Spiritualism was a religious movement in North America and Europe that peaked in popularity in the second half of the 19th century. The movement was defined by the idea that an individual’s consciousness continues after death and may be contacted by the living. Emmanuel Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer are often credited as the progenitors of the ideas and approaches that underpin spiritualism. Swedenborg, a Swedish inventor and writer, published descriptions of his waking communication with what he believed to be the spirits of the afterlife. Mesmer popularized a technique dubbed mesmerism, in which a person in a trance state could supposedly communicate with the dead. Mesmerism is only one of the many communication techniques that spiritualist mediums would eventually employ in their craft. Other mediums claimed to communicate with the dead through approaches as varied as interpreting rapping and knocking sounds, reading the flickering of candle flames, and even transcribing messages from spirits directly.

As Sarah Penner discusses in the Author’s Note, most spiritualist mediums were women because of “the belief that a woman’s passivity, femininity, and intuition allowed her to access otherworldly realms more easily than a man, and because a man was considered less likely to submit to a spirit taking control of his psyche” (331).