👁️ The Ones Who Stayed — Grief, Genius, and the People Who Could Not Leave Spiritualism Behind

Some people entered Spiritualism through curiosity. Some through sorrow. Some through intellect. But not everyone left the room the same way they entered it.

By the time Spiritualism began spreading through the nineteenth century, it had already become more than a rumor of rappings, tables, and dimly lit parlors. It had become a question that attached itself to people.

Not simply: Is this real?

But something more personal, more dangerous, and far more enduring:

What if I cannot dismiss it?

That question did not belong only to the obscure, the desperate, or the easily persuaded. It followed people with reputations, education, literary power, scientific discipline, political proximity, and public lives that should have made Spiritualism inconvenient.

And yet they stayed near it.

Not always in the same way. Not always with the same certainty. Not always for the same reasons.

Mary Todd Lincoln reached toward Spiritualism from inside devastating grief. Victor Hugo approached it through exile, imagination, and metaphysical hunger. William Crookes entered through scientific curiosity and found himself standing in one of the most controversial chambers of Victorian investigation.

Together, their stories show why Spiritualism endured. It did not survive only because people believed without question. It survived because some people could not close the question at all.

🕯️ Mary Todd Lincoln — Grief Inside the White House

Mary Todd Lincoln did not come to Spiritualism as a woman with an abstract fascination for the supernatural. She came to it as a mother who had already lost too much.

Born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1818, Mary grew up in a prominent family and received an education unusually strong for a woman of her time. She was intelligent, politically aware, socially ambitious, and emotionally intense. Those qualities helped her move in powerful circles, but they also made her vulnerable to criticism, especially once she became First Lady during the Civil War.

Her public life unfolded beneath pressure few women could have endured easily. She was watched, judged, mocked for her spending, suspected for her Southern family connections, and expected to perform patriotic composure while the nation split apart around her. Yet the wound that most changed her was not political. It was maternal.

In February 1862, her eleven-year-old son Willie Lincoln died in the White House, likely of typhoid fever. The White House Historical Association notes that Willie’s death devastated Mary, and that she turned to Spiritualism afterward as a way of processing her grief.^[1]

The timing matters.

Willie died while the Civil War was filling homes with absence. Washington was not merely a capital. It was a city of hospitals, casualty lists, military funerals, and families waiting for news. Death was everywhere, but Mary’s grief was not softened by its commonness. If anything, the national sorrow intensified her private one.

According to historical accounts, Mary was introduced to mediums after Willie’s death and found comfort in séances. The White House Historical Association states that she hosted séances in the Red Room and that there is evidence suggesting as many as eight séances may have been held in the White House, with Abraham Lincoln reportedly attending some of them.^[2]

This should not be flattened into gossip.

Mary was not merely dabbling in fashionable occult amusement. She was trying to survive the unendurable idea that her child had vanished completely.

Spiritualism offered her something that conventional mourning could not fully provide. Christianity promised heaven, reunion, and immortal life, but Spiritualism suggested immediacy. It did not ask her only to wait faithfully for the next world. It hinted that the dead might still enter the room. That a child might still stand near the bed. That absence might not be absence in the way the living feared.

One account connected to Mary’s grief records her saying that Willie lived, that he came to her at night, and that Eddie, another Lincoln son who had died young, sometimes came with him.^[3]

Whether one reads this as literal visitation, grief vision, Spiritualist belief, or the language of a bereaved mother trying to remain in relationship with her dead children, it reveals the emotional force of the movement.

For Mary, Spiritualism was not primarily a spectacle.

It was continuity.

And continuity mattered because her losses did not stop. After Willie came the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. After that came years of social humiliation, financial anxiety, estrangement, public scrutiny, and emotional decline. Her later life became a battlefield of memory and reputation.

Even her most famous connection to spirit photography came after the White House years. In 1872, she sat for William H. Mumler, the controversial spirit photographer whose image appeared to show Abraham Lincoln’s ghost standing behind her. The Harvard Art Museums identify the image as Mumler’s spirit photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln with Abraham Lincoln’s shadow, while later historians generally treat Mumler’s methods with deep skepticism.^[4]

That photograph belongs more fully to the coming chapter of this timeline: spirit photography. But it also belongs emotionally to Mary’s story.

She remained a woman reaching backward through death.

