How does a seance work?

How does a seance work?

Chris French (Anomalistic Psychologist) gives expert video advice on: Can all paranormal phenomena be explained by science?; What sort of fakes and hoaxes have you come across?; How does a Ouija board work? and more...

In the Victorian era, séances were extremely popular and a whole range of strange, weird, and wonderful things were said to happen. Things were said to levitate including sometimes the medium, ghostly faces and hands would appear, disembodied voices would be heard, musical instruments would move around the room apparently playing themselves. Strange lights would move around the room, all kinds of things were said to happen. Now the mediums and the people who supported the mediums believed that all this was evidence of life beyond the grave, this was spirits returning and they were causing these things to happen. However, there were always sceptics around who said the whole thing was being done by trickery. In fact many of those sceptics could reproduce those effects and they held their own séances and they were just as convincing as the people who claimed that they were doing it for real. Now it was a very rare medium indeed who wasn't actually caught at sometime or other in his or her career actually actively engaged in trickery. I would say the evidence for séances is not at all convincing that anything paranormal is actually happening in those situations. The people who want to believe in it find them very convincing.