A gazetteer rather than a history, arranged by date of birth. For each medium I give what they did, who investigated them, and what was found, in that order, without adding a verdict the record does not support. Some were plainly frauds. Some were plainly not frauds of any simple kind. Most were somewhere in between, and it is the in-between cases that make the subject impossible to close. The methods and the history of trance itself are told in full at The Channel; the investigations are in the chapter on psychical research.
Emanuel Swedenborg · Andrew Jackson Davis · Kate and Margaretta Fox · Daniel Dunglas Home · William Stainton Moses · Emma Hardinge Britten · Florence Cook · Eusapia Palladino · Leonora Piper · Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Eva Carrière (Eva C.) · Mina Crandon (Margery) · Rudi Schneider · Helen Duncan · Eileen Garrett · Edgar Cayce · Pearl Curran · Jane Roberts · Chico Xavier
Emanuel Swedenborg 1688–1772 · Sweden
Not a medium in the later sense but the first modern visionary of the spirit world. A distinguished mining engineer and anatomist who, from 1745, reported daily conversations with angels and the dead and published their geography in Latin. Kant satirised him; the Spiritualists inherited his afterlife whole.
Andrew Jackson Davis 1826–1910 · United States
The Poughkeepsie Seer. A barely educated shoemaker's apprentice who, in mesmeric trance, dictated The Principles of Nature in 1847 and predicted the opening of communication with the spirit world a year before the Fox sisters. The theorist of American Spiritualism.
Kate and Margaretta Fox 1837–1892; 1833–1893 · United States
The rapping girls of Hydesville, whose knocks in March 1848 began Modern Spiritualism. Maggie publicly confessed in 1888 and demonstrated the toe-joint cracking; she retracted the confession the following year.
Daniel Dunglas Home 1833–1886 · Scotland and the world
The medium nobody caught. Held séances in good light for Napoleon III, the Tsar and half the aristocracy of Europe; in December 1868 was reported by three witnesses to have floated out of one window of a London house and in at another. In 1871 the physicist William Crookes tested him with an accordion played inside a cage and a spring balance that registered force without contact. Robert Browning, whose wife believed in him, attacked him as Mr Sludge, the Medium.
William Stainton Moses 1839–1892 · England
An Anglican clergyman and schoolmaster whose automatic writing, attributed to a band of spirits led by Imperator, was published as Spirit Teachings in 1883 and became a devotional text of English Spiritualism. A founder of the London Spiritualist Alliance.
Emma Hardinge Britten 1823–1899 · England and United States
Trance lecturer, historian and organiser, whose Modern American Spiritualism of 1870 and Nineteenth Century Miracles are the movement's own first histories, and whose Seven Principles became the creed of the Spiritualists' National Union.
Florence Cook 1856–1904 · England
The teenage medium of the full-form materialisation 'Katie King', who was photographed arm in arm with William Crookes in 1874 and whom Crookes declared genuine. In 1880 a sitter, Sir George Sitwell, seized a materialised spirit at one of her séances and found it was Florence Cook in her underclothes.
Eusapia Palladino 1854–1918 · Naples
An illiterate Neapolitan who converted the criminologist Cesare Lombroso in 1891 and was sat with by Richet, the Curies and the leading physicists of Europe. Caught cheating at Cambridge in 1895, vindicated by a careful English investigation in Naples in 1908, and caught again in New York in 1910 by observers who had hidden under the table. The paradigm of the medium who cheated when she could and, some thought, did something else when she could not.
Leonora Piper 1857–1950 · Boston
A trance medium discovered by William James in 1885, whose controls, a French doctor called Phinuit and later a young man known as George Pelham, gave sitters information James could not explain. Richard Hodgson of the SPR had her followed by detectives for years and was converted. James called her his white crow: to upset the law that all crows are black, it is enough to prove one white crow.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky 1831–1891 · Russia, India, the world
A Spiritualist medium in New York before she was a prophet, she co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 and claimed instruction from hidden Mahatmas in Tibet. A report by Richard Hodgson for the SPR in 1885 accused her of fabricating their letters; a re-examination of the handwriting evidence published in 1986 criticised that report. Her Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine shaped the whole esoteric twentieth century.
Eva Carrière (Eva C.) 1886–1943 · France
The medium of ectoplasm, photographed for years by the physician Albert von Schrenck-Notzing in Munich and Paris with a white substance issuing from her mouth and forming faces. Some of the faces were identified as cut-outs from the French magazine Le Miroir, including one showing part of its masthead.
Mina Crandon (Margery) 1888–1941 · Boston
The wife of a Boston surgeon, whose spirit control was her dead brother Walter. In 1924 she was a candidate for the Scientific American prize for genuine physical mediumship; Harry Houdini, on the committee, built a box to hold her and accused her of fraud. In 1932 a thumbprint said to be Walter's, pressed into dental wax, was found to match her dentist's.
Rudi Schneider 1908–1957 · Austria
An Austrian physical medium tested with electrical restraint and infrared beams by Harry Price in London in 1929 and 1932 and by the Institut Métapsychique in Paris, where objects near him were reported to absorb infrared light. Price later published a photograph he said showed Rudi freeing an arm; it was argued that the photograph had been doctored.
Helen Duncan 1897–1956 · Scotland
A materialisation medium whose ectoplasm was photographed and was widely thought to be cheesecloth. In 1944 she was tried at the Old Bailey and convicted under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 after sitters in Portsmouth reported that a dead sailor had announced the loss of HMS Barham, whose sinking had not yet been made public. She served nine months in Holloway. Winston Churchill called the trial tomfoolery.
Eileen Garrett 1893–1970 · Ireland and New York
The most tested medium of the twentieth century, who sat for Rhine at Duke, founded the Parapsychology Foundation in New York in 1951, and said to the end of her life that she did not know whether her controls were spirits or parts of herself. In October 1930, two days after the R101 airship crashed in France, her séance with Harry Price produced a communicator claiming to be its captain and giving technical detail about the failure.
Edgar Cayce 1877–1945 · Virginia Beach
The Sleeping Prophet. A Kentucky photographer who, lying down in self-induced trance, gave some fourteen thousand recorded 'readings' on illness, reincarnation and Atlantis, and whose Association for Research and Enlightenment, founded in 1931, still keeps them.
Pearl Curran 1883–1937 · St Louis
A housewife through whose Ouija board, from 1913, a personality calling herself Patience Worth dictated poems, plays and novels in an idiosyncratic archaic English, including The Sorry Tale of 1917, a novel of the time of Christ. The case has never been satisfactorily explained by anyone who has read the output.
Jane Roberts 1929–1984 · New York
A poet and novelist who, experimenting with a Ouija board in 1963, began speaking for an entity called Seth, whose dictated books from The Seth Material onward became the foundation texts of the channelled literature of the New Age.
Chico Xavier 1910–2002 · Brazil
The great medium of Brazilian Spiritism, who psychographed more than four hundred books by automatic writing, gave away every royalty, and received letters for grieving families that were accepted as evidence in a Brazilian murder trial. Voted in 2012 in a national television poll one of the greatest Brazilians of all time.