Fruits and Fallacies: The Spiritualist Revival of the Interwar Years
Following the end of the First World War, families processed the loss of loved ones and re-assessed their relationships with life, death and the great beyond. Within this chaos, Spiritualism offered a lifeline of community and comfort, professing to be able to reunite the living with the dead, and appease any fears of an eternity of nothingness. Within Spiritualist home circles, communities were made, relationships nurtured, and a new religion found a second life within an increasingly secular populous.
While messages of comfort emerged from these spirit realms, so did ghosts, animals, objects and ectoplasm. Fortunes were found and lost at the edge of a séance table, and while deceased celebrities made a habit of visiting some of the country’s most popular mediums, others looked on in bafflement. The interwar years were a boom time for Spiritualists and debunkers alike, as Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini were at loggerheads; a friendship spoiled in a cloud of fairy photographs, fake ghosts and even faker moustaches.
While countries began to rebuild after conflict, a new spiritual war began to rage beneath the surface, more profound, impassioned and dangerous than ever before.This talk offers an overview of the world of Spiritualism during the interwar years, introducing key events, figures (and dramas!) with an informative and light-hearted tone.
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
