4 Tools of Victorian-Era Ghost Hunting

In the early days of Victorian-era spiritualism, tables were the most common tool used to communicate with the dead. A medium, along with séance attendees, would sit around a small or medium table and place their hands on top. Then the table would start moving, indicating that a spirit was present—a practice known as table tipping or table turning.

“Through table tipping, the spirit could make itself known,” Carter says. “You’d ask, ‘If you are here, give us a sign,’ and the spirit would then make the table rattle and shake and jump up and down.”

Table tipping exploded in popularity in the 1850s. By then, more people believed communication with the spirit world was possible and they were looking for new ways to facilitate it.

Not everyone believed in table tipping. In 1853, scientist Michael Faraday concluded that the people sitting at the tables were unconsciously moving them. Despite the debunking, table tipping remained the go-to method for conjuring spirits well into the early 20th century.

At first, communication with the dead during the Victorian era involved asking spirits to make noises to signal their presence—like knocks or raps on a table, Carter explains. This typically took the form of asking them to knock once for “yes” and twice for “no,” or once for the letter “A,” twice for the letter “B” and so on. “It was really time-consuming and exhausting for everybody,” she says.

That’s where spirit boards—also known as “witch boards”—came in. They looked like board games but displayed all 26 letters of the alphabet, the numbers zero through nine and the words “yes,” “no” and “goodbye.” They came with a heart-shaped piece of wood called a planchette, which participants would touch with their fingers, allowing the spirit to come through and spell out messages. 

“These devices were meant as a sort-of otherworldly typewriter,” Carter says. “It got the messages through faster and more accurately.” The most famous type of spirit board is the Ouija board, patented in 1891 and a trademarked name.

In the late 19th century, narrow tin, aluminum or cardboard cones known as spirit trumpets or séance trumpets became “one of the most popular séance-room tools,” says Chris Woodyard, the author of The Victorian Book of the Dead and The Ghost Wore Black: Ghastly Tales from the Past. Though the use of a spirit trumpet may go back to the ancient Greeks, she credits Jonathan Koons, a spiritualist from Ohio active in the 1850s, with introducing it in the Victorian era.

During a séance, the trumpet was placed in the center of a table and was thought to amplify sounds from the spirit world, including whistles, whispers, dogs barking, wind or waves. Alternatively, a medium might put a trumpet to their lips for it to act as a megaphone for spirit messages. “Direct voice communication with the dead was a common phenomenon of the séance room,” Woodyard says. “Mediums who produced voices were often known as ‘trumpet mediums’ because the ‘spirit voices’ manifested themselves through a tin trumpet.”

Having a direct line of communication with the spirit world made it faster and easier to receive messages than going letter by letter with spirit boards. “Spirit trumpets allowed you to get more elaborate messages, like, ‘I miss my mommy,’ ‘I am here,’ ‘Look under the dining room table for a sign,’” Carter says. In some instances, the spirit trumpet was said to levitate and float around the room, hovering next to the recipient of the message.

While mediums were typically in full view during a séance, some used a piece of furniture known as a manifestation cabinet or spirit cabinet to separate themselves from the rest of the group when making contact with the other side. Manifestation cabinets were often wooden wardrobes covered by a heavy velvet curtain, though sectioning off the corner of a room could serve as a makeshift cabinet.

The purpose of a spirit cabinet was to “attract and conserve spiritual forces, enabling the medium to produce manifestations,” according to The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits Unknown. Brothers William and Ira Davenport—who posed as spiritualists, considered themselves magicians and let séance audiences decide for themselves—popularized use of manifestation cabinets in the 1850s.

The medium sat in the cabinet with hands and feet bound to “prove” that anything coming through was from the spirit world. Then floating faces or full-body apparitions would emerge from the cabinet’s curtains. These apparitions typically looked a lot like the mediums themselves, wearing a loose muslin robe and veil known as spirit drapery.