ABSTRACT
A medium is someone who claims that they can communicate with the spirits of dead people and pass on messages from the spirit to a living person during a seance. The Margarita Fox sisters claimed that they heard banging noises which they believed to be communications from the spirit of a man who had died and been buried beneath their house, and they devised a way in which he could answer their questions using two raps for a “yes” and no raps for a “no”. Mediums became particularly popular in the West following the rise of the Spiritualist Church in the late nineteenth century. However, although the Fox sisters had confessed to being frauds, their confession seems to have gone largely unnoticed by those who believed in mediumship, and by this time many new mediums had emerged who claimed to be in contact with the dead.
