History of Mediumship: From 1848 to Today
History of Mediumship
Mediumship, the claim that a living person can communicate with the dead, is older than any single religion or movement. People in many cultures have spoken with ancestors, consulted oracles, and listened for the voices of the dead for thousands of years. But the history of mediumship as a named practice, with mediums, seances, and a movement behind them, begins in a small farmhouse in New York State in the spring of 1848, and the story from that night to the present day runs through churches, courtrooms, war, science, and the internet. This page follows that timeline date by date, naming the people and the turning points, and separating what is documented from what is believed. If you need the basics first, what is a medium explains the role, psychic vs medium draws the line against general psychic work, and the mediumship hub gathers the whole cluster.
The first thing to understand is that mediumship did not begin in 1848. It took its modern shape then. Before that date, communication with the dead was part of religion, folklore, and family life in many places, but it was not a profession and it was not a movement. After 1848, it became both, and the next 175 years show how quickly a local event can become a national craze, a church, a target for investigators, and finally a quieter practice that still fills booking calendars today.
Before 1848: Ancestors, Oracles, and Swedenborg
Long before the word medium was common, people sought messages from the dead. In ancient Greece, people visited oracles and necromanteia, shrines where the dead were said to speak, including the oracle at Delphi, where a priestess known as the Pythia gave answers said to come from the god Apollo. In ancient China, ancestor veneration treated the dead as part of the family, to be honored, fed, and consulted. In many African and Indigenous traditions, ancestors remained active members of the community, and a healer or diviner could carry their messages. These practices were religious and communal, not commercial, and they did not use the language of mediumship as we know it.
In Europe, the eighteenth century added a new figure: Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist and theologian who lived from 1688 to 1772 and who wrote that he could speak with spirits and angels and visit the spiritual world. Swedenborg's books described heaven and hell as places shaped by the lives people had lived, and his ideas spread widely after his death, influencing writers, theologians, and later Spiritualists. A second influence was Franz Anton Mesmer, an Austrian physician who lived from 1734 to 1815 and who promoted the idea of animal magnetism, a force he said could be used to heal through trance. Mesmer's trances, and the trance states that followed in his wake, gave nineteenth century audiences a model for how a person might enter an altered state and speak with knowledge they did not ordinarily have.
A third figure was Andrew Jackson Davis, an American seer born in 1826, who published The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind in 1847, a year before the Fox sisters. Davis wrote in trance, said the spirit of Swedenborg spoke through him, and described a spiritual world in which the dead continued to learn and to communicate. His book gave the coming movement its ideas before the movement had its famous event. When the rappings began in Hydesville in 1848, Davis's readers already had a framework for what they might mean.
1848: The Rappings at Hydesville
On March 31, 1848, in a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York, a hamlet in Wayne County about twenty miles west of Rochester, two young sisters, Maggie Fox, aged 14, and Kate Fox, aged 11, reported mysterious rappings on the walls and furniture of their home. The sounds had been heard on earlier nights, but on that evening the girls answered them. Kate clapped her hands and called out to the noise, telling it to do as she did, and the raps answered in the same number. Their mother, Margaret Fox, asked the unseen presence to count, to give ages, and to answer questions, and the raps replied. A code grew out of that evening: one rap for no, two for yes, or a number of raps for a number, and later an alphabet called out letter by letter until a rap signaled the right one.
The family soon said the presence was the spirit of a peddler who had been murdered and buried in the cellar of the house, a man the girls named Charles B. Rosma. No missing peddler matching that story was ever identified, and bones later found in the cellar included animal bones, so the peddler story remains unproven. What is documented is the event itself: the date, the place, the family, and the rapid spread of the story. The Fox family left the house, the girls went to live with their older sister Leah Fox Fish in Rochester, and within months the rappings were being reported in homes across New York State.
