Craddock breathed very deeply in the free religious air of liberal Unitarianism. “As to my creed,” she confessed in 1890, “I have had to make so many additions at various periods of my life, that I some time ago made up a brand-new garment, big enough to cover every portion of my then known universe, and put in an abundant supply of tucks to be let out as my knowledge of the universe grew taller and broader.” No matter how many pleats Craddock later added to her novel religious garb, she continued to count herself part of the Unitarian fold. Even after her Chicago sojourn and her experiment with the Church of Yoga, Craddock kept up her ties to the Spring Garden congregation.17
Yet, as Craddock’s image of “an abundant supply of tucks” suggested, there was always a lot of slack built into her identity as a liberal Unitarian. She did not join up with that denomination as a way to remain within a nominally Protestant household of faith; instead, it was her portal out of the religious mainstream. If the Hicksite wing of the Society of Friends had provided one potential egress for Craddock, the “Free Religion” of radical Unitarianism offered the principal exit. Craddock had discovered just the right religious community from which to launch into still more eclectic inquiries, a springboard that eventually landed her as the self-appointed pastor of the Church of Yoga.
IN THE UNITED STATES in the second half of the nineteenth century, séances, mediums, and spirits appeared all over the place: from parlors to theaters to university laboratories to communitarian enclaves to Lincoln’s White House. Anyone with a pulse knew about such phenomena; anyone without a pulse had a good chance of soon reappearing as a ghost. Alive or dead, credulous or skeptical, it was well-nigh impossible for Americans to avoid the spectacle of spiritualism after 1850. Sparked by a series of mysterious rappings in Hydesville, New York, in 1848 in which a murdered peddler was said to be communicating through the mediumship of two young sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, the sensation had spread wildly during the 1850s. Quickly growing into an extensive extra-ecclesial movement, spiritualism cut across the divide of the churched and unchurched, the believing and the doubting. In post-Civil War America, psychical phenomena—from clairvoyance to telepathy to automatic writing—proved endless sources of hopeful affirmation, journalistic exposé, scientific scrutiny, and promotional hype.
It would have required a singular lapse of curiosity for someone with Craddock’s inquisitiveness to ignore the cascading reports on these spectral occurrences. Hardly déclassé, such fascinations received the imprimatur of respected researchers and institutions; this was especially so in the 1880s when Craddock was coming into her own intellectually. The Society for Psychical Research at its founding in London in 1882 boasted several Fellows of the Royal Society among its membership, and, when an American branch was formed in 1885, no less a luminary than Harvard’s William James played the leading role. To the end of his life James never tired of extolling the scientific importance of the organization’s experiments and data collection.
An active interest in séances had also been percolating on Craddock’s doorstep in Philadelphia in the early 1880s. In 1883, at the very time Craddock was agitating for her right to matriculate there, the University of Pennsylvania set up a special commission, backed by a sizeable gift from the philanthropist Henry Seybert, for the sole purpose of investigating the claims of modern spiritualism. In gathering their findings for Penn’s Board of Trustees, committee members sat in on séances, waited skeptically for the spirits to communicate via table-rapping or slate-writing, watched for mediumistic sleight-of-hand, examined spirit photographs in which ghostly shades ostensibly materialized alongside the living, probed trance-states, and analyzed specimens of automatic writing. When all was said and done in May 1887, the commission issued a highly critical report emphasizing spiritualist fraud, but only after involving several faculty members and the university provost in four years of psychical research.18
The possibility of becoming a psychical researcher had exercised a strong pull on Craddock when she first began plotting out her plans for a post-secondary education. “I remember, when I was a schoolgirl of perhaps eighteen, I longed to investigate Spiritualism, and to demonstrate to the world its truth or its falsity, on a scientific basis,” she recalled years later in 1894. “I wrote in my diary a schedule of the studies I should like to pursue—classical, scientific and medical—up to the age of thirty-five, when I felt I would be sufficiently mature to investigate and pronounce upon the phenomena with authority.” That late-teen ambition, she claimed, had been an important part of why she had deemed a university education so imperative in the first place, but, with her path to Penn blocked, “the stress and turmoil of business life”—including all her shorthand teaching at Girard College—left no time for her to pursue this “youthful dream” of becoming a psychical researcher. Even so, she still paid at least intermittent attention to those kinds of inquiries throughout the 1880s, reading books on clairvoyance and perusing the publications of the Society for Psychical Research, which offered the flagship Proceedings in this area of inquiry.19
Psychical phenomena continued to pique Craddock’s curiosity even as she turned toward secular activism. During her years as corresponding secretary of the American Secular Union, Craddock consistently approached spiritualist matters with the mind of a psychical researcher: curious, skeptical, theorizing, and empiricist. “I had no interest whatsoever, at that time, in the world beyond the grave,” she insisted. Her concern was all about explaining paranormal occurrences without recourse to spirits, including testing out pet theories of the day like telepathy or thought-transference, a signature pursuit of the Society for Psychical Research. In one typical gesture, Craddock looked to the new technology of the phonograph as a way of possibly explaining the phenomena associated with haunted houses, another prime topic for ghost-hunting investigators. Wanting to do away with the notion of any phantom presences, Craddock speculated on the possibility that sounds could be impressed upon building materials in a way analogous to Edison’s vibrational indentations on tin-foil sheets. That was not exactly a tour de force explanation, but it did suggest that a spiritualist victory was far from a predetermined outcome in Craddock’s life—neither in this particular guesswork on haunted houses nor in her larger metaphysics.20
The majority of psychical researchers were, on principle, doubters as much as believers, and Craddock’s phonographic reasoning was an example of that skeptical, yet open-minded posture. Much of the phenomena associated with spiritualism seemed designed, William James wrote in a final estimate of his twenty-five years of involvement in psychical research, “to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions all in equal measure.” It was in this intellectual space between explanation and corroboration that psychical researchers moved—and Craddock moved with them, half-hopeful, half-disbelieving, but always curious.21
In the heady mix of religious influences that swirled around Craddock, spiritualism and psychical research were especially pronounced. The Ouija board, a newly patented device, was the initial vehicle of her curiosity. Borderland 1 (1893-1894): 207.
