a machine as to what can be used next and how they they can be updated And what it does now and it's it's almost created a bit of a beast I think as opposed to stripping it back in terms of well, what are you actually fundamentally trying to do?

50:01

So yeah, it's it's fascinating to see that kind of sudden explosion thanks to TV and, you know, a few TV shows and then suddenly there's lots and then there's lots and lots of groups and yeah, it's kind of everywhere.

Yeah, absolutely.

And and it's interesting to me to watch the evolution of this too, because I've noticed that just within about the last two years, the gadgets are starting to become slightly less popular and many of these teams are starting to involve mediums again.

50:29

And that kind of makes sense to me in terms of the cyclical nature of these things.

And I found really interesting a show that came on Hulu last year called Living with the Dead, in which they almost abandoned the gadgets.

50:46

Not quite, but almost.

And it was about 5 people who were all sensitive or mediums and it involved even things like tarot card reading.

And it was almost kind of a return to the original form.

Which all too often very much does, isn't it?

It's that things falling in and out of favour, a bit like the Ouija board, you, you, they seem to have their moment and then something else takes it, like takes its place.

51:10

And again, I just think it's because there is this very much, this enduring me to try and answer the question.

That is a really big, difficult question that I'm not sure we're ever going to really know until sadly, you know, we find ourselves in that situation ourselves.

It's that need to know.

51:26

It's that want to know.

It's that unknown that really, I think it's a marker of human nature.

We we like to answer questions, don't we?

We like to have something neatly concluded and finalised and to have all the information at hand.

And sadly, what happens to us in death is not so easy to come by.

51:45

And I I think one of the things about ghost, one of the questions that I had when I started writing the book Ghost to Haunted History was why are we so afraid of them?

You would think that if we were confronted with evidence that there is life after death that it would be the most amazing, joyful moment of your life.

52:04

And it's not.

It's almost universally feared.

The the only possible exception to that are the spiritualists, who seem to approach it with that sense of joy and but otherwise it why is it always fearful?

And I think one of the things that we fear about ghost is the it's interesting that the root word of ghost means fury or anger or wrath.

52:27

I think we're afraid that maybe what ends up surviving after death is the worst part of us, the part that we try to bury when we're alive and and that's what remains.

I think that's one of the reasons that we are so fearful of Ghost is that they say, hey, yeah, you know what, you'll go on after death, but not the part you want to go on.

52:49

And I'm glad you mentioned your book Ghost the Haunted History because again I just think it's a really very well constructed book in terms of helping to grapple and convey some of these quite big concepts around what ghosts might be or what they might not be and how beliefs can change varying on culture and geography.

53:13

And yet you've you've provided a really good timeline and journey through trying to unpick some of that as well.

And I think, you know, maybe we could start there in terms of what you kind of think some of those key aspects of similarities and differences are between some of the the different cultures, the the, you know, the different geography of belief systems around ghosts.

53:40

Yeah, it's it's fascinating that around the world, ghosts are viewed very differently.

There are certain cultures where they believe it's indistinguishable from a person walking down the street, and our modern conception of the ghost, of course, is kind of the misty, translucent thing that you can see through.

53:59

But that's not the case in many parts of the world I found.

For example, certain ghost beliefs from India were fascinating.

There was one that was you could tell someone was a ghost because their feet pointed backwards.

Things like that.

54:15

And certain similarities.

Like I said, one of the similarities was that they're almost always frightening.

I laughed when I was Segwaying into another thing when I was doing research on my Halloween book.

Halloween has caught on a lot in mainland China, which surprised me.

54:34

And one of the reasons it caught on there was that younger people in many parts of China found Halloween delightful and whimsical and fun, whereas their own hungry ghost festival genuinely terrifies them.

So again, we get that kind of universal belief that ghost are frightening.

54:54

And with the Hungry Ghost Festival, it's very similar to DI de Los Muertos in Mexico, where the idea is that there is a time of the year when the ghost of your deceased loved ones will return and you have to leave them honorings and things they liked when they were alive.

