Fingerprinting Ghosts: Science, Technology & the Occult with The Media of Mediumship Project Team

The Media of Mediumship project is running jointly at the
University of Stirling and the Science Museum Group. The project
team comprises Principal Investigator Professor Christine
Ferguson, Co-Investigator Dr Efram Sera-Shriar and Postdoctoral
Research Fellow Dr Emma Merkling.


In this very spooky episode, Christine, Efram and Emma tell us
how from the late-19th Century on, novel technologies of the
period - including photographic cameras, radio transmitters and
devices for producing and recording different types of
electromagnetic radiation such as X-rays - were used to explore
what we now think of as the 'supernatural'. The team show that
during this period, phenonema such as the ability of a medium to
channel the spirits of the dead, or the physical manifestations
of this ability such as the production of ectoplasm, were open to
scientific debate, having not yet fallen outside the boundaries
of legitimate scientific study. Similarly, what phenomena it was
possible for novel technologies such as radio and photography to
record or capture was not yet settled. Spiritualists, occultists,
scientists, as well as magicians and outright con-artists (with
more than one of these labels often applying to the same
individual) used these novel technologies variously to evidence
or debunk various claims, draw boundaries between legitimate and
illegitimate scientific and spiritualist or occult practises,
whilst also satisfying a Victorian public for whom attending a
séance, for example, was a popular form of entertainment. The
team discuss this fascinating history with reference to some of
the technological artefacts and other objects of the period,
which are held by the Science Museum Group and Senate House
Library, and which were implicated in some of the most
high-profile contemporary controversies e.g. the Cottingley
fairies.