A Medium's Voice from Nowhere

Clairaudience surfaces in the same nineteenth-century milieu as clairvoyance, coined by French mesmerists to describe entranced subjects who reported hearing rather than seeing at a distance, and adopted wholesale by spiritualism after 1848 as one of the standard modes by which a medium claimed contact with the dead. A clairaudient medium at a séance would typically report an inner voice dictating messages, sometimes transcribed on the spot, distinguishing the claim from direct voice mediumship, where the sitters themselves were meant to hear a voice in the room.

Spiritualist churches and camp meetings in Britain and America institutionalised clairaudience as a recognised platform gift alongside clairvoyance, and it remains part of the working vocabulary of contemporary mediumship and of some New Age channelling practice, where a practitioner may describe "hearing" guidance from a spirit guide or higher self rather than seeing or simply knowing it. The claim has always been treated as a variant of the broader extrasensory perception idea rather than a separate faculty requiring its own theory, which is part of why it was never singled out for dedicated experimental attention the way telepathy and clairvoyance were.