Not because grief made her foolish.

Because grief made the unseen feel necessary.

Mary Todd Lincoln’s story shows one of Spiritualism’s most powerful pathways: a mother who had no interest in philosophical abstraction when what she wanted was her son.

🌙 Victor Hugo — The Poet and the Voices at the Table

If Mary Todd Lincoln entered Spiritualism through grief, Victor Hugo entered through exile, imagination, and the strange authority of the poetic mind.

By the 1850s, Hugo was already one of France’s great literary figures. He had written with moral fire, political conviction, theatrical force, and sweeping emotional grandeur. But after opposing Napoleon III, he was forced into exile. That exile carried him to the Channel Islands, where political separation became something more than geography. It became a spiritual and imaginative condition.

On Jersey, Hugo and those around him began participating in table-turning séances. These sessions were not merely casual parlor games. They were recorded, discussed, repeated, and eventually became part of the strange archive known as Le Livre des Tables. Modern scholarship notes that Hugo’s séance experiences in exile were bound up with his political resistance to the Second Empire and with visionary language surrounding revolution, death, and spiritual authority.^[5]

At first glance, Hugo’s séances can seem almost impossible to categorize.

The voices that allegedly communicated through the table were not limited to deceased family members. The circle believed it received communications from great writers, historical figures, religious presences, and symbolic or cosmic entities. Shakespeare, Dante, Death, the Ocean, and other vast presences appeared in the records of these sessions.

That is precisely what makes Hugo important.

For many mourners, Spiritualism promised contact with the beloved dead. For Hugo, it became something larger and stranger: a metaphysical theater where poetry, politics, grief, and cosmic speculation could speak in the same room.

His dead daughter Léopoldine hovered painfully over this period. She had drowned in 1843, a loss that marked Hugo permanently. Though his table sessions cannot be reduced only to grief for her, her death formed part of the emotional ground beneath his fascination with communication beyond ordinary life.

In Hugo’s hands, the séance became less a narrow claim and more a vast symbolic machine.

It asked whether history had a soul.

Whether the dead continued speaking.

Whether genius survived death.

Whether political exile could become prophetic vision.

This is why Hugo’s Spiritualism cannot be handled as a simple question of “did he believe?” The better question is: what did the séance allow him to think, feel, and imagine?

He was not an empty vessel waiting to be tricked. He was a writer whose imagination already worked at mythic scale. When the table spoke, the communications entered a mind prepared to receive them as drama, revelation, symbol, and philosophical provocation.

That does not mean the sessions must be accepted as literal spirit communication. It also does not mean they can be dismissed as meaningless. They mattered because they became part of Hugo’s exile world, part of the intellectual weather around him, part of how he wrestled with death, God, justice, revolution, and the unseen.

For Hugo, Spiritualism did not only console.

It expanded.

It opened a chamber where the dead, the legendary, and the abstract could sit at the same invisible table.

And once that chamber opened, it left its mark.

🔬 William Crookes — The Scientist Who Continued Looking

William Crookes entered Spiritualism through a very different door.

He was not a grieving First Lady seeking a lost child. He was not an exiled poet surrounded by voices of cosmic drama. He was a scientist, a chemist, an experimentalist, and a public intellectual whose reputation mattered.

That is why his involvement became so controversial.

Crookes was born in 1832 and rose to prominence in Victorian science. He worked in chemistry and physics, contributed to spectroscopy and vacuum-tube research, and became associated with the experimental confidence of the nineteenth century. This was an age that believed instruments, observation, and disciplined inquiry could force hidden realities into visibility.

Then Crookes turned that impulse toward Spiritualism.

In 1870, he publicly acknowledged that he had begun investigating Spiritualism. In his later collection Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, published in 1874, Crookes framed his work as an attempt to study phenomena associated with mediums rather than dismiss them without examination.^[6]

Cambridge University Press describes the 1874 volume as a collection of reports in which Crookes examined “psychic forces,” including experiments involving notable mediums such as D. D. Home, Kate Fox, and Florence Cook.^[7]

That list matters.

Kate Fox tied Crookes back to the origin point of modern Spiritualism. D. D. Home represented the spectacular physical mediumship that fascinated and alarmed Victorian observers. Florence Cook brought him into one of the most famous and disputed episodes in Spiritualist history: the materialization of “Katie King.”