The three years following her departure from the American Secular Union in the autumn of 1891 proved decisive in Craddock’s religious development: In brief, she gradually moved from the avowed stance of a psychical researcher to the “desired goal” of becoming “an all-around medium.” Of all things, the Ouija board was the first step in that transition. If that spirit-writing plank looks now to be little more than a clichéd parlor game—Parker Brothers, after all, holds the trademark—it was a novelty in 1891, a recently patented device poised between popular entertainment and experimental demonstration. The search for mechanical instruments that would facilitate communication with the ghostly realm was a constant among spiritualists, devotees and dabblers alike. That quest produced recurrent metaphysical reflections on the latest inventions from the telegraph to the telephone and engendered various tools (and toys) to turn such airy speculations into household practice. One of the first e
ntries was the planchette, a small board that rolled on casters and had a pencil affixed to the end. Lightly controlled by the medium’s hand, it was offered as a way for spirits to communicate messages more efficiently than through the prevailing form of table-tapping. Other spirit-writing machines—“psychographs,” “pantographs,” and various “talking boards”—were soon invented, and they were invariably offered up with the combined fanfare of eerie mystery, technological marvel, and scientific breakthrough.22
Craddock had apparently resisted the lure of spiritual-cum-scientific instruments hitherto, but the Ouija board managed to catch her eye as the latest experimental sensation. The teardrop pointer, quivering from one letter to the next as inquirers laid their fingertips on the board, seemed uncanny in its power to spell out messages or offer “yes” and “no” answers. As one reporter raved about this “new spiritualistic device” in 1892, “The board seems to grow electric, and questions are answered, and advice and information given with head-swimming, brain-turning dispatch. It is certainly a very wonderful performance, and one which I am totally unable to account for. Scientific experiments are now being made with Ouija in Paris, and I am informed that the results so far promise well.” With that kind of journalistic coverage as advertisement, it is not hard to see why the Ouija board attracted Craddock, a psychical researcher manqué.23
The transformative effect of Craddock’s encounter with this spiritualist instrument would have been harder to predict: “Little by little, as I experimented [with the Ouija board],” she testified, “I saw that an unseen intelligence outside of myself was moving the board.” Soon she “graduated” to experiments with other spirit-writing machines and also to efforts at automatic writing as she attempted to receive impressions from these ethereal powers and to materialize fragmentary messages from these invisible realms upon a page of paper. The Ouija board had cracked open the spiritualist door for Craddock, and from there she moved from one mediumistic method to another, testing each of them as well as her own new-found capacities to commune with “these unseen intelligences.” The psychical research that had long possessed Craddock’s part-skeptical, part-enthralled curiosity had suddenly switched gears. It was now in the realm of the all too real.24
Craddock focused her sights on the mysteries of mediumship with characteristic intensity. Spiritualists had a vast repertoire for communing with unseen entities, and Craddock wanted to pursue the full range of communicative possibilities with all due diligence. Whatever visionary gifts she ended up possessing she developed through experiment, practice, and discipline, not unrehearsed inspiration. Crystal gazing worked for some, trance speaking for others, but neither did for Craddock. Likewise, automatic writing proved anything but automatic for her, so she started working next on clairaudience, on listening quietly for an inward voice that was separable from her individual subjectivity.
