Category File
Spiritualism
9 documented theories filed under this subject.
- White House SéanceThe White House Séance theory held that First Lady Florence Harding was not merely consulting astrologers and clairvoyants for personal guidance, but using a medium—most often identified in rumor as Madame Marcia Champney—to direct political decisions and influence the presidency from behind ceremonial power. The strongest historical basis for the theory lies in Florence Harding’s real consultations with Madame Marcia Champney and the publicity surrounding Champney’s alleged predictions about Warren Harding’s election and early death. The stronger version transformed astrology and occult consultation into actual governance, claiming that mediums rather than cabinet officers shaped decisions. Because the White House had a longer history of supernatural associations and because Harding’s administration was already shadowed by secrecy, scandal, and illness, the séance version proved especially durable.
- Electric Chair Soul-TrapThe Electric Chair Soul-Trap was the belief that electrocution did not simply kill the condemned but altered the soul’s departure, leaving part or all of the executed person’s essence trapped within prison wires, switchboards, electrodes, or the execution chamber itself. The theory drew power from the overlap between two late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural developments: the rise of Spiritualism and the rise of electrical technology. Because electricity was often imagined as an invisible force linking bodies, minds, and unseen worlds, the electric chair came to be viewed by some not only as a killing machine but as a device that interfered with the soul’s natural release. In prison folklore and occult retelling, execution rooms became charged spaces where the dead remained present because the current had caught them.
- The "Automatic Writing" Global PlotThe "Automatic Writing" Global Plot was the belief that post-World War I diplomacy, especially the making of the Treaty of Versailles, was being invisibly influenced through mediums, trance dictation, automatic writing, or other forms of spirit-guided text production. The theory emerged from a period when automatic writing had become a familiar Spiritualist practice and when large-scale political settlement seemed so consequential that ordinary authorship itself appeared insufficient to some observers. In its strongest form, the plot held that ghosts, discarnate intelligences, or dead statesmen were dictating the treaty’s terms through receptive intermediaries around world leaders. The theory turned diplomatic authorship into an occult communications conspiracy.
- The "OUIJA" Board PossessionThe "OUIJA" Board Possession theory was a 1920s-era occult panic that treated the Ouija board not simply as a parlor game or séance device, but as a real receiving instrument capable of tuning the human mind to hostile intelligences beyond ordinary reality. In its more extreme form, the board was interpreted as a telepathic receiver for a nonhuman or alien dimension whose entities could enter the user’s consciousness through repeated contact. The theory drew on the late nineteenth-century Spiritualist background of the board, the use of planchettes in automatic writing, and a period fascination with radio, invisible waves, telepathy, and unseen communication. It became a classic example of a new communications technology being reimagined as a gateway to invasion from beyond the visible world.
- The Houdini "Murder"The Houdini "Murder" theory held that Harry Houdini’s death in 1926 was not merely the result of appendicitis and peritonitis, but a retaliatory killing by Spiritualists he had exposed and humiliated in public. The theory developed because Houdini had become one of the most visible critics of fraudulent mediums, séance performers, and spirit communication claims in the years before his death. While the documented medical cause of death was peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, rumor quickly extended the event into darker explanations, including poisoning, occult revenge, and "mental force" attacks that allegedly ruptured the appendix or accelerated the illness. The result was a long-lasting theory that his anti-Spiritualist campaign had made him a target.
- The "Spirit" Photography FraudThis theory claimed that ghost and spirit photographs were not mainly produced by fraudulent photographers or misinterpreted exposures, but were being quietly enabled by camera and film companies—especially Kodak—through the manufacture of film, plates, or processing conditions that encouraged ghostly results. The theory grew from a real history of photographic double exposure, deliberate trick photography, and accidental “ghost” images, all of which made the medium itself seem complicit. In rumor form, photographic companies moved from neutral suppliers to hidden manufacturers of haunting.
- The "Spirit" RadioThis theory claimed that wireless communication, especially in its headphone-based listening forms, could open the listener to supernatural contact or even spirit possession. It developed in the overlap between late Spiritualism and the new technologies of telegraphy, wireless transmission, and radio. Because radio made voices audible without visible speakers and operated through invisible waves, it was easily assimilated to preexisting beliefs about unseen entities and disembodied communication. In stronger versions, Marconi’s invention did not merely carry signals through space but provided a channel through which spirits could enter the body and mind.
- The "Electric" GhostThis theory centered on claims that Thomas Edison was developing an instrument—later popularly called a “Spirit Phone”—to communicate with the dead. Unlike many purely fictional technological occult rumors, this one had a real historical spark: Edison did publicly state in 1920 that he had been working on an apparatus to test whether personalities surviving death could communicate. Because no confirmed prototype or finished device has been found, the announcement itself became the foundation of a lasting conspiracy tradition about a lost, hidden, or suppressed machine.
- The "Spirit" TelegraphThis 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.