Welcome to Unobscured, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minky.

Today's guest historian is John Boucher. He is the author of many books and articles on the

history of American spiritualism. And that should be no surprise. He's the co-director of the

International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals.

It's an online database where John and his team have digitized thousands of pages of

newspapers, pamphlets, books, and advertisements, which is a goldmine for historians and people

like me. Researcher Carl Nellis talked with John about all kinds of spiritualists some we covered

in our season of Unabskirt like Coruscata John Conkland, and some will introduce to you here for

the first time. So let's get to the interview. Here's Dr. John Boucher. This is the Unabskirt

Interview Series for season two. I'm Aaron Minky.

Music

Well, it meant to be attached to a movement that was sometimes firmly and sometimes loosely

associated. These were people who felt that they could make immediate contact with the soul

so they're departed. And in order to do that, they typically would sit around in a table,

at joint hands, and wait for things to happen. Light for usually turned down fairly low.

One of them would act as a medium, which means someone who could establish psychic contact

with the spirits. Sometimes things would happen that were not just what you might think of as

messages coming out of the medium's mouth from various spirits, but sometimes

furniture would move or people would feel caressings or hear wraps under the table and so on.

That was more or less the practical meaning of being a spiritualist, but it was a wide movement,

and you didn't necessarily have to actually attend what came to be called sails in order to

identify yourself as a spiritualist. Spiritualists also developed a kind of

...