Fortune Telling

Swedenborg taught that angels and demons and spirits aren't locked in heaven or hell, and used scripture to explain his experienceand visions in talking to angels.  

Credit: Swedenborg Foundation: Heaven and Hell

It surprises most Americans to learn Charles Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, was not just a Disney folk hero but a real person. Chapman became a missionary for the Swedish Swedenborgian Church after its founder, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), was declared a heretic (someone accused of having false religious beliefs) by the Swedish monarch, King Adolf Frederick (who reigned from 1751 to 1771). Chapman, although wealthy, traveled like a beggar in rags, wore a pot on his head, and planted apple orchards as he moved west (cider was the most common alcoholic drink in the American colonies). Through his travels and other missionaries of the Swedenborgian Church, the ideas of the Swiss Reform Spiritualist tradition — spread by way of the Swedish Swedenborgian Church — spread along the eastern seaboard.

As Spiritualism grew, it connected to the old Celtic Druid idea that All Hallows’ Eve (Halloween) was when the veil between the living and the dead was thinnest. Many believed it was the best night to contact lost loved ones. These tools and practices spread at Halloween parties, especially during their peak from the 1840s to the 1920s.

If you attend the VIP Experience, you can learn all about these traditions from one of our experts.  

Spiritualism began with the Fox sisters of Rochester, New York — later exposed as frauds and charlatans in part by the famous magician Harry Houdini. They claimed they could communicate with spirits through mysterious "rappings" or knockings. At first, they pretended to summon one or more wandering spirits, asking yes or no questions and having the ghost knock once for yes and twice for no (later, three knocks for yes). 

They worked out coded signals with collaborators, knocking or snapping fingers under their dresses, or using their knees, ankles, and toes. Sometimes, they even had spirits “knock out" letters of the alphabet (A = one knock, B = two knocks, etc.) while being signaled secretly.

A relative and collaborator, Mrs. Norman Culver, first confessed to their tricks in 1851. Then, in 1857, Charles Grafton Page (a patent examiner known for exposing frauds), the Boston Courier newspaper, and magician John Wyman publicly challenged the Fox sisters with a $500 prize. 

They accepted but failed, and it was revealed they made the sounds with bone and foot movements. In 1887, the Seybert Commission also declared them frauds. For $1,500 in 1888, at the New York Academy of Music on October 28, Margaretta, with her sister Kate present, publicly confessed and demonstrated their methods.  Their defenders to this day said they were ruined by people like Houdini and the confession was only a result of their destitution as a result of their smear campaign.  Both sisters died in abject poverty.

Despite being a scam, their act sparked what would today be a multi-million-dollar cottage industry of mediums, psychics, and occultists. The social and religious movement of Spiritualism taught that human consciousness survived death. Spiritualists rejected the idea of heaven and hell and instead believed in a Spirit Realm where souls could act as messengers between God, other spirits, and the living.

Spiritualism spread rapidly in New York, likely helped by the influx of Irish immigrants in the mid-19th century, who brought older Goidelic Celtic beliefs in the Otherworld — which also rejected a strict heaven-or-hell system (unlike their Gallic cousins' Albios, Bitnos, and Dubnos).

The Industrial Era was full of death: 

• from childbirth complications, 

• childhood diseases, 

• malnutrition, 

• dangerous working conditions, and 

• constant wars (Mexican-American War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, World War I, etc.). 

Spiritualism spread much faster than Mormonism among both Catholics and Protestants because nearly everyone was grieving and desperate to reconnect with lost loved ones. Traditional religion posed to offer answers to questions about what happens when we die but couldn't help people talk to a lost loved one or deal with their accumulated grief over so many losses.  By some estimates, 50% of children made it to adulthood.   

The Civil War especially fueled Spiritualism. Historian Drew Gilpin Faust, in her 2008 book This Republic of Suffering, notes at the White House history website :

“750,000 American fatalities, nearly equal to the total number of American deaths in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined.”

