A Medium at Harvard

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey

The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.

Photos of the séance medium Mina Crandon (1888–1941), known publicly as Margery, are among the most shocking images in the history of photography. Restrained and half-dressed, she sits with legs spread as phantom forms emerge from nearly every orifice. It is difficult to tell whether these images, some captured at Harvard University, document a sideshow, a scientific trial, a crime scene, or a surrealist performance.   

For over two decades, I have photographed mediums and séances, culminating in my book Séance (Fulgur Press, 2019) that examines this bizarre photographic lineage tracing back to Boston, where spirit photography first emerged in the 1860s. Long dismissed as absurd curiosities or fraudulent entertainments, séance photographs are more than failed or compromised evidence. They expose how the authority of the camera was forged and remains in tension with ritual, embodiment, and belief. 

Margery’s séances in Boston generated international controversy, drawing the attention of prominent figures such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, W. B. Yeats, and Harry Houdini. During two Harvard University investigations, multiple domains of knowledge converged upon Margery’s body. In a windowless room on the third floor of Emerson Hall, scholars from English, mathematics, astronomy, biology, and psychology scrutinized the chthonic displays emerging from under her dress in the dark.   

Eighty years earlier, William Mumler (1832-1884), the first recognized séance photographer, also residing in Boston, produced images showing the living posed alongside deceased relatives. To the skeptic, Mumler’s images look like manipulated exposures. To the believer, they are spiritual revelations attesting to the fact that the living and the dead remain connected. The camera conjures what was not visibly present, revealing the unstable boundary between evidence and appearance—a paradox at the heart of photographic truth. 

The primary force driving Margery and Mumler’s visions was Spiritualism, an American-born religious movement grounded in the belief that the living can communicate with the dead. Like other image-oriented ritual technologies—from cave paintings and ceremonial masks to the ancestral moai of Easter Island—séance photography makes matter a threshold through which presence becomes authored. Photographic emulsion joins pigment, wood, and stone as a material through which the unseen can take form. 

Séances involving manifestations of ectoplasm are central to Spiritualist imagery. A viscous, light-sensitive substance said to bridge life and death, witnesses describe ectoplasm emanating from mediums’ bodies as an animated phenomenon, shape-shifting into luminous veils, floating faces, or disembodied limbs. Yet in photographs, ectoplasm suggests crude theatrics, appearing like paper-mâché dolls, cheesecloth constructions, or cut-up magazines.  

Spiritualism’s séance culture created a new iconography through séance photography. This uncanny visual record circulated Spiritualist ideas and controversies across the Western World and eventually around the globe. Spiritualism and séance photography survive today, though on a far smaller scale. In the twenty-first century, mediums still claim to produce ectoplasm, and my work continues to document the phenomenon.  

Margery was among the few women mediums from modest means who unsettled the greatest minds of their time. Her most notorious feat was materializing the ectoplasmic hand of her deceased brother. Emerging from between her legs, the spectral appendage felt like an organic substance to the touch. From session to session, the hand shape-shifted from cool flesh with stubby fingers into cord-like strands or into the heel of a foot. Bursting forth in the dark, the hand touched séance participants and performed impossible acts, such as ringing a bell locked inside a box or levitating a six-pound weight five feet off the ground. It reportedly smelled like liver and was suspected to be made of animal tissue. Researchers cast it in wax, fingerprinted it, and photographed it as evidence. 

Religion, spectacle, and scientific inquiry collided around Margery. From that clash, a new science emerged. The scientist J. B. Rhine was so disturbed by Margery’s displays that he set out, in his words, to “eliminate the shadows” from psychic experiments, abandoning séance fieldwork to study extrasensory perception in a laboratory setting at Duke University. Rhine replaced professional mediums with anonymous subjects and relied on card-guessing tests, random-number generators, and statistical analysis to generate data.  

Rhine transformed nineteenth-century British psychical research into twentieth-century American parapsychology, but Rhine’s shift to controlled abstraction was not solely for scientific progress. It was an empirical purification seeking to eliminate theatricality, embodiment, and ritual residue from psychic study. But what is lost when the shadows are removed?  

Both the photographic medium and Spiritualist mediums blur boundaries between subjective experience and objective fact. Far from a neutral instrument of verification, photography emerges as a site where measurable proof and lived encounter intersect, where the unseen moves from a séance vision and onto the supposedly objective photographic image. In Margery’s pictures, grief and ritual collide with strict procedures of scientific testing. Her displays of form carry meanings beyond explanation, reminding us that human experience surpasses what science can verify.