From a Farmhouse in Hydesville

Modern Spiritualism dates itself to a specific house and a specific year: in 1848, the young Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, reported mysterious rapping sounds that they and their family came to believe were communications from the spirit of a murdered peddler, and the sisters' subsequent public demonstrations of spirit rapping made them the first celebrity mediums of a movement that spread with startling speed across the United States and then to Britain and continental Europe within a decade.

The seance format that grew up around the Fox sisters' example, a small group seated around a table with a medium seeking contact with the dead, became the movement's central rite almost immediately, and its popularity is inseparable from the era's circumstances: the American Civil War and, later, the First World War each drove huge numbers of the bereaved toward mediums promising contact with sons and husbands lost in numbers no previous generation had grieved at once. Spiritualism's appeal was never only consolation. The movement attracted early and disproportionate support from campaigners for women's rights and abolition, since trance mediumship offered women a socially sanctioned public voice at a time when few other platforms existed, and its egalitarian theology, holding that spiritual truth could be verified empirically rather than received on clerical authority, fit an age captivated by science and sceptical of establishment religion alike.