Kevin Dixon: Our fascination with the afterlife goes above and beyond the grave

In February 1873 the Torquay novelist Annie Hall Cudlip visited a séance. She came to explore her interest in Spiritualism, a belief that the spirits of the dead could communicate with the living.
 
During the séance Annie saw “spirit faces” through a haze of smoke, one of which was apparently her deceased mother. Even though to our modern eyes the ‘apparitions’ were clearly crude trickery, Annie was convinced and dedicated her life to the spiritualist cause.
 
This séance took place at the peak of the spiritualist phenomenon in Torquay. It was a time when contacting the departed was a mix of parlour game, public entertainment and religion.
 
The Victorian Spiritualism craze began in 1848 when the Fox sisters in New York claimed that curious rapping sounds were messages from the dead. These spirits could be asked questions and would answer by rapping. However, one of the sisters later confessed that she had made the noises by cracking her knee joints.

 
In 1852 table rapping came to England. In the fashionable health resort of Torquay, our élite quickly seized on the new sensation. We were ready for something that would reassure the public that there really was an afterlife.
 
Doubts were creeping in. Geology had proved that the earth was far older that the Bible claimed, while Torquay visitor Charles Darwin in his 1859 ‘Origin of Species’ was arguing for a new natural explanation for life’s variety.
 
Organised religion was further seen by some to be out of touch. In Ellacombe, for example, people were complaining that church sermons were long, dull and dry.
 
An exciting alternative was Spiritualism. It was also respectable; Queen Victoria practiced table rapping. Torquay harbourside resident, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning was fascinated. She enquired, “Do your American friends ever write to you about the rapping spirits?”
 
As a result, and regardless of the misgivings of the Church, few were concerned about attending a seance on a Saturday evening and then worshipping at a church service on a Sunday morning.
 
Séances were expected to be entertaining, and they offered other enticements. In a society of strict rules, they provided a means for men and women to meet with the gas lights turned low.
 
It was possible to attend a number of seances across town and so mediums needed to compete for an audience. Accordingly, séances moved on from simple and predictable table rapping and came to feature a range of increasingly bizarre faux supernatural phenomena.
 
These could include spirit writing, furniture floating in the air, possession by spirits, and accordions playing themselves. Incidentally, voluminous skirts were useful as a hiding place for the objects that would later materialise.

 
This escalation would eventually lead, as in Annie’s séance, to the full materialisation of a supernatural being. A ‘spirit’ would leave its cabinet and wander amongst the audience, perhaps trailing ‘ectoplasm’, supposedly an otherworldly vapour that sometimes solidified. Spirit photographs were also extremely popular. These were usually double exposures which purported to show the sitter with a ghost and were a profitable sideline for local photographers.
 
It’s worth noting how an interest in the occult was often associated with a commitment to progressive ideas, such as vegetarianism or the right to vote. The Suffragette Annie Kenney, who rallied her sisters in Torquay, became a committed spiritualist.
 
Indeed, being a medium was one of the few professions where women were seen as being equal to men.  These were the days when an unaccompanied woman walking on the Strand ran the risk of being accused of being a prostitute.
 
Spiritualism could also offer a platform for the eccentric. In the 1880s a group calling itself the Order of the Temple occupied ‘Cloudlands’, a house near Torquay railway Station. Their leader, the spiritualist Countess Marie Borel, believed that her adopted son, Prince Baptiste St John Borel, had special powers. The Countess understood herself to be the “woman clothed with the sun” who was to “bear the child to rule the world with a rod of iron”. Yet, we hear nothing more of her or the Prince, so sadly the Messiah wasn’t to come from Chelston.
 
As it grew in popularity Spiritualism attracted inevitable criticism and scrutiny. It was particularly noticeable that sometimes the spirits seemed to have interests originating in this life rather than the next.
 
In 1867 the famous society medium DD Home visited Torquay. The same year Home was taken to court by a 75-year-old widow. The medium had claimed that he had contacted the elderly lady’s long-dead husband and had been told to pass on the message that his wife should adopt Home and shower him with gifts. This included a sum of £60,000. She later changed her mind and demanded the money be returned. The resulting high-profile court case caused the aristocracy to be wary of taking the advice of mediums.
 
The claims of the spiritualists eventually attracted the attention of the scientific community and in 1882 the Society for Psychical Research was formed. The Society included in its membership committed spiritualists who wanted to weed out the fraudsters and identify those genuinely able to communicate with other realms.
 
Their investigations, however, found that there were a large number of fraudulent mediums using confederates, hidden compartments, sleight of hand and even electrical devices. Posing as members of the public, the Society’s members would ‘break the circle’, seize hold of ‘apparitions’ and find they were disguised mediums or their assistants.  Consequently, many mediums gave up and left their profession, some emigrating to Australia.

 
Yet Spiritualism didn’t die out. Despite widespread evidence of trickery, belief in talkative spirits continued and was particularly prevalent in times of mass grieving.  There are 609 names on Blomfield’s 1920 War Memorial in Princess Gardens indicating just how profoundly effected Torquay was by the Great War. The subsequent need for comfort saw an upsurge in spiritualist activity.
 
One prominent Torquay visitor was the Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle whose son had died in the Great War. In 1926 Sir Arthur wrote ‘The History of Spiritualism’ and was a member of the paranormal investigation organisation ‘The Ghost Club’. Proclaiming his firm belief in the afterlife, on 5 August 1920 he gave a lecture entitled ‘Death and the Hereafter’ at Torquay Town Hall to a mainly female audience. The meeting was presided over by local builder and Freemason Henry Paul Rabbich, the then President of Paignton Spiritualist Society.
 
Another local claiming psychic powers was Violet Tweedale. Violet became involved in the Spiritualism off-shoot Theosophy and was a member of the magical Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, one of the largest influences on twentieth century occultism. In 1917 Violet took part in an exorcism during a visit to Torquay’s Castel-a-Mare, ‘the most haunted house in England’. The incident was documented in her 1920 memoirs ‘Ghosts I have Seen’.
 
As a specialist on all things supernatural, Violet was called as an expert witness in a famous legal case when a medium sued for libel in 1932. This was Mrs Meurig Morris who had begun her long career contacting the dead at a séance in Newton Abbot a decade earlier.
 
Reviewing a Meurig Morris service at a London theatre, the Daily Mail wrote a review titled ‘Trance Medium Found Out.’ Meurig Morris sued for libel. After a long trial no allegations of fraud against Meurig Morris were proved. On the other hand, the Mail wasn’t liable for damages as the paper had published in the public interest. The jury had found it difficult to decide whether the medium was sincere, or if she was merely a charlatan.
 
This challenge remains when looking at any paranormal claim.
 
Today the Spiritualist tradition retains a strong presence across Brixham, Paignton and Torquay. In the 2021 Torbay Census 231 people defined themselves as a ‘Spiritualist’.