Spirit Cabinet

The spirit cabinet entered history as a piece of touring equipment. Ira and William Davenport, brothers from Buffalo, New York, took to the road in the 1850s with a large wooden wardrobe fitted with benches and a curtained opening. Committee members from the audience tied the brothers hand and foot inside; the doors closed; and at once bells rang, tambourines rattled, and disembodied hands waved through the aperture, though the brothers were always found tied fast when the doors reopened. The performance made the cabinet famous on two continents and gave physical mediumship its defining apparatus. Spiritualist theory explained the enclosure as a condensing chamber: the darkness and stillness concentrated the subtle forces a medium's body supplied, which manifesting spirits needed to act on matter.

In the seance parlors of the 1870s and after, the cabinet became domestic, often no more than a curtained corner of the sitting room. The medium sat within, sitters sang to raise the atmosphere, and from the gap in the curtain came raps, voices, floating instruments and at the practice's height full materialized figures that walked among the sitters. The cabinet marked a boundary sitters were forbidden to cross, and that prohibition, protective in the believers' account since a shock could endanger the entranced medium, was also, as critics never tired of observing, precisely the condition a conjuror would require.

The cabinet's two histories ran side by side from the beginning. Within Spiritualism it framed the era of the great materialization mediums, none more discussed than Florence Cook, from whose cabinet emerged the white-robed figure called Katie King, investigated in the 1870s by the chemist William Crookes, whose favorable testimony remains among the most argued-over documents of psychical research. Alex Owen's study of Victorian mediumship reads the cabinet seance as a theater in which young women, entranced and curtained, briefly commanded rooms of adults in ways ordinary life never allowed them.

Outside the movement, the cabinet belonged to the magicians. John Nevil Maskelyne began his career in 1865 by replicating the Davenport performance openly as trickery, and stage conjurors have kept a version of the act alive ever since; Houdini, late in life, made a public specialty of duplicating and exposing cabinet phenomena, and several celebrated mediums were caught in flagrant fraud when sitters seized the materialized form or lit an unexpected match. The exposures never quite killed the practice, and small circles of physical mediumship still sit with cabinets today, but its great age ended with the Victorians. What survives everywhere is the image: the curtained box from which something comes, half sacred and half showbusiness, which is an honest summary of the seance era itself.