Rochester was a fitting place for the story to catch fire. The Finger Lakes region of New York was a center of religious reform and new movements in the 1840s, the same region that gave rise to Mormonism and to Millerism, the movement that became Seventh Day Adventism. The Fox sisters gave public demonstrations, Leah managed their tours, and by 1850 the rappings had become a national phenomenon. By the mid 1850s, Spiritualism, as the movement came to be called, had spread across the United States and into Europe, with millions of believers by some estimates of the period, though no reliable census of believers exists and that figure should be read as a sign of scale rather than a counted total.
1850 to 1900: Spiritualism Becomes a Movement
The 1850s turned a household event into an institution. Seances became a regular social event in middle class homes, with a medium at the center of a table, hands joined, lights low, and the room waiting for raps, for a voice, for a table to move, or for a materialized hand. New kinds of mediumship appeared alongside the rappings: trance mediums who spoke while in a trance state, physical mediums who produced sounds and movements, and writing mediums who produced automatic writing said to come from a spirit. The variety mattered, because it meant a person who doubted one kind of evidence might accept another.
The movement also became a church. In 1893, the National Spiritualist Association of Churches was founded in the United States, giving Spiritualism a formal organization, a statement of principles, and a network of churches that still exists today. In Britain, the Spiritualists National Union was founded in 1901, and it remains the main Spiritualist organization in the United Kingdom. Both bodies treated mediumship as a religious practice rather than a stage act, and both set standards for mediums working in their churches. That distinction, between a church medium and a stage medium, has shaped the practice ever since, and it is one reason a modern church service with a medium feels very different from a private paid reading.
The late nineteenth century also brought the first organized investigations. The Society for Psychical Research was founded in London in 1882, with members including respected scientists and philosophers, to study mediumship and other claimed phenomena with scientific methods. Its investigators examined mediums, attended seances, and published reports that were careful, skeptical, and often inconclusive. Some mediums passed their tests. Others were caught using tricks. The Society's work did not settle the question, but it established a standard that still matters: a claim should be tested under conditions the claimant does not control, and a medium who refuses such a test is asking to be believed without evidence.
The Fox sisters themselves became part of that skeptical history. In 1888, forty years after Hydesville, Maggie Fox publicly said that she and Kate had produced the rappings themselves by cracking the joints in their toes and feet. She demonstrated the method on stage. A year later she took back the confession. Kate died in 1892 and Maggie in 1893, and Leah had died in 1890. The confession and its retraction left the founding story unresolved, and historians still argue about what the sisters did and why. What is not in dispute is the effect: the rappings launched a movement that outlived its founders and outlived the confession itself.
1900 to 1950: War, Houdini, and the Second Wave
The First World War brought a second wave of interest in mediumship, and the reason was grief on a scale no one had seen before. Millions of families lost sons, husbands, and brothers, and many turned to mediums hoping for a word from the dead. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, became one of the most famous believers of the period, writing and lecturing in support of Spiritualism after losing his son Kingsley in the war. His belief gave the movement a respected public voice, and his friendship with Harry Houdini gave it its most famous argument.
Houdini, the magician, had first approached Spiritualism with an open mind after the death of his mother, hoping to find comfort. What he found, in his own account, was trickery, and he spent the last years of his life exposing it. He attended seances in disguise, demonstrated the physical methods behind floating trumpets and ringing bells, and wrote a book, A Magician Among the Spirits, published in 1924, describing the tricks he had seen. In 1924 he also sat on the Scientific American committee that had offered a 2,500 dollar prize to any medium who could produce phenomena under strict test conditions, and he reported that the effects he witnessed were produced by ordinary physical means. In 1926, a few months before his death on October 31, 1926, he testified before Congress in support of a bill that would have criminalized fortune telling for hire in the District of Columbia. His campaign cost him the friendship with Conan Doyle, who believed Houdini was attacking a genuine faith rather than exposing fraud.
The Second World War brought another wave of grief and another wave of interest, but by the middle of the twentieth century the movement was smaller and quieter than it had been in the 1850s or the 1920s. Television, modern medicine, and a more skeptical public culture pushed mediumship to the edges, where it survived in Spiritualist churches, in small private circles, and in the work of individual mediums who kept the practice alive without the crowds and the headlines of the earlier waves.
