| Description |
After World War I, a religious fervor known as Spiritualism spread across Europe and America. Spiritualism was characterized by the use of seances, psychics, automatic writing, mediums, and spirit photographs to prove the existence of spirits and the afterlife. It was especially popular with soldiers who had seen their fallen comrades walking on the battlefield, but could find no answers within the context of other religions. Spiritualism was often derided, but given credibility due to the support of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and Sir Oliver Lodge, a well-known physicist turned Spiritualist, among others. By collecting primary source documents from microfilm and digital copies of the Salt Lake Tribune, the Deseret News, and the Salt Lake Telegram, we can see how the newspapers of the time treated Spiritualism. Salt Lake City did not have a strong spiritualist following due to the LDS community and Brigham Young forbidding church members to attempt to communicate with spirits. The newspapers, therefore, rarely took it seriously unless science was involved or someone had done a credible experiment. Most spiritualist stories came from London or England and were often printed in the Telegram. The biggest local spiritualist event was Conan Doyle's lecture in the Salt Lake Tabernacle in 1923, when even the Tribune and Deseret News took notice of Spiritualism. By the end of the decade, national interest in Spiritualism had died down to the occasional story. Overall, Salt Lake City acted as the city that wasn't caught up in the spiritualist fad, but recognized its existence and importance. It was an easy target to joke about, but still given some credibility as a religion and sometimes as a science. |
