RP387 Speaking Spooks

 RP387 Speaking Spooks

In 1848, two sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, said they could communicate with the dead. They claimed to hear loud tapping sounds coming from their house in Hydesville, New York. People who visited them confirmed the tapping and that the girls could indeed communicate with the noisy spirit.
Before long, thousands of mediums had emerged who claimed miraculous powers of being able to speak to the dead. In darkened rooms, with a small group of people, they would attempt to reach departed loved ones.
Mediums would use many different methods to indicate that a spirit was present. Bells and balls were placed on the table, and as the medium spoke, the ball would move around, or the bell would ring without being touched. Some mediums would use spirit slates—two blank chalkboards tied together that, after calling a spirit, would be opened to reveal a message written on the inside. However, many of these methods were exposed as common magic tricks.
Many modern seances now take place in front of large audiences, with the medium providing personal messages from the spirit world. The medium often displays an uncanny knowledge of the deceased as well as the audience member—sure proof that he is genuinely talking to the spirits!
However, skeptics insists that mediums are simply using a linguistic trick called “cold reading,” which gives the impression of telling someone information, when actually the information is mostly being provided by the audience member himself.
For example, a medium might claim to be hearing from a spirit whose name begins with P and who is repeatedly saying the number five. An audience member picks up on this information and says, “That must be my father, Peter, who had five brothers.” In fact, the letter P and number five could have applied to many audience members; meanwhile, the medium has actually not given any details at all, only appeared to do so.
It may not come as a surprise, then, that in 1888 Margaret Fox, who had started the entire phenomenon, confessed that the mysterious tapping was nothing more than she and her sister cracking the joints of their toes.