Cook was a young medium who claimed that a spirit form named Katie King could appear during séances. Supporters believed Katie King was distinct from Cook herself. Skeptics suspected fraud. Crookes observed and wrote about the phenomenon, and his apparent willingness to take the case seriously damaged him in the eyes of critics.

That damage is part of why Crookes belongs in this branch-out.

He did not merely attend a séance and leave with a polite anecdote. He entered a debate that threatened the boundary between science and Spiritualism. If he had dismissed everything, his reputation would have been safer. If he had declared total belief without restraint, the story would be simpler. Instead, he occupied the more difficult position of the investigator who continued looking.

His case forces an uncomfortable question:

What happens when a person trained to value evidence encounters something that refuses to become clean evidence?

Spiritualism did not need every scientist to believe. It needed only enough serious people to refuse easy dismissal. Crookes provided exactly that kind of disturbance.

To believers, he suggested that the séance room deserved investigation. To skeptics, he became an example of how intelligence could be misled by desire, performance, or inadequate controls. To later historians, he remains a complicated figure standing at the threshold between Victorian science, psychical research, and the coming obsession with proof.

That is why Crookes is the perfect bridge toward spirit photography.

With him, Spiritualism begins to change shape.

It is no longer only grief.

It is no longer only private testimony.

It becomes inquiry.

Measurement.

Reputation.

The attempt to make the unseen answer to modern methods.

👁️ Why They Stayed

Mary Todd Lincoln, Victor Hugo, and William Crookes did not enter Spiritualism for the same reason.

That is what makes them powerful together.

Mary came through grief. Spiritualism offered her the possibility that motherhood had not been severed by death.

Hugo came through imagination and exile. Spiritualism offered him a language large enough for death, politics, poetry, and cosmic speculation to meet.

Crookes came through inquiry. Spiritualism offered him a problem that seemed to resist ordinary scientific closure.

None of these stories should be reduced to gullibility.

Nor should they be flattened into proof.

They are more interesting than either.

Each figure reveals a different kind of unresolved need. The need to speak again. The need to imagine beyond exile and death. The need to examine what respectable certainty had not yet explained.

That is why Spiritualism endured.

It entered grief and gave it a voice.

It entered imagination and gave it a table.

It entered science and gave it a controversy.

And for some people, once it entered, it did not leave.

🌫️ Closing Reflection

The history of Spiritualism is often told through exposures, fraud trials, famous mediums, and spectacular claims.

Those things matter.

But they do not explain everything.

Movements do not endure only because of public demonstrations. They endure because individual people find something inside them that ordinary life has not answered.

Mary Todd Lincoln did not need a movement. She needed Willie.

Victor Hugo did not need a parlor trick. He needed a universe large enough to answer exile, death, and destiny.

William Crookes did not need superstition. He needed to know whether the unexplained could be brought beneath the lamp of investigation.

That is the strange power of Spiritualism in the nineteenth century.

It did not ask every person to enter through the same door.

It only required that some, after entering, found they could not quite leave.

And before Spiritualism tried to place ghosts into photographs, before it sought visible proof in silvered plates and shadowed studios, it had already accomplished something quieter.

It had convinced certain people that the question itself was worth staying with.

📚 Footnotes

White House Historical Association, “Seances in the Red Room,” which discusses Mary Lincoln’s turn to Spiritualism after Willie Lincoln’s death. Source ↩
White House Historical Association, “Seances in the Red Room,” noting reports of séances held in the Red Room and evidence suggesting as many as eight White House séances. Source ↩
White House Historical Association, “Seances in the Red Room,” quoting Mary Lincoln’s reported statement that Willie appeared to her at night and was sometimes accompanied by Eddie. Source ↩
Harvard Art Museums, catalogue record for William H. Mumler’s spirit photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln with Abraham Lincoln’s shadow. Source ↩
Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe, “Decapitating God: Revolution in Victor Hugo’s Le Livre des Tables and Dieu,” discussing Hugo’s séance experiences in exile and their relationship to political and visionary language. Source ↩
William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, 1874, available through the Internet Archive. Source ↩
Cambridge University Press description of Crookes’s Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, noting his investigations of mediums including D. D. Home, Kate Fox, and Florence Cook. Source ↩

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