Category: Fraud Allegations

• The "Spirit" Telegraph

  This theory claimed that mediums who said they were communicating with the dead were in fact using hidden wires, coded signals, or confederates to exchange information with living collaborators. It emerged from the close association between Spiritualism and nineteenth-century communications technology, especially the telegraph. Spiritualists embraced the telegraph as a metaphor for communication across invisible distances, while critics and debunkers reinterpreted the same language as evidence of trickery, espionage, or covert signaling.