Reflecting the nineteenth-century obsession with death and the afterlife, thousands of British men and women turned to spiritualism and psychical research. This was, in part, a consequence of many educated people's unease with orthodox religion. From crowded public halls to private drawing rooms, practitioners were present during putative ‘messages’ from the dead, rapped out on tables, walls and floors, scribbled on slates and, occasionally, expressed in garbled song. Tennyson wrote, ‘the veil / is rending and the Voices of the day / Are heard across the Voices of the dark’.