Medium

The modern Spiritualist movement traces its founding to 1848, when sisters Kate and Margaret Fox, teenagers in Hydesville, New York, reported communicating with a spirit through a series of rapping sounds, a phenomenon that quickly attracted wide public attention and, within a few years, produced a rapidly growing movement of individuals claiming similar mediumistic abilities across the United States and, soon after, Britain and continental Europe. Mediumship as it developed through the following decades took varied forms, including trance mediumship, in which a medium claimed to allow a spirit to speak or write through them while in an altered state, physical mediumship, involving claimed physical phenomena such as table movement, materialization or ectoplasm produced during a seance, and mental mediumship, involving claimed clairvoyant or clairaudient communication without physical manifestation.

Spiritualism grew rapidly in the nineteenth century partly through its resonance with contemporary interest in scientific investigation of previously unexplained phenomena, and partly, particularly following the mass bereavement of the American Civil War and later the First World War, through its promise of continued communication with deceased loved ones, a promise that gave the movement particular appeal during periods of widespread grief.

Spiritualist mediumship attracted sustained skeptical and scientific scrutiny from its earliest years, including formal investigations by organizations such as the Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882 specifically to apply rigorous investigative methods to claimed paranormal phenomena, alongside numerous documented cases in which individual mediums were caught employing physical trickery, including hidden mechanisms for producing supposed spirit rappings or materializations, to produce fraudulent effects for paying clients. Margaret Fox herself publicly confessed in 1888 that the original rapping phenomena had been produced through a mundane physical method, cracking her joints, though she later attempted to retract the confession, an episode that has remained a frequently cited and debated point in the movement's own history.

Despite these well-documented instances of fraud and the consistent failure of controlled scientific testing to validate claimed mediumistic abilities under conditions ruling out deception, Spiritualism has continued as a living, organized religious movement into the present, with organizations such as the National Spiritualist Association of Churches maintaining formal congregations, training and certification programs for mediums, and a continuing theological framework distinct from the specific evidentiary claims that drew the earliest skeptical challenges to the movement.