The belief in paranormal occurrences with ghosts and other unexplained phenomena is by no means a modern concept. Such beliefs have waxed and waned throughout recorded history. In the nineteenth century, three sisters in New York unwittingly created the Spiritualist Movement through their alleged contact with the spirit world.

From Wikipedia:

The Fox sisters were three sisters from New York who played an important role in the creation of Spiritualism, the religious movement. The three sisters were Leah Fox (1814–1890), Margaret Fox (also called Maggie) (1833–1893) and Kate Fox (1837–1892). The two younger sisters used "rappings" to convince their much older sister and others that they were communicating with spirits. Their older sister then took charge of them and managed their careers for some time. They all enjoyed success as mediums for many years.

In 1888 Margaret confessed that their rappings had been a hoax and publicly demonstrated their method. She attempted to recant her confession the next year, but their reputation was ruined and in less than five years they were all dead, with Margaret and Kate dying in abject poverty. Spiritualism continued as if the confessions of the Fox sisters had never happened. "This pattern of confession followed by retraction, which is not uncommon, has supplied both true believers and sceptics with material to support their case, so controversy never ends."

It is no surprise that the desire to communicate with the dead reached a fever pitch during the Civil War due to the high casualties in both the Union and Confederacy. People needed to have their last goodbyes and sought comfort in any way they could. It became highly fashionable to hire mediums to come to gatherings in homes or public venues for this specific purpose. Unfortunately, most of the alleged mediums, like the Fox sisters, were charlatans looking to profit from the grief of others. The fraud has continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the reputations of legitimate mediums have never fully recovered.

Seances involved people sitting around a table with their eyes closed asking the spirits to communicate through the medium present. Often the alleged medium had the table rigged with different things under tables such as bells with strings that they could pull with their toes, chalkboards on which they could write messages with their toes, and so on. While people's eyes were closed, the clean chalkboard was quickly and quietly switched with the chalkboard containing the message from the great beyond. Tables were also rigged to shake and jerk at the best dramatic moment, which was allegedly a sign from the spirits with the people. The belief in false mediums went to the highest levels of society, including Mary Todd Lincoln, who held seances in the White House after her son died. She also went to a spirit photographer in the years after President Lincoln was killed in order to try and make contact with him.

Spirit photography became immensely popular in the mid-to-late nineteenth century but it was also the most fraudulent practice by these charlatan mediums. It was very easy to accomplish by taking a normal photograph of a living person and then developing it with a double exposure method to impose another image on top of it.

Here are some examples of spirit photography.

If you think strange creatures and things that go bump in the night are inventions of the twentieth century, you are sorely mistaken. The Victorians loved their Gothic literature, spearheaded their own Spiritualist movement, and even encountered a mythological creature or two. Victorians even had their own cryptozoological creatures swimming about their waters and creeping about their forests. In fact, most of the cryptozoological creatures people encounter today were the same ones encountered in the times of our ancestors.

Scotland has the Loch Ness Monster and New England has the Great New England Sea Serpent. Sightings of the sea serpent around the New England coast began in 1638 and have continued being told by boaters and fishermen since then. The creature resembles a large ocean snake, the major difference being its massive size described between 30 and 80 feet long in my brief research. No real specimen of this creature has been caught, although people in 1817 believed they caught a baby sea serpent, which was most likely a deformed terrestrial snake.

The sightings of the sea serpent were not limited to lower class fishermen, sailors and boaters, however. About a year ago, I came across a copy of the Brunswick Telegraph from the 1880s with an odd article in it about yet another sighting of the slithery creature. The article reported peripherally that General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the great Civil War hero and former governor of Maine, had actually seen the great sea serpent with his own two eyes. He was on his schooner, the Pinafore, off one of the peninsulas south of Brunswick (I believe it was Casco Bay) and he saw what he described as a serpentine creature that he had never seen before and was quite large. I want to say he estimated that it was 40 feet long. I don't have the article in front of me as it is in storage but it appeared to me that the reporter, of course, did not take the story very seriously. A joke was cracked in the article about General Chamberlain charging the great serpent as he had charged the rebels on Little Round Top.

Even so, Chamberlain was not prone to lying and I find him to be a credible source. If he said he saw the Great New England Sea Serpent, then he saw it.