The Rise of Spiritualism (and Séances) After the First World War

The First World War began in July 1914, and by its conclusion in November 1918, over nine million soldiers had been killed in the conflict. Each death was devastating to relatives and friends left behind, and the first decades of the twentieth century were marred by individual grief on a global scale. The Victorians had turned death into something of a pageant, something to be celebrated as much as revered; for the large part, death followed illness and was often witnessed by surviving family members. The Great War, however, turned death into something sudden, cruel and unknowable, as young men—often barely into adulthood—were slaughtered on the front line, their deaths reported to their families days or weeks later.

In the first years of the twentieth century, Spiritualism had lost much of the popularity it enjoyed in previous decades. Admissions of fraud by the Fox sisters, numerous exposures of trickery and growing secularism meant that interest in communicating with ghosts was rapidly dwindling. The Great War, however, breathed new life into Spiritualism; as men began to die in their thousands, far away from their homes and families, mediums and investigators were afforded a reinvigorated sense of purpose.

Séances ceased being a party game or stage act and instead became a beacon of hope for those who were left behind that their sons, brothers and husbands weren’t truly gone. Spiritualism spread globally once more, with a new league of well-known and passionate supporters. Equally, though, it renewed the anger of skeptics; mediums weren’t simply practicing fraud now, but were exploiting public grief on a massive scale. The conflict in Europe was mirrored by a ferocious debate between scientists and Spiritualists, each side fueled by the pain of their own private losses.

Barely two weeks after Raymond’s death, the Lodges believed that he began to appear at their supernatural sittings.

Among the nine million soldiers killed was Raymond Lodge, the youngest son of Sir Oliver Lodge. Lodge was a prominent member of Spiritualist circles and the Society for Psychical Research, as well as a distinguished scientist whose work formed some of the key early developments of radio communication. Raymond volunteered to join the conflict in France in September 1914, and by the spring of 1915 was in the trenches at Ypres. An ambitious young man who clearly inherited his father’s quick intellect, he advanced through the ranks, and, taking over from an injured captain, was soon leading a company through No Man’s Land.

On September 14, 1915 he was struck by a fragment of shell. His death took several hours, and his family received the news three days later.

Raymond was 26 years old.

Sir Oliver Lodge had been actively engaged in ghost hunting and attempts to contact the dead both before and throughout the war, and the rest of the Lodge family shared his interest. They were known, therefore, among the circles of the Spiritualist mediums whom they regularly visited to conduct séances and experiments. Barely two weeks after Raymond’s death, the Lodges believed that he began to appear at their supernatural sittings. In 1916, Sir Oliver compiled his notes from these séances into a book titled Raymond, or Life and Death.

It is a strange, sad book. Usually, sources like this fascinate me; I scribble down notes with excitement at what I’ve come across, while my mind sparks with connections to other things I’ve read and how I might structure it in a particular chapter. My interest is mostly practical: how can I use the text? I type up the notes, return the book to the library or close the browser tab, and move on. Raymond was like nothing I’ve read before. It is an incredibly complicated and sensitive book, so much so that I found myself thinking about the Lodges, and Raymond especially, on my walk up to campus and while making dinner. I still think of Raymond when I pass the war memorial in the centre of my village. It’s not really a book about objective experiments with various mediums, as much as Lodge presents it that way. It is a book about a father’s crushing grief, and his desperation to follow any lead, any glimmer of evidence, that his son still exists somewhere—and that his final moments of consciousness were not of a slow bleeding-out in a filthy trench hundreds of miles from home.

Paranormal researcher Dr. Kate Cherrell echoed my complicated thoughts when I spoke to her about Spiritualism during the First World War. It was, she told me, a period in Spiritualist history “led by immediate and active grief.” She sees this era as something that helped to shape modern grief and attitudes to the afterlife. Whereas Victorian Spiritualists were “propelled by zeal” and frequently mocked for it, Cherrell described how Spiritualist texts written from experiences of wartime grief are much more “raw and immediate,” much more about personal loss, and so provoke sympathy from even the most skeptical of readers.

Raymond is split into three parts. The final part is a rather rambling segment philosophizing on proof of the afterlife—in line with dozens of similar texts from this era of psychical research. It is the first two sections that are the most interesting, and the most upsetting.

Lodge opens by collecting Raymond’s letters together. He said he does this mostly for his family and for those who knew his son, and hoped that anyone else will forgive him for including them. In those letters, Raymond is truly alive. He is humorous, optimistic and light-hearted—even if it is only for his parents’ benefit. “I got a splendid reception from my friends here,” he wrote, upon arriving at the Front in late March 1915. “I am having quite a nice time in the trenches,” read a letter from April 3rd. He described a cuckoo he often hears, and how much more notice he took of the night sky while keeping watch.

Things began to affect him, though, despite the hope he pinned to the end of every letter. His friend Fletcher left for a rest cure—“his nerves are all wrong”—and Raymond was upset without him. The roads became thick with mud, the numbers in his Company were diminishing, and on a night in June the Company advanced to dig a further trench, only to retreat again immediately having not made a lick of progress—but not without suffering the fatality of his friend, Thomas.

The séance took place on September 25th, when the loss of Raymond must still have been an open wound, and involved the techniques of table-tilting and rapping out letters of the alphabet.

