Like many of these other scholars, Peters offers an abbreviated history of this metaphoric kinship between ghostly telegraph and physical telegraph, linking the very first decoding of spirit rappings to the model of the Morse code ( 1999, 95). Peters is but one of many scholars (Connor 1999 Noakes 1999, 2002 Sconce 2000 Luckhurst 2002 Galvan 2010, 2012 Harvey 2013) who have explored the powerful metaphoric cross-fertilization between the séance (or “spiritualist telegraph”) and the electric telegraph as parallel media channels of “communication,” in the newfangled sense of messages able to travel without palpable physical sign vehicles (Peters 1999, 94–95). This article explores three such boundary genres of communication between the living and the dead: how the séance converted the “spectral aphasia” of haunted houses into the domestic séance how ghosts of loved ones dying far away across the “phantasmal empire” turned the ghost from an actor to a message, working in tandem with telegrams and letters in the “psychical ghost story” and lastly, how the American spiritualist press created “spirit post offices” to publish communications from the dead alongside ordinary postal “correspondence” from the living.Īs John Durham Peters points out in his wide-ranging history of the idea of communication, Speaking into the Air, nineteenth-century Spiritualism was a key watershed moment in which many of the keywords of our communication vocabulary-“medium,” “channel,” and “communication” itself-were first given fleshly and ghostly forms in the spiritualist séance ( 1999, 100). Nineteenth-century Spiritualism was a watershed moment in which many of the keywords of our communication vocabulary-“medium,” “channel,” and “communication” itself-were first given fleshly and ghostly form in the spiritualist séance, which early on was likened to a “spiritual telegraph.” Throughout this period, newfangled ghosts and communication infrastructures (including the telegraph, but also the equally novel postal service) developed in tandem.
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