Deconstructing the Séance Room
Do you know your trumpet from your tambourine? What about your cabinet from your knocking hand? In Deconstructing the Séance Room, Kate Cherrell leads a tour through history’s greatest spiritual successes and frauds, presenting history’s tools of the spiritualist trade against stories of their use and power. When spiritualism bloomed as the new religion of the 19th century, it reunited the living with the dead, transforming grief and posing greater questions about man’s changing place – and power – within the universe. It also created an environment where fraudulent practitioners could lay roots, taking equipment from stage magicians and rebranding it as a mystical new outlet.
Spirituality is the mother of invention, and the Victorian era was prime for new beliefs and methodologies that stretched the limits of science and belief. Taking a journey through the séance rooms and spiritual theatres of the past, this talk celebrates the ingenuity of the spirit telephone and floating banjo, while placing fantastical tales of mediums and spirits back into a human, and historical, context.
BIO: Dr Kate Cherrell is a writer, speaker and broadcaster specialising in Victorian Spiritualism and paranormal history. She is the author of Begotten (2025), Buried England (2026) and The Sensuality of Séance (TBC), and writes commercially about paranormal history for various media outlets. As a paranormal historian, she has co-hosted the television programmes Haunted Homecoming and Unexplained: Caught on Camera and has provided historical expertise for The Yorkshire Exorcist, Paranormal, and Weird Britain. She is co-founder of Not of this World festival, director of The Bats’ Ball and co-founder of the Lincolnshire Folklore Society. She lives for good wine, ghosts, and graves
Curated & Hosted by:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
This is a 5 part series of lectures