By 1897, historian David Artonis estimated about 8 million Americans were Spiritualists, with the movement peaking from the 1840s to the 1920s, especially among the middle and upper classes.

This inescapable and sudden loss explains why President Lincoln’s wife,  Mary Todd Lincoln held séances in the Red Room of the White House  and worked with spirit photographer William Mumler. 

She desperately tried to contact her three deceased sons — Edward (Eddie), who died unexpectedly at age four in 1850 (possibly of tuberculosis or thyroid cancer); William (Willie), who died of typhoid in 1862; and Thomas (Tad), who died in 1871 at age 18. Only one of her four sons lived to old age. She also later tried to reach her assassinated husband, Abraham Lincoln.

Today, sociologists and psychologists understand that the Spiritualism craze in late 19th-century America functioned as a widespread coping mechanism because of events in our history that changed how Americans mourned for the incomprehensible losses American families faced in this era and for which traditional religion seemed unable to offer reassurance. Faced with unimaginable loss and grief, many families found traditional religion unable to offer the comfort they needed — so they turned to mediums and séances as a way to keep their loved ones close or gain closure.  

Alexandra Kommel of American University explains that the meaning of a lost loved one's life and death must be understood in order to properly grieve — something late Victorian Era Americans were often denied because of the Civil War.  Kommel again quotes Faust's 2008 Republic of Suffering:

“The particular circumstances of the Civil War often inhibited mourning, rendering it difficult, if not impossible, for many bereaved Americans to move through the stages of grief. In an environment where information about deaths was often wrong or entirely unavailable, survivors found themselves both literally and figuratively unable to ‘see clearly what… has been lost...When these soldiers perished far away from home, observance of grief was impossible and the state of the soul of the deceased at the time of death was forever lost to the family. Bodies were left on the battlefield for a variety of reasons: lack of a structured, recovery system, attempts to disgrace the enemy and lower its morale, junctures of battle, and discrimination between officers and their subordinates." 

Kommel continues: 

“The uniqueness and scope of death during the Civil War left thousands of families without the proper outlets to grieve. It transformed wives into widows, children into orphans, and mothers into mourners."

She continues in quoting historian David Nartonis' 2010 professional journal article, “ The Rise of 19th-Century American Spiritualism: 1854-1873," in The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion:

“Spiritualist activity increased rapidly in America at a time when bereaved citizens were seeking new assurance of continuity and justice after death and when traditional religion was becoming less able to offer this assurance.”

This surge in Spiritualism also inspired charlatan and grifter Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and her associate, former Union Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, to found the occult order of Theosophy. This order later influenced or popularized groups like Freemasonry (in its esoteric expressions), Rosicrucianism, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and other occult societies that spread Spiritualism worldwide.

The Fox sisters, Blavatsky, and Olcott toured the world performing demonstrations of spirit mediumship, spirit boards (Ouija), spirit rapping and knocking, and séances. 

Midnight séances at Halloween parties on Hallow’s Eve became especially popular, and the rest is history.

Many Spiritualist practices that began at Spiritualist camps in Ohio and in Lily Dale, New York, aimed to communicate with spirits and predict the future. These practices left their mark on Hallow's Eve traditions.

They live on in the custom of telling ghost stories at Halloween and even at Christmas by candlelight (which also alludes to our company's original name, Candlelight Frights). This tradition was strengthened by the ghost stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, and other authors, and became a common activity at Victorian Halloween parties — reading horror, ghost, and witch tales by fire or candlelight on Hallow's Eve. 

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with its three Christmas ghosts visiting Ebenezer Scrooge, is a prime example of how this custom crossed over into Christmas as well.

This tradition, reading ghost tales and witch folktales by candlelight at Halloween parties, along with the invitation tradition, explain the namesakes of our first iteration as Candlelight Frights.  In our first logo, the crow, a reference to Poe's famous poem The Raven, then serves as symbolic homage to the contributions of the mostly Protestant but slightly Catholic Christian Spiritualists upon American Halloween traditions.