American Experience Telegrams from the Dead (1988– ) watch online HD

It's an interesting documentary about a subject mostly forgotten now but important and popular over a period of some seventy years before the Civil War and after World War I. It seems that everyone of note had dipped a toe into spiritualism at one time or another -- senators, celebrities, engineers, authors, scientists, and even William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Horace Greeley, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln. Later, Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle were swept up in it. The object of this combination of science and religious ritual was to contact the dead and communicate with them.

A protocol was set down in a manual from 1857 and was specific about who wore what kinds of clothing, who sat where, what the handful of participants might eat before the séance, and so forth. The whole procedure was "operationalized" as a scientist might put it.

I'd always recognized that spiritualism was an interstitial movement illustrating the conflict between the scientific work of people like Darwin and the power of religion. But I never knew that the movement more or less began with the experiences of two young girls in a town in upstate New York. Maybe it makes sense. Too many apples. But there was something oddly mystical about the area in the 1840s, which generated what has come to be called The Great Awakening. It gave birth to a wave of new religions and cults. The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints began in upstate New York before being driven west to Utah. Shakerism, Millerism, and Seventh Day Adventism followed.

Well, why not messages from spirits? Technological achievements like the telegraph showed that messages could be transmitted by electricity, so why not messages from an as yet undiscovered country? The little Fox girls were fine catalysts. They usually are. The witch trials in Salem in 1693 began with hysterical little girls. In this case, the Fox girls were eleven and fifteen and when they went to bed at night strange rapping noises could be heard. The girls claimed it was a ghost and named him Mister Splitfoot.

Among the Fox family's first clients was a devout Quaker family, the Posts. Spiritualism fit with the Friends' religious beliefs in that the Protestant reformation had gotten rid of the Pope, the Baptists had gotten rid of priests, and the Quakers had gotten rid of everything and everybody between the individual congregant and God -- and here was a direct channel to the world of God.

At the time, before the Civil War, only about one in three Americans belonged to an organized church. (Lincoln wasn't one of the devout.) The established churches saw spiritualism as a rival in the religion business at attacked it -- "spiritomania." Over time, what began with unexplained rapping became more spectacular: first moving tables, then levitating trumpets, then photographs.

To the dismay of true believers, spiritual shenanigans were taken to theater stages where many of the tricks were exposed as fraudulent. Finally, having grown up, the Fox sisters admitted that they had caused the original noises themselves by cracking the muscles in their toes. But when one of them went on tour to demonstrate the trick, there was little interest. The devout spiritualists, having bought the whole business, could not bring themselves to believe they'd been made fools of. It's not an uncommon finding in social psychology. (Read, "When Prophecy Fails.")