We like to think that we know everything about the world and owning an iPhone will soon reveal all the secrets to us. In fact, we do not know anything, especially about what happens to us after death. Will we rot in the ground forever, or will we ascend (or descend) to the spiritual dimension that we deserve? Fortunately for us, there were many people who tried to contact those who know the answers - with the dead. Or pretended to be asked.
Spiritual photography is a scam for fools
There are so many different devices these days that we forget what a miracle photography was. After all, with its help, you can stop the past, hiding it, for example, in family albums, which our parents constantly show to guests. Probably because photography is more like magic, it was quickly turned into another way to deceive people.
In the olden days, photos were taken at low resolution and therefore often had spots and shadows. And, of course, some began to assert that these spots were actually ghosts or other supernatural beings that we managed to capture. Towards the end of the 19th century, spiritistic photography became as much a fashion as suicide. After the Civil War, there were many Americans who lost their loved ones. Spiritual photographers promised to contact the living with the dead for a lot of money.
Hoaxer
The most famous of these scammers was amateur photographer William Mumler. In the 1860s, he often photographed visitors to his studio, allegedly along with long-dead relatives. He gradually became a celebrity, and no skeptic could debunk him. Even the wife of the late President Abraham Lincoln, Mary Todd, walked into Mumler's studio to see if he could capture the spirit of her deceased husband.
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The photo taken became world famous, but led to the death of Mamler's enterprise. He attracted the attention of several influential critics, including the greatest showman Phineas Barnum, who testified against Mumler in court. It was discovered that the amateur photographer was also a burglar. He stole photographs of the deceased. Then he placed these pictures on a glass plate hidden inside the camera and superimposed them on the photos he took in the studio.
Edison and Tesla tried to contact the dead by phone
The invention of the telephone in 1876 was a revolution in communication. Now you could talk to your friends and family in any country and report what happened this morning. But was it possible to make a phone that the dead would answer you?
One of those who tried to penetrate the world of the ancestors was Thomas Edison. In 1920, he issued a statement that he makes an apparatus with which one can communicate with people who have left the earth. But, alas, Edison died without leaving us any plans or drawings of such an apparatus. Many years later, his diary was found, which theoretically described how such a device could work. But since the ghosts didn't have telephones to answer, maybe he went out to investigate this?
But Edison was not the only ghost telephone enthusiast. Nikola Tesla made a device that converted electromagnetic waves into sounds, but the noises he heard scared him out. It seemed to him that these were the sounds of hell or the voices of people from other planets.
Automatic writing, or when your mind pretends to be a ghost
We would like to ask the ghosts about a lot: who killed them, where are the treasures … The list is very long. Therefore, everyone liked the idea of automatic writing. It was no longer necessary to wait for a seance and experiment with a board. It was just that the medium grabbed the pen and gave the word to the silent spirits.
Pearl Curran was one of the most famous practitioners of this art. In 1913, the spirit of Patience Worth, a 17th century pilgrim slain by the Indians, began to infiltrate her. One day, her hand slipped on the board by itself, leaving lines in Miss Worth's name. Since then, Pearl Curran has been telling the story of Patience Worth, who also had a literary talent, for almost a decade. In addition to her autobiography, she wrote down many poems and novels, and soon she published a five-volume book and even published her own magazine.
Helen Smith
This woman medium claimed to have traveled the astral worlds with the help of her spirit guide Leopold or the late Italian magician Cagliostro. In doing so, she wrote down strange symbols, which, she claimed, were the language of long-dead Martians, with whom she established contact during her travels. Although later linguists found that structurally these records are similar to her native language - French. Coincidence?
We can, of course, consider all these people to be scammers, but, apparently, everything was more complicated. This automatic writing was most likely a flood of disturbed or suppressed subconsciousness. Who knows what's worse? Ghosts or our own tainted subconscious?
Fun late night Victorian encounters
In the 1800s, Spiritualism was the coolest religion in the city. Instead of kneeling, he united people who were interested in the world of the dead. In movies, such sessions are often portrayed too darkly and are often associated with serial killings. In fact, the seances were fun performances, where strange voices sounded, tables and musical instruments were flying.
One Ohio farmer even went as far as creating a spirit machine equipped with instruments such as drums, guitars, horns, bells, and tambourines. What for? Because the spirits told him so. And witnesses said that when this farmer started to play the violin, other instruments rose above their heads and began to play too. Interestingly, he did not take money for these concerts.
Another hallmark of seances were tables that swayed, swiveled, and rose, as if all spirits in the past were furniture bearers. But famed scientist and inventor Michael Faraday dismissed this spiritual nonsense. He began to check the seances and found out that the participants themselves subconsciously moved the tables with their hands.
Ectoplasm
What's the creepiest way of dealing with a ghost? Writing on the bathroom mirror? A white veil over the bushes outside the window? No, ectoplasm is a supernatural entity through which ghosts are trying to tell you that they have unfinished business.
In the middle of the 19th century, a strange substance appeared during seances. It came from holes in the body of mediums. Sometimes it took the form of the faces or bodies of the deceased with whom the participants tried to contact. Mediums explained this by the fact that spirits, interacting with the material world, leave part of their essence. Physiologist Charles Richet coined the term "ectoplasm" for her, similar to the then fashionable biological theory of protoplasm.
What it consisted of
As it turned out, mediums simply swallowed, and then belched up the pre-prepared material, which often consisted of ordinary objects, like in a budget horror movie. For example, some revelations showed that the composition of the "ectoplasm" included gauze, muslin and offal. But the crudest fraudster was Mina Crandon, from whose navel an "ectoplasmic hand" supposedly grew. It turned out to be just a piece of animal liver. So if a medium's job is to walk around with spoiled meat in a hiding place all day in order to deceive grieving people, then maybe it is better to consider another career?