Victorian Mediums' Ghost Tricks Laid Bare in Podcast Episode on Séance Charlatans

THE INTERNET — Grieving families of the Victorian era paid good money for a few minutes with their dead, and the mediums who took it had help. So says the show notes for an episode of the Weird Darkness podcast, which devotes its opening segment to the methods of séance charlatans. Props hidden up sleeves and assistants who gathered details about each sitter beforehand are among the aids named.

According to the episode description, an estimated eight million Americans believed in Spiritualism in its heyday. Paying sitters, it says, watched tables float, heard trumpets speak in the dark, and felt spirits knock upon the walls. The segment is said to cover the spirit rapping of the Fox sisters, the ectoplasm faces that Marthe Béraud cut out of newspapers, spirit slates, manifestation cabinets and cold reading.

The segment is credited to Liv Pasquarelli of Ranker's Graveyard Shift. The program was originally aired on June 25, 2024, and the notes state that no AI voices are used in its narration.

The remainder of the hour-long programme ranges widely. Listeners are promised an account of Bedlam, the London asylum founded in 1247, and the 1976 Chowchilla school bus kidnapping, in which 26 children were buried in a truck and later dug themselves out. There is also a Nevada boy's tale of a cave creature, the 1925 Portuguese scheme in which a con man had genuine banknotes printed, and the legends of New Mexico's Urraca Mesa.

The broadcast closes with a catalogue of unusual legal name changes, among them a man who became "Bacon Double Cheeseburger" after a night of drinking, according to the notes.