Horror's Obsession With Spiritualism: A Multimedia Wander

Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, I’m trying out a potential new series I’ve been thinking about—an mismatched collection of two books, a movie, and a podcast that all have spiritualism in common. One warning: This newsletter contains spoilers for Richard Matheson’s Hell House, so skip that section if you want to avoid them!

Many years ago now, when I was in my early 20s and Obama was still in office, I sat in a darkened theater in Brooklyn. I was there to see one of Pop Up Magazine’s first East Coast shows. The magazine was fresh, experimental: A stage performance that combined journalism, documentary film, and immersive experiences. I was young, and media felt full of promise.

I can’t be certain now, but I seem to remember radio journalist Jack Hitt telling a story during that show about how he approached reporting. “Gathering string,” he called it: The slow, unconscious, gradual process of allowing observations and experiences to accumulate. The first few are just bits of fluff, hardly enough to knit together. But if you wait long enough for those threads to tangle, you might eventually have a hell of a yarn.

I think of that metaphor often. Peculiar patterns seem to emerge from my horror studies, with recurring images and themes refracted across decades of storytelling. In some cases, writers respond to real-world events, warping genuine experiences into fictional novels and screenplays. I realized last week, as I turned the final pages of Richard Matheson’s 1971 novel Hell House, that my brief encounters with spiritualism had accumulated into a collection with some heft.

Spiritualism is a relatively new religion; it emerged in the nineteenth century, popularized by the Fox sisters, who claimed to hear otherwordly rapping on their bedroom walls. The movement became a transatlantic sensation, with prominent celebrities including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle among its devotees. Believers embraced the idea that spirit is distinct from matter, and that communication with the dead is possible through rituals like seances and automatic writing.

If you read like I do—meandering from text to text, chasing down a series of intertextual references—these offer an interesting rabbit hole to dive into.

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Before we proceed, it’s important to say: Spiritualism is a real religion that’s still sincerely practiced today. As an ex-Catholic, I’ve personally never felt offended by characters like The Exorcist’s Father Damien Karras—but there’s always a gap between the real religion people practice and fictional representations.

This is complicated by the fact that spiritualism is also far from mainstream, so niche that even Google autocorrects many searches to “spirituality.” In 2019, the BBC reported that just 11,500 Spiritualists practiced the religion in the UK.

That’s why my first recommendation—before any fiction—is for Ghost Church, an investigative podcast by Jamie Loftus. In 2022, Jamie traveled to Florida, where she visited one of the only actively practicing Spiritualist camps in the US: Cassadaga, the namesake of Bright Eyes’ eighth album.

Over the course of nine episodes, Jamie takes us through the history of the Fox sisters; into rooms where she witnesses mediums practicing automatic writing; and into her own experiences with loss, death, and spirituality. It’s an often funny and moving journey, but deeply researched, too. In one particularly memorable episode, Jamie offers a nuanced and insightful look at the troubling colonial dynamics around spirit guides (more on that in a moment).

Also, Speedy Ortiz wrote an original theme song and it slaps:

I’m making a big deal about the real history of spiritualism because Richard Matheson’s Hell House (1971), which I finished reading last week, plays so fast and loose with the facts.

The novel follows a group of researchers employed by a dying billionaire desperate to find out if there’s an afterlife. Promised $100,000 each, they’re whisked away to a mansion in Maine that once hosted orgies so diabolically evil that the property is said to have killed every subsequent visitor or driven them insane.

One of the researchers, Florence, is a devoted spiritualist who’s quickly established as the foil for the expedition’s cooler scientific minds. She’s almost immediately locked in a rivalry with Dr. Lionel Barrett, the expedition’s leader and a rational paraphysicist. Barrett believes in energy, but he does not believe in ghosts.

There’s not a single character who isn’t humbled by Hell House, but Florence’s fate is worst of all. The house’s evil exploits Florence’s faith to extreme consequences; she’s attacked, mauled, sexually assaulted, possessed, and mutilated before eventually being crushed to death by a crucifix featuring a crudely posed Jesus. In a climactic scene, Florence channels her apparently indigenous spirit guide in broken English, a moment so racist that even other characters comment on it. I couldn’t quite get a handle on why Matheson wrote Florence such a cruel arc; was it her gender? Her faith? A week later, I’m still not confident I can say.

