lol. I’m pretty sure it’s her nickname though.

Good to know! Thanks.

If anyone here hasn’t read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, I highly recommend it! I bring it up because it’s about a woman who joins an academic who is investigating a supposedly haunted house, all set in the 1950s. It’s a great read for October.

Ooh, what’s the title & author of that?

That sounds awesome! I’ll have to check it out.

To be fair, the girls who made the pictures were children, so that’s pretty impressive, imo. Not impressive enough for anyone to believe them though...heh

Ooh. I want a glow-in-the-dark book!

Yep. Spiritualism had surges in popularity after the American Civil War & WWI. lots of young men lost their lives in those conflicts and there were plenty of frauds ready to defraud grieving families :[

Definitely. I mean, William James (father of American psychology) was a big believer. I don’t think he was stupid. As someone living in 2015, however, it’s very weird for me to see authors taking such an ambivalent (or even somewhat credulous) stance.

It’s on my list! A lot of the fictional books I’ve read were YA (lol), but I’ve read some non-YA too. Sarah Waters’ Affinity was very good (of course, because it’s Sarah Waters!) and I liked John Harwood’s The Seance (among others)

Yes and no (lol). I think what’s happened with this topic is that the early & mid twentieth century writers on the topic (almost all men) completely eviscerated mediums & Spiritualism, so in the past few decades there’s been a more nuanced approach to the subject, led largely by feminist academics. I mean, I can…

I’ve read a few nonfiction works on Spiritualism lately and it’s a very weird line. Despite my interest in the subject, I don’t believe in Spiritualism for a second and that made certain books very eyeroll-worthy for me.

Arthur Conan Doyle was an interesting man. He believed in the Cottingley Fairies too.

A number of mediums were beautiful young women and a large part of the appeal was for (male) sitters to be with them in the dark ;)

I am so fascinated with Victorian & Edwardian spiritualism. Within the past couple of years I’ve read a couple of nonfiction books on the subject as well as a dozen or so fictional books (it’s like a mini-trend right now). Really fascinating stuff. I think it’s interesting how now we think of ghosts & things like…

Hmmm. I thought they were legally required to keep “Family” in the name?

That is a theory. I’m not personally convinced though. Witch hunts were fairly commonplace in the Western World at that point of time and the Salem Witch Trials were just another in a long line. And as this modern case demonstrates, you don’t have to have an illness to accuse someone of witchcraft - you can just be a…

I mean, there are rumors of child pedophile rings in Hollywood, so I assume a lot of these pedophiles know each other and provide each other access to children :[

Imagine the teen drama this will create. One girl will buy bracelets for all of her “closest” friends, but will inevitably snub one or two girls. Friendship war ensues.

Huh. That seems about right to me for Wisconsin (even in Madison). But I only lived in Wisconsin for a couple of years, so probably others have a better idea than I do.