SPIRITS & SPECTERS
New Book Rechecks Séance Wonders Against the Record, and the Record Is Unkind
Darren Marlar's 'Manufactured Manifestations' revisits the Fox Sisters to Houdini, setting what believers saw beside what investigators later found.
HYDESVILLE, N.Y. — A new book from Darren Marlar, host of the Weird Darkness podcast, proposes to put the spirit world's greatest hits on trial. According to its description, it follows the manifestations from a house in Hydesville, New York, in 1848 to a Boston medium's séances in 1924, when the dead are said to have knocked on walls, written on slates, lifted tables and spoken through trumpets.
The description notes that the circles were not populated by fools alone. It states that the chemist who discovered thallium sat in one, as did a future Nobel-winning physiologist and the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and that all three vouched for what they saw.
The book then, by its own account, goes back through each wonder in the same order and checks it against confessions, court records and investigators. Some of the findings are offered as teasers. An 1891 manual by a former practitioner allegedly advised mediums to study funeral notices and visit cemeteries. A Paris spirit photographer is said to have built a headless doll and kept a stock of heads. The skeleton found in the Fox cellar wall in 1904 is described as a jumble of bones that included chicken bones.
Other items concern provenance. Kate Fox's famous challenge to the knocking, the description says, appears in no printing before 1860, twelve years after Hydesville. The ectoplasm faces in Paris are said to have turned up in a French picture paper, and the 'Rosabelle, believe' code delivered to Houdini's widow had reportedly been printed in a biography of Houdini the year before.
One case is left in doubt. A man was seen floating outside a third-floor window, yet one witness spoke of full moonlight while the almanac shows a new moon, and another said it was too dark to see how he was supported. The three men present, the description adds, remained convinced.
The page also lists 110 consulted sources, among them Scientific American, the Society for Psychical Research and Houdini's own writings. Of the quarrel, the author concludes that skeptics cry scam, believers proclaim miracle, and the truth might be somewhere in between.