Most mediumistic sittings are about messages: the medium perceives something inwardly and passes it on. Physical mediumship is different – it claims something all those present can hear, see or touch at once: objects move, raps run through the room, voices speak out of empty air, and in rare cases forms are said to take shape. This article explains what is meant by it, which phenomena belong to it, where the tradition comes from – and why this field above all demands the greatest caution.
Physical or mental? The decisive difference
Mental mediumship happens inside the medium: it "sees", "hears" or "knows" something (clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience) and conveys a message. It is only indirectly testable – through the accuracy of the information. Most mediums work this way (such as Gordon Smith); the typical procedure is described in the article on contacting the other side.
Physical mediumship, by contrast, claims an effect in the physical world: not just a message but an objectively perceptible event in the room. That is what makes it at once more fascinating and more problematic – an event in the room can be filmed, measured and controlled, but also faked. Physical mediums are very rare; the heyday of the phenomenon was the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The phenomena
Across history a remarkably constant repertoire recurs:
- Raps. Knocking on walls, furniture, in the room – the founding phenomenon of modern Spiritualism.
- Movement of objects. Table-tilting, floating or carried objects, up to the levitation of the medium itself.
- Direct voice. Voices speaking freely in the room independently of the medium, often amplified through a "trumpet".
- Apports. The alleged appearance of solid objects "out of nowhere".
- Light phenomena. Flashes of light, mist, glowing points.
- Materialisation and ectoplasm. The most spectacular and most contested phenomenon: a substance said to issue from the medium's body, from which hands, faces or whole forms are said to shape themselves. The term ectoplasm was coined by the Nobel laureate Charles Richet.
A historical arc
Modern Spiritualism begins in 1848 with the Fox sisters at Hydesville: raps in a farmhouse that could be interpreted – via a yes/no code and then the alphabet – as "intelligent knocking". Within years it became a mass movement.
Over the following decades the most famous physical mediums appeared, and with them serious scientists:
- Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–1886), probably the most famous physical medium, never clearly convicted of fraud; the chemist and Royal Society fellow William Crookes investigated him and posited a "psychic force". Notably, Crookes never retracted his findings — neither as president of the British Association (1898) nor of the Royal Society (1913); in 1889 he even published a detailed retrospective in the SPR Proceedings (Notes of Séances with D. D. Home) and stood by his conclusions.
- Eusapia Palladino (1854–1918), the Italian medium tested across Europe – the Paris séances with the Curies and Richet are documented; she was caught cheating several times and produced phenomena under control. Pierre Curie took part for months and wrote, days before his accidental death in 1906, that here "a whole domain of entirely new facts and physical states of space, of which we have no conception" was opening up — he wanted to investigate the field systematically but did not live to do so. A decade earlier, in 1894, the radio pioneer Oliver Lodge — who had demonstrated wireless transmission almost a year before Marconi — had tested her together with Richet on the Île Roubaud and came away convinced; it was precisely those sittings that moved the SPR to bring Palladino to Cambridge in 1895. There the electron's discoverer J. J. Thomson and the later Nobel laureate Lord Rayleigh took part — both stayed methodologically cautious rather than convinced; Rayleigh even took the telepathy statistics more seriously than the physical phenomena.
- The German physician Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (1862–1929) photographed ectoplasm and studied the brothers Willi and Rudi Schneider for years under strict conditions (tied up, marked with luminous pins, held by witnesses).
- The case of Helen Duncan (jailed in 1944 under the Witchcraft Act) shows that states at times took mediumship seriously.
A notable more recent chapter is the Scole Experiment (1993–1998) in Norfolk: three researchers of the Society for Psychical Research (Montague Keen, Arthur Ellison, David Fontana) attended 18 sittings and, in the extensive Scole Report (1999), found no evidence of fraud – without thereby proving the phenomenon. Today only a few keep the tradition alive, such as the researcher Eckhard Kruse and the medium Kai Mügge. The tradition is taught and kept above all at Arthur Findlay College in England – named after the spiritualist who documented the direct-voice medium John Sloan.
How a physical séance works
By the practitioners' own account three things are needed: a medium in deep trance, a group of sitters who supply "energy", and the cabinet – a curtain the medium withdraws behind, said to gather energy like a "battery". One peculiarity gives the whole thing its shady reputation: the work is done in darkness or under red light.
A tradition line runs exactly here: in the English school the medium is tied up and placed in the closed cabinet – as proof that it can do nothing itself. The German school took a more pragmatic route: as soon as the light is dimmed, controllers hold the medium by both arms and legs and check one another. Germany in fact focused on physical mediumship because it could be measured – with apparatus such as skin-resistance meters.
The most thoroughly measured German case, however, was not a séance at all but a haunting: in the Rosenheim case of 1967/68 the Freiburg parapsychologist Hans Bender brought in two plasma physicists from the Max Planck Institute at Garching – their report explicitly recorded that the fluorescent tubes bursting in series and the drawers opening by themselves could not be explained by electromagnetic fields or vibrations. The phenomena hung on a focus person (a 19-year-old employee), not on a medium in a cabinet – related, but a class of its own.
How productive such measurement can be is shown by an experiment of Eckhard Kruse's on the "direct voices" at a sitting with the British direct-voice medium Warren Caylor: he fixed four microphones to the walls and triangulated the origin of the voices from the differences in arrival time. The result was telling: the voices came not from the cabinet and not from the sitters' places – a child's voice seemed to come "from high up" – and they sounded clearly different from the medium. That too is not proof, but it is exactly the kind of testable approach the field would need.
