A belief in contact with the spirit world, reached through mediums and séances. In 1853 it touched the Chelsea ghost of 6 Pond Terrace. Robert Owen, the 82-year-old social reformer, had recently been converted by the American medium Maria B. Hayden. Through séances he learned the apparition was Mr Ward's dead grandfather. In 1868 came the Ashley House levitation of Daniel Dunglas Home, later defended by Arthur Conan Doyle in The History of Spiritualism. It remains one of the movement's most famous claims, and one of the most disputed. By 1881 a reporter on the Garstang Ghost blamed spiritualism for a run of hauntings.
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