Mediumship is the claimed ability to communicate with the spirits of the dead, and to relay messages or impressions from them to the living. It is the psychic ability most closely associated with the wider ghosts and hauntings tradition, since a medium's claimed contact is specifically with the deceased, distinguishing it from clairvoyance or telepathy, which don't require a spirit intermediary.
Origins: the Fox sisters and Spiritualism
Modern Western mediumship traces back to 1848, when two young sisters, Margaretta ("Maggie") and Catherine ("Kate") Fox, reported mysterious rapping sounds in their family's home in Hydesville, New York, which they attributed to a communicating spirit. Their older sister, Leah, began managing public demonstrations, and the "Rochester rappings" quickly became a sensation, sparking the religious movement known as Spiritualism across the United States and Europe. The sisters toured for decades as professional mediums, and prominent contemporaries — including Mary Todd Lincoln, who reportedly held séances in the White House hoping to contact her late son — took part in the wider craze that followed.
In 1888, Margaretta publicly confessed that the rappings had been produced by cracking her joints, and demonstrated the technique on stage. Despite the confession, Spiritualism continued to grow, and mediumship remained a popular practice well into the 20th century.
Types of claimed contact
Mediums typically describe their perceptions using one or more of several claimed senses, sometimes referred to as "the clairs":
- Clairvoyance (clear seeing) — visual impressions
- Clairaudience (clear hearing) — auditory impressions, such as hearing a spirit's voice
- Clairsentience (clear feeling) — physical or emotional sensations attributed to a spirit's presence
Mediumship is also sometimes divided into mental mediumship (impressions, messages, and communication) and the largely discredited physical mediumship popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which claimed physical manifestations such as table movement, materialised objects, or ectoplasm during a séance — effects investigated at length, and frequently exposed as fraudulent, by early organisations such as the Society for Psychical Research.
Notable example: Derek Acorah
Derek Acorah is one of the best-documented modern examples of a professional medium, through his long-running role on Most Haunted. His case also illustrates the standard sceptical test applied to mediumship claims: in 2005, he was fed fabricated details about entirely fictitious spirits by the show's parapsychologist, Ciarán O'Keeffe, and went on to describe contact with them as though genuine.
Scientific perspective
Mediumship has never been demonstrated to the satisfaction of the scientific community. The most commonly proposed non-paranormal explanation is cold reading — the use of vague, high-probability statements, careful observation of a subject's reactions, and general statistical likelihood (common names, common causes of death, common family structures) to construct an apparently specific reading that the subject supplies most of the meaning for themselves. Deliberate prior research into a subject, sometimes called hot reading, has also been documented in cases of exposed fraud, including several associated with the original Spiritualist movement.
Related concepts
- Psychic Ability, the umbrella page for this and related claimed abilities
- Derek Acorah, under Psychic Mediums
- Parapsychology