1950 to Today: Television, Evidence, and the Internet
The late twentieth century changed mediumship again, this time through television and through a shift in emphasis. In Britain, mediums such as Doris Stokes, who became famous in the 1970s and 1980s for public demonstrations in large halls, brought mediumship to a mass audience. In the United States, television mediums in the 1990s and 2000s, including John Edward and later Theresa Caputo, turned the private reading into a broadcast format, with an audience, cameras, and edited highlights. Television made mediumship visible, and it also made it harder to judge, because an edited program shows the hits and cuts the misses.
Inside the movement, a quieter change was also happening. A style called evidential mediumship gained ground, especially in Britain, in which the medium is expected to give specific, checkable details about the person who died, a name, a job, a habit, a cause of death, before offering any message or guidance. The standard was a response to decades of vague readings, and it is the standard a careful reader should look for today. Evidential mediumship explains that standard in full, and types of mediumship describes the different kinds of mediumship, from mental to physical to trance, that have developed since the rappings.
The internet changed the practice a third time. Readings moved from the seance table to the phone, to video call, and to chat, and a person in one country can now book a medium in another without leaving home. Online platforms, review systems, and social media have made it easier to find a medium and easier to check a reputation, and they have also made it easier for a fake medium to reach a grieving person quickly. The old questions have not changed. Is the detail specific. Is the medium honest about limits. Is there pressure to pay more. The setting has changed, and the checklist has not.
Today, mediumship sits in three places at once. Readers looking for a practitioner can use how to choose a medium before booking anything. It is a religion, in Spiritualist churches that hold services with a medium as part of worship. It is a private service, in readings booked by people who are grieving and who want a connection with one person. And it is a subject of public interest, in books, television, and online discussion. The history from 1848 to today is the story of a practice that began with two girls in a farmhouse, became a movement, survived exposure and skepticism, and settled into a quieter, more personal form. Whether you believe the claims or not, the history is worth knowing, because it explains why a modern reading looks the way it does, and why the same red flags Houdini named a century ago still matter.
If you would like a quiet moment to reflect on this long history, try a One-Card Tarot reading and see what theme it raises for you. First 3 minutes FREE — every time, for every reading, with all advisors.
For a simple next step, try a One-Card Tarot reading and reflect on which part of this history, the faith, the evidence, or the grief, speaks most to you.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did modern mediumship begin?
Modern mediumship is usually dated to March 31, 1848, when Maggie and Kate Fox reported mysterious rappings in their home in Hydesville, New York. Communication with the dead is far older, in ancestor traditions and oracles, but 1848 is the start of mediumship as a named movement with mediums and seances.
Who were the Fox sisters?
Maggie Fox, aged 14, and Kate Fox, aged 11, were the sisters at the center of the Hydesville rappings in 1848, with their older sister Leah Fox Fish later managing their public demonstrations. In 1888 Maggie publicly said the raps had been made by cracking toe joints, then took back the confession a year later, leaving the founding story unresolved.
What is Spiritualism?
Spiritualism is the religious movement that grew from the Hydesville events, teaching that the dead survive and can communicate with the living through mediums. It became a formal church movement with the National Spiritualist Association of Churches in the United States in 1893 and the Spiritualists National Union in Britain in 1901.
Did Harry Houdini believe in mediumship?
Houdini approached Spiritualism with an open mind after his mother's death, then spent his last years exposing what he found to be trickery, including sitting on the 1924 Scientific American committee and testifying before Congress in 1926. He died on October 31, 1926. His work targeted fraud, not belief itself.
Is mediumship still practiced today?
Yes. Mediumship continues in Spiritualist churches, in private readings by phone, video, and chat, and in public demonstrations. Modern practice emphasizes evidential detail, specific facts about the person who died, and honest limits about what a medium can and cannot do.
Last updated: November 11, 2026