Fraud accusations – honestly considered
There is no getting around it: no area of mediumship research is as heavily burdened with documented accusations of fraud as this one. The emphasis is on accusations: what is documented is usually the charge and the occasional exposure – less often an unambiguous, complete proof of the deed. There are real, uncovered cases – swallowed and regurgitated muslin as "ectoplasm", mediums disguised as spirits, tables moved with a foot – and working in the dark is the obvious gateway for it. But alongside them stands a second kind of case: the accusation that is raised once, sticks immediately, is passed along everywhere and never checked again.
Practitioners offer two counter-arguments. First: darkness is not cover but condition – some processes (a germinating seed, shy animals) require it; turn on the light and the phenomenon vanishes, which does not mean it does not exist. Second, per Kai Mügge: it is "never fully dark" – usually there is red light in gradations, and precisely the strangest manifestations are shown in good red light. That is fair to note – but the sceptics' rejoinder stands: a condition that at the same time prevents any rigorous check (no flash, no infrared camera, "light harms the medium") is exactly the one under which deception comes easiest. The reported harm to the medium from sudden light, too, can be read both ways.
Kai Mügge as a stroke of luck. How things really went with the historical mediums can no longer be found out today – the sittings are over, the participants long dead, nothing can be re-checked. That is precisely why Kai Mügge is a stroke of luck: in him one sees almost in real time how an accusation of fraud arises and spreads in the present – it sticks immediately, is passed along and is quickly taken as settled, without anyone checking it again for themselves. If it works this way today, it may well have worked the same way again and again in the past; from this living example one can develop cautious parallels to the old cases.
The decisive difference lies in verifiability. With Kai Mügge one can form one's own picture today: Eckhard Kruse provides videos on his research page in which the phenomena – down to the formation of the "ectoplasm" in infrared – are documented with sensors; this is exactly the rigorous observation, infrared camera included, that the classic objection declares impossible. The darkness argument thereby loses much of its force: today we have the technology to observe and measure even in the dark – infrared, thermal imaging and sensors see precisely where the naked eye registers nothing. Anyone – a TikToker, YouTuber or simply an interested person – who wants to know more precisely can attend a sitting; researchers can carry out their own investigations. With the historical cases none of this is possible any more – and that is exactly why restraint is called for before adopting an old verdict unchecked.
The honest balance is therefore sober: physical mediumship is not scientifically accepted and not unambiguously established in any single case. As Eckhard Kruse recounts in the mystica.tv interview, a structural obstacle compounds this: it is not the finding that counts but the dogma – in effect, "I observed such and such, may I publish it? No, because the wrong result came out." He once wrote his cases up as a detailed scientific report; today he leaves the journals aside and publishes directly – as a downloadable report and as film. The lack of recognition is therefore not only a question of the evidence but also of the gatekeepers of academic science. At the same time there are serious investigations by reputable researchers and cases that were never cleared up. The appropriate stance is neither credulous acceptance nor reflexive rejection but control: holding, measuring, repeated sittings, triangulation. The obstacle today no longer lies in the technology: with modern measuring and recording equipment a sitting could, in principle, be examined completely – provided the mediums allow it. The research would simply have to be carried out. Yet that is mostly what fails to happen: barely funded, rejected by the journals, and more damaging to the researcher's reputation than rewarded. The obstacle is not technical but institutional. What is astonishing is that of all people influencers, TikTokers or YouTubers barely take up such topics – there would be ample audience for it, which would remove the funding obstacle too, and the technology is not the sticking point anyway.
And quantum physics?
In the spiritual scene the line comes quickly: "Quantum physics proves all this." Here, of all people, an insider is the voice of caution. Eckhard Kruse, himself trained in physics, warns against it: just because quantum physics is astonishing does not mean it proves some other astonishing phenomenon. Non-locality, the collapse of the wave function, a possible role for consciousness in measurement – these are real, open questions (see quantum entanglement and matter and the Higgs field), but no free pass. This intellectual honesty – openness without overreach – is the best one can wish the field.
Context
Physical mediumship is the most spectacular, most measurable and at the same time the chapter of mediumship research most accompanied by accusations of fraud. For a deeper dive, the individual figures have their own articles: Crookes, Palladino, Richet, Kruse and Kai Mügge. Why such research stays at the margins despite interesting findings is treated in the article on hidden knowledge and power logic. And what to watch for when choosing a medium is covered in recognising a serious medium. The stakes are larger than the topic first appears: were even one such phenomenon genuine, the purely materialist worldview would be incomplete. The researcher Eckhard Kruse therefore considers the utilitarian question "what is it good for?" misguided — it would be about the door to a reality in which much becomes conceivable, up to spiritual healing.
Sources:
• William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, 1874.
• Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialisation (Eng. 1920); Experimente der Fernbewegung, 1924.
• Charles Richet, Traité de Métapsychique, 1922 (coined the term "ectoplasm").
• M. Keen, A. Ellison, D. Fontana, The Scole Report, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 1999.
• mystica.tv, interviews with Eckhard Kruse and Kai Mügge (YouTube).
• Eckhard Kruse, Der Geist in der Materie.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection and the series on the history and science of mediumship.