Keeping in Touch: An Anthology of the Victorian Seance

My Visit to the Mysterious Rappings

“My Visit to the ‘Mysterious Rappings’ and What they Brought Me” is an anonymous account of a séance that appeared in The Monthly Magazine in 1853. Like many journalists the author attends an séance, but in an unusual turn of events encounters the spirit of a recently deceased friend and then experiences the friend’s death in a dream-like state. Besides the atypical success of the séance, the author’s digression into the radical socio-political nature of spiritualism is of particular interest because it explains why spiritualism could be seen as so threatening. In addition the author’s anticipation of “rational” explanations indicates how believers chose to rely on their own sensory experiences as empirical evidence in the face of epistemological critique.
 


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