A formal sitting with the dead, run like a board meeting.
Documented
The sisters who started it, then confessed
Modern Spiritualism dates to 1848, when the Fox sisters of Hydesville answered mysterious raps with a code. Millions followed. In 1888 Margaret Fox demonstrated on stage that the raps were toe joints cracking, though she later recanted the confession, broke and bitter.
Assessment: Documented from both ends: the founding event and the founder's confession exist in the record. The movement shrugged and kept sitting.
Stories
The dark room protocol
The inherited script: hold hands, dim the lights, beware skeptics whose disbelief disrupts the conditions. Every séance story contains the clause that explains failure in advance.
Assessment: Documented as the tradition's standing rule, and the reason séances are unfalsifiable theater by design. The condition that guarantees belief is written into the instructions.
Interesting claims
The medium was the message
The historians' reading: séances were the one Victorian room where women held authority, spoke in public, and were paid for it. Trance lecturing let women preach politics, abolition, and suffrage while technically not being the ones speaking.
Assessment: Well supported in the scholarship. Whether or not the dead attended, the living used the room to say the unsayable. The archive finds this more interesting than the ghosts.
Sources and further reading
Brandon, The Spiritualists (1983)
Margaret Fox confession, New York World (1888)
Owen, The Darkened Room (1989), on women and Spiritualism
Worth asking
Which was channeled more often: the dead, or everything the living were forbidden to say?