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How to Contact the Dead: (and Lose Your Money in the Process)
Paperback
Series: Historically Bad Advice
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Feb 21 2026
Pages: 168
Weight: 0.38
Height: 0.39 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Ever wanted to speak to a deceased relative, manifest ectoplasm, or simply give your life savings to a charismatic charlatan in a dark room?
Welcome to the golden age of Spiritualism, a time when the veil between the living and the dead was surprisingly thin-and surprisingly expensive to cross.
In How to Contact the Dead (and Lose Your Money in the Process), author William Hathorne dives into the lucrative, absurd, and entirely fraudulent world of 19th and early 20th-century séances. Drawn directly from genuine mediumistic guides, paranormal research, and spiritualist journals published between 1847 and 1926, this darkly comedic history reveals exactly how Victorian and Edwardian experts turned grief into a booming industry.
Part of the Historically Bad Advice series, this book pairs jaw-dropping historical source material with biting satirical commentary. You'll discover how a couple of bored sisters cracking their toes started a global religion, and how the world's greatest scientific and literary minds-including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle-were repeatedly duped by cheesecloth and double-exposed photographs.
Inside, you will learn:
The Fox Sisters' Secret: How to launch an international spiritual movement using nothing but an apple on a string and double-jointed toes.
The Economics of Ectoplasm: The messy, highly suspicious spirit matter that mediums produced for paying customers.
Ghost Photography 101: How to perfectly capture a spirit on film (provided you have a willing assistant and a basic understanding of double exposure).
The Cottingley Fairies: The paper cutouts that fooled the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
The Astral Body: How to properly project your consciousness across the room, according to the Mahatmas of Tibet.
Perfect for fans of dark history, true crime adjacent scams, and macabre humor. How to Contact the Dead is a hilarious reminder that while the dead may be silent, the living have never stopped paying to listen.
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