Mediumship

Spiritualism in the United States from 1848

A scholarly review of Robert S. Cox's history of American Spiritualism reports that traditional accounts begin at Hydesville, New York, in 1848, when sounds in John Fox's farmhouse were interpreted as messages from a spirit communicating with his teenage daughters Margaret and Kate. When their older sister Leah took the girls to Rochester, a movement developed around séances in which entranced mediums acted as intermediaries between the living and the dead.

The same review notes that Cox treats the Fox sisters as only one of several origins, alongside Andrew Jackson Davis's 'Harmonial philosophy' and other prophetic traditions, and places Spiritualism within earlier debates on somnambulism, mesmerism and phrenology. The source is a book review, not the book.

Kardec and the origins of Spiritism

The French educator Allan Kardec (1804-1869) is described in a 2025 history of psychiatry article as one of the first people to propose the scientific investigation of psychical experiences, and as an influential scholar in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. The authors say his life and research are little known and often misconstrued. They report that he tested several explanations for mediumistic phenomena: fraud, hallucination, a new physical force, somnambulism, thought reflection (including telepathy) and discarnate minds.

Spiritistic organisations in São Paulo, Brazil, were the setting for a 2008 interview study of mediums, which shows that Spiritism is a living tradition there. The sources reviewed do not trace in detail how Kardec's ideas reached Brazil, so that history is not covered here.

Psychology and psychiatry before the twentieth century

Carlos Alvarado's 2020 historical survey describes long nineteenth-century discussion of mediumship in relation to dissociation and the unconscious mind, drawing on writers including Alfred Binet, Théodore Flournoy, William James, Pierre Janet and Frederic Myers. It reports that some of these writers reduced mediumship entirely to processes within the individual, while others also considered whether some phenomena were veridical, meaning that they conveyed information that was later verified.

Andreas Sommer's 2024 essay contrasts the opposed attitudes of William James and Wilhelm Wundt, and of the psychiatrists Eugen Bleuler, who defended research with mediums, and Emil Kraepelin and Henry Maudsley, who were dismissive. Sommer argues that treating all open-minded scientific interest in mediumship as wishful thinking is asymmetrical. This is a historian's argument in a thematic journal issue, and it does not itself assess the evidence.

Spirit mediumship in other settings

A 2022 study of dang-ki, a form of Chinese spirit mediumship practised in Singapore temples, notes that the calling to be a healer often involves an initiatory illness, and that dang-kis go on to hold demanding social roles. The authors interviewed eight dang-kis from five temples. The existence of such practices alongside Spiritualism does not show a shared origin, and the sources reviewed do not compare their histories.

Medium, mediumship and anomalous information reception

Costa and Moreira-Almeida define mediums as individuals who claim to communicate with deceased persons or non-material beings. Freire and colleagues describe mediumship as a spiritual experience in which a person claims to be in communication with, or under the control of, spiritual beings. In these definitions the claim belongs to the medium or the tradition, and research papers often add 'alleged' or 'ostensible' to mark that.

Researchers use 'anomalous information reception' for information about a deceased person that was not obtained through the conventional senses or inferential reasoning. The term names a claimed observation and not an explanation, and the studies below test whether it occurs under controlled conditions.

Spiritualism, Spiritism and related terms

'Spiritualism' in the sources reviewed refers to the movement that grew from the Hydesville events of 1848, whereas 'Spiritism' is associated with Kardec and with the Brazilian tradition studied by Moreira-Almeida and colleagues. The sources do not give one agreed taxonomy, and similar words in different traditions, including the Singapore dang-ki, should not be read as meaning the same practice.

In the nineteenth-century literature, explanations of mediumship used terms such as dissociation, personation, memory states, automatisms, hysteria and hypnosis, and Kardec's list of hypotheses included somnambulism and unconscious cerebration. These were competing explanations, not names for the practice itself.

Readings and demonstrations in the UK

A 2015 interview study of nine working mediums in the UK describes mediumship as a service some people use for comfort and support after a death. Its authors cite an estimate that around 10% of UK adults regularly visit a medium and that television programmes showing mediumship demonstrations draw audiences in the millions. The sources reviewed do not describe the sensory or perceptual channels that practitioners report, so those terms are not covered here.

Formats used in controlled studies

Research formats differ from everyday practice because they limit contact between medium and sitter. In several studies mediums gave readings about a named deceased person to an experimenter acting as a proxy sitter, and the real sitter later rated the reading meant for them alongside control readings. A 2020 Brazilian study used written mediumistic letters (psychography) from eight mediums for blind proxy sitters in 18 sessions.

A 2022 Omega study of 28 self-claimant mediums used a triple-blind protocol with no interaction between medium and sitter for 100 readings. These are laboratory arrangements and should not be taken as typical sessions.

Practitioner conduct and codes of ethics

In the UK interview study, mediums described their work through themes of responsibility and ethics, a wish to help and therapeutic value, and the authors describe an ethical framework that shows awareness of how vulnerable sitters can be. A 2025 survey of 119 English-speaking mediums and trance channelers, 74% of them living in the United States, found that about two-thirds said they followed a specific code of ethics. A sitter can ask what a practitioner's code covers and can end a session at any point.

Comfort and support after bereavement

Mediums interviewed in the UK study presented their work as a helping profession and a service that comforts and supports the bereaved. This is how practitioners describe it, and the study does not measure outcomes for sitters. Its authors also ask whether mediums are equipped to deal with sitters who have complicated grief.

A 2015 article in Omega by Beischel, Mosher and Boccuzzi, authors at the Windbridge Institute, frames readings as 'assisted after-death communication' within the continuing bonds model of grief. They state that little is known about the effects of this self-prescribed option and that anecdotal reports and exploratory data suggest a positive outcome. This is a discussion article and not a trial of grief outcomes.

