Spirit Trumpets

Joined
Nov 26, 2016
Location
central NC
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(Public Domain)
The biggest problem with speaking to the dead in the Victorian era—beyond the whole “being dead” thing—was that the spirits never seemed to speak loudly enough. They spoke in whispers—sometimes unintelligible babble. The spirit trumpet—a fancy name for a skinny cone that supposedly amplified the voices of the dead—was called to the rescue.

Before the spirit trumpet, conversations with spirits were limited to nonverbal forms of communication like rapping on the floor. The spirit trumpet supposedly allowed the dead to speak directly with the living. The spiritualist medium Jonathan Koons popularized the spirit trumpet in the mid to late 19th century. It seems his son Nahum likely invented it.

According to Koons, the spirits could speak by possessing the vocal cords of the person speaking into the trumpet. Too soft-spoken to really project in a spirit room, the dead required all the sound-amplifying help they could get. The first spirit trumpets were homemade, either out of metal or cardboard, and resembled simple narrow cones. But as the trumpets gained popularity, they became fancier, leading to steel trumpets and some that even sported glow-in-the-dark rings at the end.

William Jackson Crawford, a 19th​ century psychic researcher, wrote about how Victorian séances always followed a prescribed itinerary. Everyone sat in a circle, prayed, and usually sang a hymn—all in absolute darkness. Then the summoned spirit would rap on the floor to announce its presence. The table would then levitate and, on occasion, spin around or turn sideways. The medium would then bring out the spirit trumpets. They would float in the air and come crashing down when the spirits departed.

Harry Houdini (1874 - 1926 ), the famous magician, is pictured below speaking into a spirit trumpet. He attempted to debunk mediums and their tools.

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(Public Domain)
 
Turns out this expression dates from the mid-1800s so I bet you're on to something. I hadn't thought of that!
A challenge I could not resist.

John Peel

D’ye ken John Peel with his coat so gray?
D’ye ken John Peel at the break of day?
D’ye ken John Peel when he’s far, far away?
With his hounds and his horn in the morning?

’Twas the sound of his horn called me from my bed,
And the cry of the hounds has me oft-time led.
For Peel’s view-hollo would awaken the dead,

Or a fox his lair in the morning.

by John Woodcock Graves (circa. 1826)

And I always thought this was a phrase my mother made up when I got too loud. 🎺
 
This particular ad was published turn-of-the-century or later - the horn being of aluminum - which was far too expensive to manufacture for something like this in the Antebellum/post-CW era.* There was no profit in it before the 1990s.

And the offer of optional luminous bands is an indication this ad was published some time after 1902 when Radium was first isolated.**

That's not to say such horns were not made of tin or rolled steel in the Antebellum/post-CW era, without glowing bands.


* www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/aluminum-common-metal-uncommon-past
** www.livescience.com/39623-facts-about-radium.html
 
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Very Interesting item and I guess folks believed in this as well as the Ouija board.
 
Don't you love that it can be ordered in two sizes? For the very, very dead or the kind-sorta dead?

Was it possible to use some kind of application containing phospherous ( sp? ) to achieve those glowing bands? Daughter a chemist, married to a chemist, know not a thing about chemistry.

Spiritualism seems to have been a massively contentious topic? You read lengthy articles full of snark and venom about hucksters preying on the gullible then even lengthier articles about how the author witnessed inexplicable events. There was a ton of debunking complete with discovering mirrors , strings and speaking tubes- then there was a crazy seance witnessed by Lincoln and his cabinet. Yes, Mary was responsible. The thing is, the Alabama made an appearance well before that actual story transpired. Dates on the article sure make you wonder what on earth happened there.
 
I smell an interesting D&D magic item. Maybe something that *literally* enabled you to speak with the dead nearby, or commune with spirits? The former could come in very handy in a murder mystery....
 
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