Materialization (paranormal)

History

By the early 1900s, repeated revelations of trickery had caused public interest in materialization séances to fade. One famous incident occurred on July 23, 1855, when poets Robert and Elizabeth Browning attended a séance in Ealing with the Rymers. During the event, the medium Daniel Dunglas Home produced a spirit face that he claimed belonged to a son of Browning who had died as an infant. Browning grabbed the supposed apparition and found it was actually Home’s bare foot. The deception was made worse by the fact that Browning had never lost a son in infancy. In a 1902 letter to The Times, Browning’s son Robert described the event, stating that Home had been caught in a vulgar fraud.

The British medium Rosina Mary Showers was caught cheating multiple times. In 1874, during a séance with Edward William Cox, a sitter looked into the cabinet, grabbed the spirit, and its headdress fell off, revealing Showers herself. That same year, on March 29 and May 21, Florence Cook held séances at her own home with William Crookes. A spirit named Katie King was said to appear, but author Walter Mann argued that Katie was a confederate brought in by Cook. He noted the trick was simple because the room Crookes called the cabinet was actually Cook’s bedroom.

Frank Herne, who partnered with Charles Williams, was repeatedly exposed for fraudulent materializations. In 1875, during a Liverpool séance, he was caught pretending to be a spirit, found wearing about two yards of stiffened muslin wrapped around his head and hanging down to his thigh. Florence Cook had been trained in séance tricks by Herne and was also repeatedly caught faking phenomena.

In 1905, psychical researchers W. W. Baggally and Everard Feilding exposed the British medium Christopher Chambers as a fraud after discovering a false moustache in the séance room that he used to fake spirit appearances. The following year, in 1906, the medium Charles Eldred was also exposed. Eldred would sit in a chair inside a curtained-off séance cabinet, and various spirit figures would emerge and move around the room. Investigators found that the chair had a secret compartment containing beards, cloths, masks, and wigs, which Eldred used to dress up and impersonate spirits.