Introduction

J. C. F. Grumbine's 1911 booklet, Clairaudience, was an instructional manual for those who wished to hear the dead. Clairaudience offered students of Spiritualism lessons in the mechanics of spiritual hearing. Each lesson came with experiments like the one above, designed to help readers hone their practice. In his writing, Grumbine explained how direct, independent spirit voices were made audible to seance sitters by the use of the medium’s body and energy. He also explained how spirit voices maintained a certain vibrational frequency which made them audible only to the inner ear, or the “etheric ear.” Listening with this oracular organ was a skill that had to be learned and practiced and should be, Grumbine insisted, accompanied by an internal, spiritual development.

Experiment Eleven demonstrates a particular way of listening based on an understanding of sound that developed in North America over the course of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Theories of spiritual sound and the inner ear far predated Spiritualism's emergence in the 1840s. Spiritualists linked the newly occurring acousmatic sounds they heard to Swedish scientist- theologian Emanuel Swedenborg by way of the “Poughkeepsie Seer,” Andrew Jackson Davis. Listening practices and theories about the production of mysterious sounds solidified into general rules for conducting seances and spirit communication. From the first days of the Rochester Rappings, practitioners created their own methods for interpreting the knocks and raps heard throughout the seance room.