55:12

And if you don't, they get angry.

So again, this interesting sort of mix of anger and fear that seems to pervade ghost mythology all over the world.

And I so appreciated that you covered that breadth and those differences.

55:28

I mean, I spent some of my childhood in Hong Kong, which you you would see some of those festivals come through in the communities and so on.

And so it's it's it's things that I recalled from childhood, but you know, being 5678, you know, it's difficult to remember some of those things when you're an adult.

55:47

So it was lovely to kind of see some of that coming through in the writing and to recall some of that actually, because it they are really big parts of the culture in terms of these huge colourful festivals that really do take hold of the community.

56:05

It's something that they really are very much all contributing to and all belonging to, if that makes sense.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I love Hong Kong, by the way.

It's one of my favorite places and it's so interesting.

56:23

It's an interesting place to me because of the way it mixes Western and Eastern culture.

And so it has some very interesting and unique things going on.

And I remember, I have always loved Hong Kong's movies and and I remember watching some of their ghost movies and the ghosts were just people, you know, you'd see them riding a subway car.

56:43

And it was.

At first it was a little bit confusing, coming from the Western tradition, where, as I said, we think of them as these misty, translucent things you see only in a dark building.

Yeah, absolutely.

All the stereotypes with the, the jangling chains and you know, those things that come through with movies, there are some very interesting tropes, aren't there?

57:02

The translucent figure, The the the lady in a certain colour, the figure with the chains around it.

I mean it's it's fascinating when you start to kind of tease out all of those things that have become popular in someone's mind and how then they might change from one culture to another, like you mentioned, with the backward feet and how those have been things that have endured and you know, become popularized on the TV screen or in books and in through storytelling.

57:30

Yeah, it's funny.

I was just just before we got on to record this, I was doing some research into some of these things because I'm preparing to teach a course on the history of ghosts through Atlas Obscura.

That for example I think it's interesting that Native American culture a ghost you you never whistle at night because ghosts make whistling noises and just all these interesting beliefs around the world.

57:54

And the ghost in chain thing is interesting because we usually associate that with Charles Dickens and the ghost of Marley.

But there is a a Greek ghost story from about 0 AD, which was recorded by Pliny the Younger and other people about someone encountering a ghost that was covered in chains.

58:16

And so the ghost story as fiction is another part of this that's so interesting and that has propelled the belief throughout the centuries.

Absolutely.

One of the things that I think is so important when we look at it all, to be honest and its totality, is to see some of those shifts and to see what it is that has meant that some things have dissipated and some things have endured.

58:42

Because I think that speaks an awful lot about certain things being popular, how certain things then sit with the people in terms of social history and how that's important to them so that it does continue.

If that makes sense rather than getting lost, that I think there's some meaning in some of it in terms of why something's endure and other things don't.

59:06

And whether that is because of, you know, Charles Dickens helping to have one of those aspects continue, I I don't know.

But I think it's certainly a an interesting question to keep in the forefront of one's mind when thinking about this topic as to why some things continue and others don't.

59:22

Yeah, I think so.

And one of the things that you will hear sociologists and historians talk about is ghost beliefs That came right after the Enlightenment.

And that part of the reason that maybe we often place the ghost within the context of an old ruined building is our sort of trying to move on from the past, trying to get out of the wreckage and ruin of the past.

59:50

And it is interesting that when we see a ghost or hear a report of a ghost in connection with a modern structure, that structure always has a history of trauma and and terrible things happening and.

So I think that ghosts do, indefinitely, at least in our Western culture, represent some of our fear of the past.

1:00:11

And I was going to ask something that I think fits really very much into what you were just saying, to be honest, from my perspective, whether you would agree with my take on it or not, I don't know.

But somebody on social media, when I said that I was going to be talking to you, said that they would be really interested to know why you think some ghosts.

1:00:31

You know, there seems to be this prevalence of of seeing older ghosts as opposed to less modern ghosts.

