![]() ![]() ![]() Spiritualism, simply defined as the belief that souls continue to exist after death and that it’s possible to talk to them, wasn’t born in a vacuum. These mediums were able to flagrantly violate strict Victorian social taboos and speak unpopular or radical opinions. (Courtesy of )Īs laypeople experimented with these devices at home, others turned to Spiritualist mediums, a job that eventually gave young women-who were thought to be so receptive to the divine they would come to embody the spirits themselves-power they couldn’t have dreamed of before. Then, pop culture comes along and goes, ‘Oh, look what they’re doing over here.’ And entrepreneurs with vision and foresight take these devices, market them, and suddenly, they become a huge parlor hit.”īrandon Hodge, the creator of, with his collection of Victorian spirt-communication devices. “The Spiritualists come up with these devices and use them to communicate with the dead. Hodge says that most spirit-communication concepts started out with serious religious intentions, but eventually got co-opted by popular culture as playthings or curiosities. And by the end of next year, Hodge, a former magician who owns Big Top Candy Shop and Monkey See, Monkey Do! toy store in Austin, Texas, hopes to put out the authoritative book on the subject, tentatively titled Talking Tables & Scribbling Spirits: A Complete History of Spirit Communication Tools, with his collaborator, Ouija board expert Robert Murch. It’s a particularly hot topic at the moment with the recent “Ouija” horror movie-which hinges on the “Ouija boards are evil” meme that makes Hodge cringe. Hodge is a collector of such devices, focusing on “planchettes” or writing tools that supposedly helped the spirits jot down their thoughts. But ingenious Victorians quickly started looking for ways to get the message faster, coming up with all sorts of means and devices to chat with the dead. In the emerging Spiritualist movement, new mediums, including the Fox sisters, started calling out the alphabet, letter by letter, to the rapping ghosts and thereby, spelling out words and sentences from beyond in an excruciatingly slow manner. And these raps would signal ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in a simple binary code.” In the earliest days, you would sit down with a medium at a table, and you would start asking questions out to the ether. “Suddenly, there were mediums everywhere. “Mediums sprang up overnight as word spread,” he continues. (WikiCommons) Top: An image of a ghost at a séance in the May 12, 1888, edition of “Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.” (Via ) King, obsessed with death and the afterlife, often expressed his wish to communicate with the living after he died, just as he hoped to be reunited forever in the spirit world with his three Pats “we shall all be together in the Beyond,” he wrote, “of that I am perfectly sure”.Above: Margaret, at left, and Kate Fox, with their much-older sister, Leah, right. King’s detailed diary entries, published after his death in 1950 revealed that King consulted the dead Pats during these séance sessions in manners of international political policy, conscription, and Liberal Party Leadership. That King had Pat stuffed by a taxidermist so that the little dog would always be by his side turned out to be untrue. ![]() Rampant rumours circulated about King’s oddities, some true, most false. ![]() That he owned and frequently used both a Ouija board and a crystal ball was published in Time Magazine in 1953, news that shocked the nation. What the Canadian populace wasn’t aware of was his séances, his consultations with spiritual mediums, table-rapping sessions, tea-leaf readings and communing with the spirits of the likes of former PM Wilfrid Laurier, his long-deceased mother, and of course his dear ghost dog, Pat. William Lyon MacKenzie King (1874-1950), Canada’s 10th and longest serving Prime Minister was a devoted dog owner in life and in death.While active in politics King had an achingly dull public image, which was certainly at odds with the goings-on in his private life. ![]()
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