“Isn’t it fairly sickening?” he wrote.

Raymond’s final letter was dated two days before his death, describing an “ordinary tour of duty” in the front-line trenches. He was excited to be going in a motor-bus.

The next correspondence the Lodges received was a telegram from the War Office. “Deeply regret to inform you,” it read, “that Second Lieut. R. Lodge, Second South Lancs, was wounded 14 Sept. and has since died. Lord Kitchener expresses his sympathy.” Lodge explained that Raymond’s death and his involvement in paranormal research did not initially coincide. In fact, he wasn’t even present when the first supposed appearance of Raymond occurred.

A family friend, a “French widow lady, who had been kind to our daughters during winters in Paris,” had also suffered a recent bereavement in the war—both of her sons were killed, a week apart. Lodge’s wife, perhaps trying to soothe her own grief through helping her friend, took her to sit with a medium. The séance took place on 25 September, when the loss of Raymond must still have been an open wound, and involved the techniques of table-tilting and rapping out letters of the alphabet. Amid messages directed to the French woman, something else seemed to come through:

TELL FATHER I HAVE MET SOME FRIENDS OF HIS

A name was given: Myers. Frederick William Henry Myers, one of the founding members of the most infamous ghost-hunting club of all: the Society for Psychical Research. Myers was particularly interested in ghosts and a potential afterlife, and worked tirelessly on experiments and controlled séances until his death in 1901. Lodge and Myers were close, and this, along with Lodge’s interest in Spiritualism, was common knowledge. But perhaps it was the fact that Myers was now looming over the medium’s table that Lodge threw himself into what he felt was an objective inquiry as to whether Raymond had genuinely spoken to him in the afterlife. It was what Myers would have wanted.

Lodge began to have séances with the medium Mrs. Gladys Leonard, who was one of the most influential voices of the interwar Spiritualist movement. Famously, she held regular séances with the high-society lesbian couple Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, who asked her to contact Hall’s dead lover on a daily basis. Despite Leonard’s notoriety, her substantial connections in Spiritualist circles, and the fact that it was announced in several major newspapers, we’re promised by Lodge that she had no idea about Raymond’s death. Over the course of several “sittings,” Mrs. Leonard channelled Raymond. His presence was fleeting and simple at first: his name was spelled out on the table. Soon, though, Raymond was chatting away through Mrs. Leonard, and Lodge warned her that she might be overexerting herself.

“She pleaded,” he wrote, “that there were so many people who want help now […] that she felt bound to help those who are distressed by the war.”

And whom, presumably, paid rather well. A fraudulent medium of the time who was tried in the West London court belonged to the newly established College of Psychics, and told the jury she was paid an eye-watering sum of £50 a month, which in today’s money is around £6,500. I think even I could channel the voices of the dead for that kind of salary.

Most often, in fact, the messages received from mediums were from soldiers, and they were detailed enough to fill entire books which were published under the attribution of the soldier’s name.

The impact of Raymond was far-reaching. Within the first few years of publication, it ran to numerous editions. While it allegedly served to comfort soldiers on the Front, as well as their families back home, it also inspired an entire genre of books that evolved from the trend of Summerland texts, now written from the point of view of the ghosts of soldiers. Raymond’s descriptions of the afterlife become increasingly detailed (and increasingly bizarre, claiming at one point that ghosts enjoy smoking ghostly cigars), as expressed through the automatic writing of Mrs. Leonard. The technique was particularly popular during this period in the history of ghost hunting because of contemporary developments in wireless communications.

Suddenly, Spiritualist texts used the new technology of radio signals to explain the role of the medium: they were the receiving device “tuned in” to Spooky FM and able to hear, decode and record messages. Stewart Edward White, in his 1946 reflection on the wave of Spiritualism earlier in the century, The Stars are Still There, described this communication in terms of frequencies. Ordinary human beings in the “Obstructed” plane of existence, he said, can reach a frequency of 100. Ghosts in the “Unobstructed” universe, however, can only bring themselves down to a frequency of 150.

“The ordinary person—you or I—cannot bridge that gap,” wrote White. “The medium’s special gift or talent is the ability temporarily to step up her basic frequency—or allow it to be stepped up—to 150.”

For the public, especially those who had personal experience of the military, this new metaphor—of the medium as the radio officer receiving reports from soldiers in the battlefield—only added to the popularity of Spiritualism. Most often, in fact, the messages received from mediums were from soldiers, and they were detailed enough to fill entire books which were published under the attribution of the soldier’s name.

There are dozens of these posthumously written texts, many of which were directly influenced by Raymond. This is, again, where things become problematic. A cynic might argue that these “authors” were leaping on the international commercial success of Raymond, copies of which were being sent to men on the Front as well as being bought up by those grieving back at home. It was an incredibly lucrative trend in publishing.

But to read these books, at least the ones written by the family of a soldier killed in battle, is to see how genuinely they believed in the ghostly messages they received. It wasn’t about money at all, but about preserving memory amid so much grief. No one’s loss felt special in the grand scheme of things—the dead were lost in a sea of obituaries—but somehow everyone knew Raymond Lodge. Why shouldn’t the world know about the life of their son, too?

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Ghosted by Alice Vernon is available via Bloomsbury. Copyright © Alice Vernon, 2025. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury.