Episode 213: The Light and the Spirits

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This is the memory palace.

I'm Nate DeMayo.

30 people in a pitch black room.

They had lined up for hours along the brick wall as the sun cast its shifting shadows on lower Manhattan, summer 1855.

Some had jumped the queue, flashing money that proved too much to people who put in the work and waiting to refuse.

They'd offered as much as $200 to cut the line, which was outrageous then, and $8,000 now.

Others wouldn't budge.

They wouldn't miss this for anything.

Once inside, the eager women and men were seated along the four walls of a windowless room.

In the center, on the floor, lay musical instruments, strings and brass, wind and percussion.

And sat two teenagers, brothers, back to back in chairs, and tied up in ropes.

All went black.

Then there was music.

horns scronking, a cowbell clanging with no regard to musical time, a bow scraped scraped across the strings of a violin, an otherworldly cacoffee,

and then silence.

Lamps were lit,

and the audience blinked away the darkness to find that the instruments still lay before them, apparently undisturbed.

And the two boys, they were still tied to the chairs, back to back just as they had been before the room went black and the racket started.

There could be only one explanation.

The brothers Davenport, 16-year-old Ira and 18-year-old William, had done what they had promised.

They had contacted the spirit realm

and summoned from its depths a symphony of the dead.

Or at least that was the explanation that held the city in its thrall and drove the frenzy for tickets to enter the pitch-black room.

The real explanation will likely not surprise you.

It was revealed one night when, as the ghost band banged away in the darkness, a policeman lit a lamp, and everyone saw the two brothers out of their chairs, playing the instruments themselves, caught perhaps mid-cheekpuff, poised to blow a trumpet, or maybe frozen in fear, knowing the spectral jig was up.

Years later, the brothers would describe in detail the lengths they went to to concoct their con,

how, as young boys, they trained under the expert eye of their crooked police detective father, father in the arts of rope escapes and of lying with a straight face.

Mind you, this confession came after decades of taking this act and variations on it all over the United States and Europe.

But on that night, when that other policeman came to the show, the realm of the spirits collapsed in an instant, merely by shining a little light on it.

This brief story is about light and its limits.

The brothers Davenport were at the vanguard of a cultural revolution in 19th century America.

Partly a religious one, as spiritualism, the belief that certain gifted living people could communicate directly with dead ones of all sorts, became a faith that swept up some immense and unknowable number of people for about 60 years or so.

It was also a pastime, as displays of channeling, automatic writing, automatic painting, trance-induced dancing, levitation, ghostly apparitions of various kinds, filled theaters and parlors on both sides of the Atlantic.

Untold thousands of mediums, some sincere seekers, some, most surely, straight con artists, were in heated competition for believers who would buy tickets or otherwise compensate them for their spiritual services.

They were locked in a competition that hinged like any performance, and that's what they were, whether it was in front of hundreds or one-on-one, on skill and talent and charisma and innovation.

One can only see so many tables shiver as though jostled by restless spirits before one wants to see that table lift off the ground.

And so it began in the middle of the 1850s with a simple rope escape, or little tricks of suggestion and body language interpretation known to even the rookie mentalist or midway fortune-teller.

or with ghosts who communicated by simple knocking sounds that turned out to be the cracking joints of the mediums themselves.

They got more and more elaborate.

So chairs that seemed to quake beneath the guests at seances in one year were sliding about the room a few years later.

A shimmering glow that suggests a ghostly presence a bit down the road would have a face.

A decade later might have a whole body that would flit about in the air above you.

That these developments in the practices of spiritualists map roughly over innovations in the performances of stage magicians might not come as a shock.

For instance, it does turn out that those spiritualist brothers had a long-time assistant who went on to be one of the most successful magicians of his era, famous for optical illusions like the one where it looked like he cut off his own head.

And though we can generally look back and see how these spiritualists did so much of the seemingly uncanny stuff recorded in the spiritualist journals and eyewitness accounts that make up the historical record of that bygone era, and one can match a once stupefying occurrence with a now familiar illusion.

There is another thing that is harder to see and to understand.

Why did people believe?

And there are so many reasons that are rooted in human psychology and history.

In a time when death was closer and more frequent, a time of civil war, disease, and high infant mortality.

So many reasons why someone living in that time might want to believe.

But to understand why it worked, what pushed them from desire to believe to belief itself, one needs to look to the light and how light changed over time.

Because the history of spiritualism can be written in shadows.

First, those thrown from candles in darkened rooms where people would often sit in seances for hours at a time with flames flickering from a wick from a fireplace all while a gifted medium is making suggestions about what they might see there in that room.

We see things in shadows.

And later, as gaslight came in, it brought a new flickering, and a new eerie blue glow, and a hiss and a ripple.

Historians, when trying to figure out why the belief in ghosts soared, just as gaslighting grew in popularity in well-to-do homes, point to those things.

The new light, the changed soundscape, that may have set the scene for hearing ghostly whispers, for seeing spectral beings.

And with them came the gas itself.

that could seep into rooms undetected.

Rooms where these seance goers would sit often for whole evenings, all through the night, breathing in gas that messed with your head,

just as you were opening it up to the possibilities of other realms.

It is likely not coincidence.

Nor is it, I'd suggest, that spiritualism in seances largely died, just as electric lighting was born, with its steady, secular shadows.

But we cannot know what our forebearers really felt, or what really happened to them in those rooms when we try and look back.

The light doesn't extend that far.

This episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMayo, in March of 2024.

The show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

It is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network of independently owned and operated listener-supported podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company.

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It is called The Recipe with Kenji and Deb.

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