Pearsall Ronald. The table-rappers

London: Joseph, [1972]. — 258 p.Many people still believe in ghosts. As Dr Johnson said, ‘All argument is against it, but all belief is for it’. The Victorian age was the most haunted
of them all. At dark seances spectators goggled at spirit hands descending from above, and fondled ‘spirits’ who had coyly emerged from cabinets. The efforts of science to explain spiritualism away were coldly ignored; the age of reason had done away with the supernatural. The Victorians wanted it back, and they made certain they got it. Astrology and fortune-telling enjoyed a boom, and in country districts the witches and the ‘cunning men’ plied their arts, selling and casting spells, and applying the evil eye. The table-rappers deals with all aspects of the Victorian occult—the credulity of believers certain that a thing of gauze and muslin was their dead aunt, the venom of the professional mediums who sabotaged each others’ seances, and the still unexplained phenomena—levitations, the ‘fire test’ where mediums handled red-hot coals, and strange materialisations where both mediums and spirits were in the room at the same time. The book deals with Victorian witchcraft, slumbering but not dead, occasionally erupting in violent fashion, with hauntings and vile apparitions, with demonology and Satanism. It probes at the motivations of those who cultivated the weird and the uncanny, exposes the pretensions of those who sought to jump on the band-wagon, seeks to unravel the skeins of fact, fiction, and downright insanity. Mr Pearsall uses a wealth of previously unpublished material, uncovers dark corners in the spiritualist movement—seances used as introducing-houses for vice, homosexuality, and drug-taking—and asks new questions about the plethora of hauntings: not whether ghosts were seen,
but why they were seen.