This week’s historical question
What Exactly Is a Ghost Made Of?
A weekly dose of macabre history, gently pressed into your hands like a haunted educational pamphlet.
Apparently, for a while, the answer was something resembling wet cheesecloth.
Welcome to ectoplasm.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Spiritualism was booming. Mediums weren’t merely claiming they could hear the dead anymore.
Some claimed they could physically produce them.
During seances, a mysterious substance would supposedly emerge from a medium’s mouth, nose, ears and, unfortunately, other parts of the body.
And yes.
People took photographs.
Ectoplasm could appear as gauzy fabric, strange ropes of material or enormous white masses spilling from the medium’s body.
Sometimes a human face appeared within it.
And by “human face,” we mean something that looks suspiciously like somebody cut a photograph out of a magazine and stuck it to a curtain.
Because investigators eventually discovered that some mediums were doing exactly that sort of thing.
Cheesecloth, paper, fabric and photographs were among the materials associated with fraudulent manifestations.
The logistics were equally glamorous.
Mediums could conceal materials before a seance and produce them once the room was conveniently dark.
Which also explains why investigators occasionally insisted on searching mediums before seances.
Spiritualism had somehow reached the point where proving you could communicate with the dead occasionally required someone to check your underwear.
Still, believers argued that genuine ectoplasm was extraordinarily sensitive and could disappear rapidly if exposed to light or touched improperly.
Convenient?
Perhaps.
But for thousands of people attending seances, these manifestations represented something extraordinary:
Physical evidence that the dead were still there.
Today, the surviving photographs are some of the strangest artifacts of the Spiritualist era.
Women sit quietly in darkened rooms while enormous white masses emerge from their faces.
Ghostly heads float among folds of fabric.
Everyone looks remarkably calm about it.
And somewhere in the spirit world, presumably, at least one ghost is furious that after an entire lifetime, this is what their official portrait looks like.
This week’s haunting: Crowley
The lights are low. The room is quiet. Everyone is waiting to see what might come through.
Crowley was made for that strange space between this world and whatever may be lingering just outside it.
Thankfully, ours contains considerably less cheesecloth.
Please note: none of this was written by robots aka AI. It came from the dark folds of Lacey’s very human mind.
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