Claims about survival and the mind

Some researchers interpret positive results as bearing on whether mind can exist independently of the brain. Costa and Moreira-Almeida review conventional explanations and also examine the 'mind beyond the brain' hypothesis. Beischel and Schwartz stated in 2007 that their results could not distinguish between survival of consciousness and 'super-psi', meaning the retrieval of information by other paranormal means. These interpretations are contested, and the sources reviewed do not cover claims for treating physical or mental health conditions.

Blinded reading studies with positive findings

In Beischel and Schwartz's 2007 triple-blind study, eight mediums who had previously shown accurate reporting in a laboratory each read two absent sitters, and eight University of Arizona students rated an intended reading against a paired control reading. Ratings were higher for intended readings (p = 0.007, effect size 0.5), and sitters chose their own reading significantly more often (p = 0.01). With eight sitters and pre-selected mediums, the sample was small.

Kelly and Arcangel (2011) reported two studies using proxy sitters and blind rating. The first was not significant, while the second, larger study was highly significant (z = -3.89), and the authors discuss two possible weaknesses of that study. Tressoldi and colleagues (2022) examined 100 readings by 28 mediums and found that sitters correctly identified the intended reading 65% of the time, with global scores of 2.4 for intended and 1.7 for control readings.

Studies that found no effect

O'Keeffe and Wiseman (2005) reviewed the methodological debate in past research, devised a method meant to prevent those problems and tested several professional mediums. They reported that the results did not support the existence of genuine mediumistic ability.

Freire and colleagues (2020) had eight mediums write letters in 18 sessions with blind proxy sitters. Ninety-four sitters later scored the target letter and five control letters matched for gender and age, and there was no difference in global or specific fit scores. The authors concluded that the mediums did not show evidence of anomalous information under these strict conditions, while arguing for a compromise between ecological validity and control.

A meta-analysis of modern experiments

Sarraf, Woodley of Menie and Tressoldi (2020) pooled 18 experiments from 14 papers published between 2001 and December 2019 and estimated a proportion index of 0.18 above chance (95% confidence interval 0.12 to 0.25) under both Bayesian and frequentist models, with two publication-bias tests passed. The authors concluded that the results support the hypothesis that some mediums retrieve information about deceased persons by unknown means. The abstract does not state the quality of the included studies, and one author also co-authored mediumship studies discussed on this page.

Mental health of practitioners

A 2008 study interviewed 24 Spiritistic mediums in São Paulo and compared them with published data on North American patients with dissociative identity disorder. The groups were similar in female prevalence and first-rank symptoms, but the mediums had better social adjustment and lower rates of mental disorders and of mental health service use. A 2022 study of eight Singapore dang-kis found that most did not show clinically significant emotional distress. These studies concern practitioners, not sitters, and say nothing about the accuracy of readings.

Cold reading and conventional explanations

Ray Hyman's 1977 article describes cold reading as a way of convincing strangers that the reader knows all about them. It lists techniques such as general statements that fit most people, fishing for reactions, and educated guesses based on observable characteristics, and it explains why vague statements may be rated as accurate. Hyman's analysis relates to readings by a reader who can see and talk with the sitter. The blinded proxy designs above were developed partly to remove those cues.

Costa and Moreira-Almeida list the conventional explanations that studies need to exclude: fraud, sitter gullibility and wishful thinking, chance, a medium's mental disorder and involuntary personification of the unconscious mind. Beischel and Schwartz stated that their design removed conventional mechanisms, whereas O'Keeffe and Wiseman concluded their own results did not support genuine ability.

Design, selection and independence

Findings conflict between studies, and the studies differ in how mediums were chosen, how readings were scored and whether sitters or independent judges rated them. Beischel and Schwartz used mediums who had previously performed well in the laboratory. Several studies rely on sitters rating readings meant for them, and Kelly and Arcangel acknowledged weaknesses in their significant study.

Some authors are affiliated with groups that research mediumship or spirituality, such as the Windbridge Institute in Tucson and the Federal University of Juiz de Fora in Brazil, as listed in PubMed records. These disclosures do not show bias, but the evidence has not been independently replicated across many unaffiliated groups in the sources reviewed.

What the sources do not establish

No randomised trial of grief outcomes after a medium reading was found. A PubMed search on 5 October 2026 for mediumship with bereavement or grief returned eight records, and none was a randomised trial of that kind. Other databases were not searched. Even a result above chance would not identify the source of the information, since Beischel and Schwartz noted that survival and super-psi could not be separated.

Bereaved sitters and care boundaries

Beischel and colleagues note that unresolved, complicated, prolonged or traumatic grief can harm mental or physical health, and that the effects of readings on grief are poorly known. The UK interview study raises the question of whether mediums are equipped for sitters with complicated grief. The sources reviewed contain no adverse-event data from readings, so absence of reports should not be read as absence of harm.

A reading is not a substitute for assessment or support from a doctor or bereavement service. Prolonged or severe grief, or distress that affects safety, calls for professional help whatever else a person chooses to do.

Practitioner wellbeing and suitability

The practitioner studies above found generally good adjustment among the mediums and dang-kis interviewed, but samples were small and selected. The sources reviewed do not address whether mediumship or trance is suitable for people who hear voices, have dissociative symptoms or take part in trance practice while unwell.

Training and regulation

No source reviewed identifies a statutory training requirement for mediums. A 2025 survey-based project drafted an aspirational code of ethics for mediums and trance channelers, which 91% of respondents approved, and its authors present it as a step in professionalisation, not as a regulatory standard.