Halloween and other spooky things

Halloween is tomorrow.  Since Halloween is on a Thursday this year, many people held their Halloween Party on the Saturday before.  Some people will hold their parties on this coming Saturday.  We attended a party last weekend.  I went dressed in a witch costume.  My husband's costume is not as easily identifiable unless you play video games.  Gamers at the party instantly recognized his costume as Fallout Boy from the video game Fallout.  He said he was number 22.  I guess you will have to play the game to understand.

So, on to other spooky things.  I had so many interesting things to blog about that it was hard to know where to start.  After some consideration, I decided to pick one topic rather than give a quick over view of many topics.  That will leave topics for next year.  Not that I would have run out of things to blog about any time soon.  I'll start out today's topic with a question:  What do Mary Todd Lincoln, Harry Houdini, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have in common?  The answer, they all attended Seances.  And thereby hangs an interesting tale.  (Here comes that history geek again.)

The idea that people could communicate with spirits has been with us probably for as long as there have been people.  One of the earliest known books on the subject, Communication with the Other Side by George First Baron Littelton was published in England in 1760.  There were probably plenty of other texts, but they were no doubt circulated underground given the situation in Europe.  By 1760 belief in witchcraft was considered unfounded superstition, however, The Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition was not officially disbanded until 1834.  (That is true.  Look it up.)

One of the ways in which people tried to communicate with spirits was called a Seance.  This is derived from the French word for a sitting.  The term was used for a particular ceremony in which people sat in a circle around a table and attempted to contact spirits.  Mary Todd Lincoln was known to have held seances at the White House in an attempt to communicate with her deceased son.  (This is not even the weirdest story of occult happenings in the White House, but I'll save those stories for some other time.)  By the 1920s conducting seances was a booming business.  Some seances were used as a form of entertainment, however, the primary focus of most seances was still as a means of contacting a deceased friend or relative.

Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were friends at one time.  The issue of seances and communicating with the dead ended that friendship.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in Spiritualism, a religion that believes that spirits can communicate with the living.  He also believed that Harry Houdini had paranormal abilities and used them to perform his magic tricks.  Harry Houdini wanted to believe in communicating with spirits.  In his search to be able to find a medium to help contact his deceased mother, he realized that the rapping, knocking, ectoplasm, and table moving that were the staples of seances were magic tricks rather than spirits.  He began debunking the mediums and the idea of using a seance to contact spirits. He showed that there was nothing that the mediums were doing that could not be reproduced by a magic trick. He often attended seances incognito along with a sheriff.  When he found fraud, he had the medium arrested.  The debunking of mediums and the argument over the validity of Spiritualism is what ended their friendship.

To understand the belief in seances and the huge amount of fraud involved with seances in the early twentieth century, you have to look at it in the context of history.  World War I was fought between 1914 and 1918.  The Spanish Influenza Pandemic lasted between 1918 and 1920.  Millions of people died.  There were millions of grieving survivors trying to contact lost relatives or locate the bodies of the missing.  Desperate people were willing to pay large amounts of money for anything that might give them connection to those that had passed on.  This is why fraud was so rife during this time period.

Despite having debunked mediumship, Harry Houdini still wanted to believe in the ability to contact the dead.  He told his wife that if it were possible to come back, that he would come back to her through a seance.  She kept a candle burning continuously by his picture and held a seance every year on Halloween, which in Celtic mythology was the time when the veil between the living and the dead was thinnest.  They had a secret code word, that was to be produced as proof that it was really Harry.  The code word was produced at a seance three years after his death, but his wife said that the circumstances were faked.  She held a seance every year for ten years.  When she had not been contacted by that time, she put out the candle and quit holding the seances. 

Most people think that is the end of the story.  It isn't.   There are many seances held for Harry Houdini every year.  There is even one that is called the Official Houdini Seance that is held by the Chicago Society of Magicians.  So far,  no one has been able to prove contact.

Despite Houdini's debunking of mediums, there is still a belief that spirits can be sensed or that they can contact the living.  The debate over whether this is reality or imagination continues.  Many people have had experiences that cannot be proven, but leave them with no doubt that they have sensed or been contacted by spirits.