And my view is that it is precisely what you were just saying in some regards.

It is almost trying to either connect with the past or move away from the things that frightened us about the past.

1:00:49

Kind of touching on what you were just saying.

And I don't know if you have that same opinion or if you think something completely different as to why these older ghost stories tend to be the ones that people focus on and and want to see count, as opposed to less modern modern sightings, if you will.

1:01:07

I yeah, I absolutely believe there is something to that.

I mean it.

It's interesting to me that you can go into a tract home, for example, and maybe and they now actually will have you.

If you're buying a home, you have to look at paperwork that tells you whether or not that home has a history being haunted.

1:01:26

And that blows my mind that that's now part of a real estate transaction.

But if you look at a modern suburban track home that where maybe something terrible did happen, it's interesting how rarely there will be reports of that home being haunted.

1:01:45

There are a few cases of that.

The Amityville Horror is probably the most famous, one of the last 50 years or so that a fairly modern home that had a terrible, yeah, haunting.

It also had a terrible history.

And so yeah, I think most of the time it does have to do with our sort of unconscious wanting to move away from the past.

1:02:07

Yeah, I I think so.

I think there's definitely something in that.

I think it was a really good question actually that this person asked via social media and it it certainly seemed to fit really well with what you were just saying and and definitely made me think of that.

So I thank them for coming up with that question.

1:02:24

It was a good one to be honest.

So to finish, what would you kind of say you would hope that someone reading either of these books or all of your books to be honest.

What would you say would you hope would be their take away from the books?

Well, I I obviously hope that they have been entertained, that they have enjoyed the book, and maybe they have come away with something to think about.

1:02:45

I am a skeptic.

I am not a skeptic though who is cynical.

I that is part of skepticism that disturbs me.

I have been on too many paranormal investigations where I have seen things that I could not explain or that I have been with friends who encountered things sitting right next to me in a room.

1:03:08

And I absolutely believe that their encounter was genuine in earnest.

But I don't know what it was.

And so I would like to think that maybe after you were reading one of my books, you might say, wow, I I really wonder, I really wonder what's going on.

And there are so many interesting possibilities, and maybe you'll want to go out and explore some of that on your own.

1:03:28

Honestly, I genuinely think they are fantastic books.

They really do help to allow people to look at some of these human beliefs and the mysteries of the supernatural, the mysteries of the world, the questions.

And I just think it allows the person reading it to to start to unpick some of that and to go right back and see how things have evolved, how they've changed, how they sit alongside each other in a very thoughtful, very well researched, very well communicated way.

1:04:01

And I think, you know, that's not an easy thing to do.

It's a huge amount of of of history that you are bringing together and piercing together to allow someone to do that, to take that deep dive into this subject matter and and like you said to help shed light on some of these mysteries, these questions and these these interesting aspects.

1:04:22

So yeah, I very much recommend them on.

If people haven't read these books, I would certainly say take a look if it's something that you're interested in.

I think once you've read one you'll want to read more and more to be honest.

So very much something I would recommend.

Oh, thank you so much Michelle.

1:04:38

I will.

I will put that in my achievement unlocked column.

Definitely.

And honestly, it's been such a joy to chat with you because it's one thing to read someone's book, but then to have the have the opportunity to chat with them and kind of dig into their brains a little bit is is brilliant from my perspective.

1:04:55

So thank you so much for giving up your time to share some of this knowledge and passion that you've got for your writing with people listening.

I really appreciate it.

Oh, and thank you so much for the invite.

I I obviously love talking about these things, so I really appreciate being able to come on and chat with you about it.

1:05:14

And I'm going to be looking into this Atlas Obscure course, because that sounds right up my boat.

It'll be great fun.

It's three sessions.

I am putting together all kinds of fun things for it.

So I taught a Halloween history course last October and I loved it and I can't wait to teach this one.

1:05:34

And yeah, I will say thank you to everybody listening.

Bye everybody.