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Many people honestly believe in spiritualism. Unfortunately, there have been many professional magicians and others who use trickery to make themselves appear to be mediums. Because of this, anyone who says he or she is a medium is likely suspected of dishonesty. Harry Houdini, the most famous professional magician, distrusted spiritualism so thoroughly that he spent a great deal of time trying to prove that it could not be true.
Although many scientists dispute spiritualist claims, spiritualists defend their beliefs. They claim that communication between the living and the dead has been scientifically verified. Some spiritualists consider themselves in agreement with Christian tradition. But most forms of Christianity do not agree with spiritualism’s main teaching that the spirits of the dead communicate with people on earth.
Serious investigators believed some truth lay behind the reports of mediums. The society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 by a distinguished group of Cambridge scholars in London, United Kingdom, and a fund was established to investigate reports of possible spirit appearances, to find out if any of them is true. A number of famous people have supported investigations of the field, among them two British writers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge. Several organized bodies of spiritualists exist, with about 600 congregations and a membership of more than 210000 people in the United States in the late 1900s. the larger organizations include the International General Assembly of Spiritualists, with headquarters in Ashtabula, Ohio; the National Spiritual Alliance of the USA in Lake Pleasant, Massachusetts; and the National Spiritualist Association of Churches in Lily Dale, New York.
