Many practitioners of the supernatural arts regard holding an ad-hoc seance as a very bad idea.
#REAL SEANCE FREE#
Who says the spirits don’t want to talk to a regular person like you? You just need some likeminded friends, a free evening, and a back-up plan if the spirits don’t feel like gabbing. That kind of esotericism is pretty much gone these days, but you can give afterlife communication a shot without those trappings. The old-school seance was often a spooky affair during which exotic weirdos were invited into people’s homes to practice their arcane craft.
As long as people believe in ghosts - and almost half of Americans do - it seems we’re going to try to talk to them. The classic seance (and spiritualism itself) waned in popularity as the hokum was revealed, but never truly disappeared. Religious figures (who presumably didn’t like outsiders working their side of the corner), courts of law, scientists, and magicians (including Harry Houdini, whose 1924 book A Magician Among the Spiritsremains the last word on the secrets of seances) publicly unravelled the tricks of the medium trade. Prominent figures like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Thomas Edison were believers, as were countless regular people, but the era’s mediums also drew the attention of debunkers. “In the 1920s, the craze of of seances took off in America and in England because there were a lot of deaths after World War One,” explains Rob Zabrecky, the resident medium at Los Angele’’s legendary Magic Castle (where the seances are definitely not real.) “People were trying to contact their loved ones, and, lo and behold, these and magicians realised that there’s a plethora of magic tricks that you can perform to seemingly contact a ghost or a spirit.”Īs the popularity of seances grew, competition between mediums became fierce, leading to more and more elaborate tricks (or spiritual manifestations, if you’re a believer). The practice is old enough to be mentioned in the Old Testament (specifically, Deuteronomy, thought to have been written around 630 BCE), but seances reached their golden age about 100 years ago, with the rise of the spiritualist movement in the U.S. Once a popular post-Victorian parlor pastime, the seance has largely fallen out of the popular consciousness, but it’s due for a comeback, and you can lead the way, whether you want to sincerely try to talk to dead relatives, or you just want to freak your friends out on a Friday night.ĭerived from the Old French word “ seoir,” meaning “to sit,” a seance is, in the broadest sense, a gathering of people with the intention of communicating with the dead. After your next dinner party, instead of breaking out the board games for another round of Boggle, consider piercing the veil between the living and the dead by hosting a do-it-yourself seance instead.
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