Thurston could certainly boast at the time that he was the greatest magician in the world, rivaling and sometimes besting his contemporaries, such as the famed escapologist Harry Houdini. Like many magicians, however, Thurston created a persona in his adult life that masked a past he did not want to reveal: The suave, well-spoken master illusionist gave no impression of having experienced a childhood filled with abuse and crime. In addition, during his stage career he was ambiguous about his belief in communicating with the dead. The poster encapsulates the visual and textual iconography of Spiritualism in the popular consciousness, and the truths and falsehoods that it unearths mirror the complex world of those who performed spirit-related acts.

Spirit mediums and stage magicians have been inextricably linked since the mid-19th century. In 1848, 14-year-old Maggie and 11-year-old Kate Fox of Hydesville, New York, reported strange rapping noises coming from the floorboards and walls in their house. The girls claimed that these jarring sounds, which were also heard by their parents and throngs of curious neighbors, were produced by the ghost of a murdered peddler buried in the cellar. Hailed for their abilities to communicate with the spirit world, the Fox Sisters soon gave public demonstrations in nearby Rochester and beyond and attained celebrity status. They lit a spark in a region of Western New York State labeled the “Burned-Over District,” home to several new religious awakenings or revivals during the 19th century, including Mormonism and the Shakers. “The Rochester rappings,” as they were dubbed, spawned the international Spiritualist movement.

This socioreligious belief system’s central tenet is that there is no death; spirits exist in the natural world and can be contacted through mediums like the Fox Sisters, who were seen as possessing special gifts for communication with the departed. By the end of the century, this movement reportedly had millions of followers drawn to any number of Spiritualism’s facets: its anti-hierarchical access to divine forces, its support of progressive causes like abolition, its alignment with scientific thought, the sense of closure it provided for those who were unable to physically mourn the dead during the Civil War (which would be repeated during World War I) and the opportunities it offered for women to have roles of power and agency in a male-dominated society.

The Davenport Brothers were seen as mediums by the Spiritualist community and as magicians by those who thought they were conjuring “ghosts” using simple sleight of hand. But the brothers never claimed to be either. They toured their spirit cabinet act in the United States, Canada, Europe and beyond, influencing many future mediums and magicians such as Harry Kellar, “the Dean of American Magic,” who started his career working for the brothers.

Starting in the mid-19th century, Americans and Europeans were entranced and mystified by two interrelated forms of popular culture that delved into the supernatural: séances (from the French word for sitting or session) and magic shows. In both types of experiential performances, objects were integral to communicating with the other side. The Fox Sisters, by asking a spirit to answer “yes” or “no” to questions with a single or double rap, transformed floorboards and tables into active agents. The Davenport Brothers built a cabinet that mimicked a decorative piece of furniture, filled it with musical instruments and activated the ensemble into a supernatural experience.

As time went on, the demonstrations of spirit contact by mediums and magicians became more elaborate and visual. Objects that materialized the dead evolved from painted and photographic posthumous portraits into those that showed the departed or unnamed spirits hovering, comforting or floating above a sitter. Disembodied wooden hands tapped out answers to questions; blank canvases brought forth images of the deceased. In some cases, ghosts appeared before spectators’ very eyes in full form or as a spectral essence, ectoplasm, oozing from the medium’s mouth.

Works of visual and material culture were central to capturing the imagination of willing and/or skeptical audiences. Advertising broadsides, posters, books, newspapers, magazines and other forms of print media not only promoted but also augmented and shaped these public and private demonstrations of spirit communication. The Fox Sisters and the Davenport Brothers were even the subjects of sheet music sold shortly after their debuts.

Art and objects played an instrumental role for mediums and magicians “conjuring” spirits for the public and “proving” the existence of spirits in the natural world. Mediums and magicians borrowed from and influenced each other, or railed against each other as nonbelievers or frauds. They were also in an ongoing competition for the same corner of the entertainment market. As Simone Natale, who specializes in media theory and history, observes, the Spiritualist movement “was closely connected to the contemporary evolution of the media entertainment industry” since mediums and Spiritualist leaders “employed some of the same advertising strategies, performance practices and spectacular techniques that were being developed within the field of spectacular entertainments.” Spiritualism’s blurring of truth and falsehood and the polarization that can arise from differing belief systems are still very much a part of today’s cultural landscape.

For those who study and see the world through a material culture lens, it is not surprising that objects played a central role in humanity’s age-old desire to understand if there is life after death. Before the inception of the Spiritualist movement, Americans and Europeans kept loved ones “alive” and around them in the form of death masks, portraits made from casts of the departed and, later, postmortem photographs. In magic performances, while a successful act is determined by the skill of the conjurer, the focal point for the illusion is centered on an object that the audience expects to appear or disappear.

The objects and stories featured in Conjuring the Spirit World highlight Spiritualism’s influence on religious, scientific and social thought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Spiritualism arose during a time when the empirical and the supernatural were thought by some people to coexist. Unlike other socioreligious movements, Spiritualism believed in science as a means for testing and proving that spirits were part of the natural world; various branches of science and pseudoscience were established at this time.

Many well-known and respected scientists of the day rallied to the cause, creating devices to test and prove theories. Among these advocates was Alfred Russel Wallace, co-creator of the theory of evolution. The man most commonly associated with that theory, Charles Darwin, was in the anti-Spiritualist camp of the scientific community that led or supported the many exposés of intentionally deceptive mediums.

Mediumship and magic also served as a source of agency and reinvention for a diverse group of people. The Spiritualist movement started the same year, and in the same state, as the first women’s rights convention in the United States, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Being a medium provided women the opportunity to speak in public and take leadership roles. Although men dominated the world of magic, some women, such as Adelaide Herrmann, were as successful as, or more successful than, their male counterparts.

Many magicians were immigrants who used their profession to forge a new identity in the United States and elsewhere, including Houdini, who was born Erik Weisz (later changed to Ehrich Weiss) to Hungarian Jewish parents in Budapest. Henry “Box” Brown, who mailed himself to freedom in 1849 in a packing crate, used magic and spirit performance exposés as a way to tell his story of an amazing escape and resurrection from enslavement in the southern United States.