After considerable effort, Craddock was able to discern a voice speaking to her from beyond the margins of her own consciousness. As she reported, “This at length, to my surprise, came by what, I have since read, St. Teresa was wont to term ‘the interior voice.’ . . . St. Teresa says that although, at first, one’s own subjective self may be mistaken for the outside intelligence which speaks through the ‘interior voice,’ yet, after one has had a little experience, it [becomes] easy not to confound the two. And so I have found it to be.” Craddock never saw herself, of course, as a Christian mystic, but, like most other spiritualists, she took her spiritual guides from diverse corners, from a mystical “gallery of borderlanders.” St. Teresa’s discernment of the divine voice, along with her devotion to the heavenly bridegroom, made her a good source for amplifying the significance of the inner conversation that Craddock had started cultivating.25
The voices that Craddock began hearing came mostly from her own immediate past. Jesus was never among the interior presences that Craddock experienced nor did the Holy Spirit ever take over her vocal chords in a Pentecostal effusion of tongues. Rather, the voices represented a more proximate, less exalted band of spirits. Her father, vendor of teas and patent medicines, dead since Ida’s infancy, spoke to her “from the world beyond the grave,” and so did her sister, Nana, who had “passed over” as a baby before Ida was born. Now all grown up to “womanhood” on the other side, Nana was ready to be the sibling companion that Ida had never had. Then there was her sister’s spirit husband, Iases, a wise “Brahmin” who was to become Craddock’s enlightened guide and “chief trainer.” Even if Iases represented an exotic new personage in her life, Craddock had managed to make him part of the family, her own close-knit clan of intermediaries.26
The family soon had another member as well—and the most influential of all on the course of Craddock’s life. From out of this shadowy world of ghostly presences emerged the voice of a young man whom Craddock had first met “when I was little over seventeen.” A callow businessman a few years older than Ida, he had made a bashful attempt at courtship. “He fell in love with me, and wanted to marry me,” she recalled, “but I turned a cold shoulder to him as a lover, although I liked him immensely as a friend and companion.” A few years later the young man had died, and Craddock had carried on with her own independent plans for success. But, his affections apparently left a deeper mark on her psyche than Ida’s cool dismissal implied. Now about fifteen years later, he had reemerged as an angelic persona through Craddock’s mediumistic experiments. Never revealing his actual given name, Ida referred to him only by his new spiritual appellation, Soph, which derived, she duly noted, from the Greek word for wisdom and shrewdness. This clairaudient reconnection would change everything about Craddock’s spiritualist experience—and lastingly so. The whole tenor shifted to the renewal—and consummation—of a teenage romance that Craddock herself had nipped in the bud. Like her sister Nana, Ida too would have a spirit husband, but unlike Nana’s posthumous nuptials, Ida would join her partner on this side of the grave.27
It was only in the wake of the Danse du Ventre episode in late 1893 that Craddock let the news slip of this revived relationship with Soph. That disclosure, she quickly realized, did her no favors, and thereafter she usually tried to keep her mystical marriage to the side—an affair of diary-keeping, not public explanation. The revelation nonetheless proved impossible to retract (or forget), and her sanity was henceforward disputed just about everywhere she went. That diagnostic entanglement eventually included, as will become evident by the end of this story, a sustained psychoanalytic reading of her fantasized love life. At this point, though, seen within the immediate context of her wider spiritualist connections—to her father, sister, and brother-in-law—her angelic romance looked like another lonesome grasping after the departed. Lost love and unfulfilled intimacy constituted Craddock’s initial communion of saints. Stuck in an often-hostile real-world relationship with her mother, Craddock turned elsewhere for nurturance and support. These dear spirits, Craddock remarked, “are my real family.”28
CRADDOCK’S SPIRITUALISM DEVELOPED rapidly after 1892, but that did not mean her mediumistic efforts took over her life. Rule number one that Craddock learned from her new spirit companions was this: “Do your daily earthly duty, undeterred by calls to mediumship, from whatever source.” And she invariably heeded that advice: Even as she experimented by night with new psychical methods, she kept up her day job at Girard College, wrote another textbook on shorthand, and trained her scholarly attention on the history of phallic worship and its relation to marriage reform. The latter interests were the ones that led her back into the public eye in late 1893 and early 1894 as a lecturer on ancient sex worship. When she courted such high-profile radicals as Moses Harman, Edward Bond Foote, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Edwin C. Walker, she was doing so primarily as an up-and-coming marriage reformer and would-be scholar, not as a spiritualist mystic.29
The balance between Craddock’s freethinking and spiritualist interests shifted in 1894 when her efforts from the previous summer to defend the Danse du Ventre caught up w
ith her. Early that year she had received her first official warning from postal inspectors: Her Danse du Ventre essay was declared unmailable under the terms of Comstock’s anti-obscenity laws, and she thus felt compelled to back away from an invitation for its more formal publication and dissemination. That legal notice triggered her alarm, but even more so her mother’s—a combination of genuine maternal concern for her daughter’s well-being along with a sizeable dose of social embarrassment over her only child having gone public as an exponent of both heathenism and female sexual expression.
All of these developments—lecturing on the history of phallic antiquities, publicizing the spiritual value of belly dancing, announcing a mission for marriage reform, cultivating mediumistic relationships with a band of spirits (including Soph), and receiving admonition from Comstock’s local agents—made Craddock’s mother crazy with worry, anger, and shame. “Poor Mother!” Craddock acknowledged. “It must be awfully hard [times] for her, I feel sure. She would so like to have me conventional, and I can’t be, in the way she wishes.” This mother-daughter impasse, already familiar from years of disagreement, was rapidly intensifying, and now Lizzie’s “inborn love of domination”—as Ida saw her protectiveness—took an incarcerating turn. By early February 1894, right when Ida was lecturing in New York on sex worship, Lizzie had decided it was time to try a mental asylum as a necessary remedy for her daughter’s disturbing behavior and as an antidote for her own parental distress.30
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