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Spiritualists and skeptics weighed in on an 1876 Colorado séance

Chase Woodruff

(Colorado Newsline)

Colorado’s constitution had just been drafted, a municipal election in Denver was two weeks away, and preparations for the territorial exhibit at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia later that summer were well underway.

It wasn’t politics or business, however, that had lately drawn guests to the home of Philip Gomer, a Colorado pioneer who owned the territory’s largest lumber mill.

“There are two mediums in the family of Mr. Gomer, through whose agency the astonishing occurrences we are about to chronicle are said to occur,” the unnamed News correspondent wrote in a lengthy March 19, 1876 report.

“Again last evening still another séance was held, at which there were fourteen or fifteen persons in attendance, embracing, as previously, several of the prominent gentlemen of the city,” the report went on.

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Millions of Americans in the late 19th century found themselves drawn to Spiritualism, a quasi-religious movement whose practitioners believed they could commune with ghosts and other manifestations of the spirit world. At its peak in the 1860s and 1870s, the Spiritualist movement counted among its adherents famous figures like William Lloyd Garrison and Mary Todd Lincoln, who held séances in the White House after the Lincolns lost their son Willie.

As reported by the Rocky Mountain News, the séances at the Gomer residence involved typical Spiritualist practices like “spirit rapping,” slate writing and a “spirit cabinet” — a pine frame box with black curtains, in which Gomer’s daughter Lizzie would conceal herself. The “astonishing occurrences” ensued once the lights were dimmed: “At the request of the invisibles,” the News reported, “the light was … turned down to about a one-quarter power of an ordinary kerosene lamp.”

“On taking our seats in a circle, perhaps five or six feet from the cabinet, a common kitchen chair was placed therein, on which Miss Gomer took her seat and the curtains closed,” the report went on. “Singing was commenced, and in a few moments numerous ‘raps’ were heard on the inside, which was interpreted to mean that they — the purported spirits — wanted a string.”

Each séance culminated with demonstrations of Lizzie Gomer’s “mystic power,” as the News’ correspondent put it, to cause “full forms of immortal beings (to) ‘materialize’ and appear, clothed in raiment similar to that worn by the living.” These so-called acts of “materialization” became one of the most popular Spiritualist practices in the mid-1870s.

‘Magnetism’ and ’emanations’

“We have no opinion to offer in explanation of these wonderful mysteries, our object simply being to record the plain facts as they occurred,” the News said of the events at the Gomer house. “Let our scientific men explain them if they can. We acknowledge our inability to do so.”

Séances and other Spiritualist practices had their critics, both among “scientific men” and religious clergy. But even many skeptics were hesitant to dismiss the movement entirely.

On March 25, the News published a letter from the pseudonymous “Interested,” who wrote that after “extensive opportunities for two years to observe the workings of spiritualism,” they had “found the majority of manifestations coarse, foolish and useless, and but a small minority to be fine and useful.” They were quick to add, however, that they accepted as “satisfactory” the explanation that “the science is but just in its infancy.”

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“For my part I must acknowledge that that feat does not seem to me to be so wonderfully difficult as to be impossible,” wrote Interested. “I think in the séances given by Lizzie Gomer, things have transpired which could not have been produced by herself and friends alone.”

Spiritualism’s investigations into the “magnetism” and “invisible emanations” of a possible spirit world, as Interested put it, were not self-evidently absurd to Americans in the mid- and late 19th century, who were living in a society being transformed by the telegraph and other electrical innovations. In 1843, inventor Samuel Morse, seeking a congressional subsidy of $30,000 for his experimental telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore, had only narrowly succeeded over the objections of congressmen who questionedwhether the “science of Mesmerism” should receive the appropriation instead.

But the sensational practice of “materializations,” as performed by the Gomers in Denver in 1876, “opened Spiritualism to new and more spectacular forms of fraud and self-aggrandizement,” writes historian Ann Braude. A year before, two Philadelphia mediums were exposed in a high-profile scandal after Eliza White, a local actress, confessed to having played the spirit they’d “materialized.”

A new class of myth-busting skeptics was also beginning to confront and challenge Spiritualism more directly. Later in 1876, the Denver Theater would host Samuel Baldwin, a stage magician and self-styled “Exposer of Spiritualism,” who performed tricks with the aim of demystifying them for audiences — an early example of a tradition carried on by Harry Houdini, James Randi and many other performers in the 150 years since.

“I unequivocally, and without reservation, pronounce the so-called miracles of spiritualism humbuggery; and denounce mediums, one and all as frauds,” Baldwin declared in a News advertisement in May 1876. “I hereby agree to forfeit the sum of $500 for any test I cannot fully, completely, and satisfactorily expose, after seeing it performed three times.”