The spirit cabinet entered history as a piece of touring equipment. Ira and William Davenport, brothers from Buffalo, New York, took to the road in the 1850s with a large wooden wardrobe fitted with benches and a curtained opening. Committee members from the audience tied the brothers hand and foot inside; the doors closed; and at once bells rang, tambourines rattled, and disembodied hands waved through the aperture, though the brothers were always found tied fast when the doors reopened. The performance made the cabinet famous on two continents and gave physical mediumship its defining apparatus. Spiritualist theory explained the enclosure as a condensing chamber: the darkness and stillness concentrated the subtle forces a medium's body supplied, which manifesting spirits needed to act on matter.
In the seance parlors of the 1870s and after, the cabinet became domestic, often no more than a curtained corner of the sitting room. The medium sat within, sitters sang to raise the atmosphere, and from the gap in the curtain came raps, voices, floating instruments and at the practice's height full materialized figures that walked among the sitters. The cabinet marked a boundary sitters were forbidden to cross, and that prohibition, protective in the believers' account since a shock could endanger the entranced medium, was also, as critics never tired of observing, precisely the condition a conjuror would require.