Matheson wrote some of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes: ”Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” with William Shatner is possibly the series’ most famous episode. More important to me, “Little Girl Lost” (about a child who falls off her bed and rolls into a liminal dimension) and “Third From the Sun” (about a group of friends who plan a desperate escape from their planet).

In this novel, he goes for unabashed, pulpy ‘70s weirdness. There’s an abundance of maximalist phenomena—teleplasm! objects levitating! apparitions!—but for me, Hell House skewed toward cruelty more often than camp. I love the idea of a haunted house that makes people gay and horny, but not when it’s executed this way.

A novel that I found much more satisfying and compelling is Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999). It’s the story of Margaret Prior, a spinster who begins visiting London’s grim Millbank prison while recovering from a suicide attempt.

There, Margaret becomes entranced by spiritualist Selina Dawes, imprisoned after a seance goes horribly, lethally wrong. Margaret becomes convinced of Selina’s innocence and begins to concoct a plan for her escape—but in doing so, her own closely guarded secrets threaten to come to light.

Sarah Waters is one of my favorite authors for so many reasons: Her novels are teeming with life and vitality, characters drawn so carefully that they feel like breathing, living people. The stories are often populated by queer and lesbian characters who have complex motivations and desires that feel immediate, urgent, and true.

But they’re also packed with meticulously researched historical details, from the way people travel to the clothing they wear, how they light their rooms to the food on their tables. Instead of feeling stodgy or weighed down, her stories shimmer with truth and are more immersive for it.

By sheer, lucky coincidence, I was reading this novel when Ghost Church first aired, and the two reference common events, blending fact and fiction seamlessly.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Ghostwatch, a “massive seance” that caught BBC1 viewers off guard when it first aired on Halloween night in 1992.

Although it was clearly presented as a drama, viewers who tuned in late (or fell for its natural dialogue and acting) were shocked to see “evidence” of a haunting in real time. The evening starts off normal enough, with reporters and camera crews embedded with a perfectly ordinary family. But soon the situation takes a turn. The children begin to speak in impossibly gutteral voices, doors slam shut on their own, and an entity looms in the background of the footage.

According to IMDB trivia: “It earned the dubious honour of being the first TV program to be cited in the British Medical Journal as having caused Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in children.”

The story is very modeled closely after the Enfield poltergeist, a 1977 phenomenon in which a London family claimed they were tormented by supernatural activity. It’s a complex story, and Unexplained has a phenomenal three-part series that unpacks its confounding details.

I watched Ghostwatch for the first time recently, and I was completely charmed by its found footage imperfections and the utter creepiness of its entity, nicknamed Pipes. This would be even more fun to watch with friends (especially if you’re able to convince them it’s all real).

Next Up: Behind the Scenes with NIGHT WORMS

Welcome new subscribers! There are quite a few of you, and I’m so glad you’re here. I’ll offer a proper introduction soon, but for now: Hi! I’m Michelle. I’m 32. I live on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula with my husband and our three cats. For the past ten years, I’ve made zines and sent newsletters and written stories for Wired, Smithsonian, Vox, Catapult, and Literary Hub, among other places. Now I’m doing this! I have a normal job, too, but I daydream about living and breathing horror full time.

Next week, I’ll bring you a conversation with Sadie Hartmann (@mother.horror) and Ashley Saywers (@coffeeandcuentos), the co-owners of Night Worms. It’s a monthly subscription that curates horror books—emphasis on the books!—alongside bookmarks, stickers, and usually tea, coffee, or cocoa.

Finally, I’ll end with a book recommendation: I listened to my TikTok comments about my TBR and inhaled Mike Bockoven’s FantasticLand over the weekend. Styled as an oral history, Bockoven’s novel explores the aftermath of a hurricane that traps theme park employees in a violent fight for survival for five weeks outside normal society. I could not put this book down and finished it in just a few sittings. If you’ve read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.