KEARNEY — In a darkened room lit only by candles and one lamp with a dim red light bulb, Nathaniel York sat at the head of the dining room table in the G.W. Frank Museum for History and Culture at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

Dressed in black, York began a séance. He called on the spirits. He put a spirit trumpet up to his ear, and waited to hear their response. Heavy footprints thumped on the floor above.

He called again. A door slowly opened, and a silent figure dressed in black came in, circled the table, and then left the room.

Suddenly, York received messages from the spirit. He began wildly scribbling on a large tablet. He ripped pages off and scribbled some more. He seemed to be getting messages from some invisible figure.

Before the event ended, he shared what the spirit had said.

Welcome to “Séance at the Frank Museum — an Eerie Evening of Spiritualism,” a historical recreation of a séance held Friday and Saturday nights at the Frank Museum.

“What you experienced was fake,” April White, museum director, told the sell-out crowds of attendees afterward.

But people in the Gilded Age between 1877 and 1900, the period when the Frank Museum was built, flocked to séances, she said.

The event was the brainchild of White and Lainey Schmeitz, a student museum staff member. White said a colleague jokingly asked several years ago if a séance could be held at the museum, like was done in the 1890s. That got White thinking.

She and Schmeitz began researching Victorian Era spiritualism. York, a UNK theater major from Aurora, Colorado, agreed to play the medium. His costume came from UNK’s Theater Department. His “spirit trumpet” was just a plastic funnel used to put motor oil into cars. Several other UNK staffers were in on it, too.

“We used parlor tricks that mediums would use, but back then people didn’t know the tricks were going on,” White explained.

The séance history

“People believed they were being led to connect to the spirits by someone who knew how to do it,” she said.

During the Industrial Revolution, up to 10,000 séances were done each month in the U.S.

“Industries needed laborers, so people flocked to the cities. That led to overpopulation. With the lack of sewer systems, fresh air, ventilation, disease was rampant,” she said.

That, combined with the Spanish American War, World War I and the Spanish flu, brought “lots of death,” she said.

Another influence was Queen Victoria of Britain, “one of the earliest trend-setters. Anything she did, everyone else jumped on board,” White said.

When her husband, Prince Albert, passed away, Queen Victoria went into full mourning and wore only black for the next 41 years.

“She still laid out his clothes, and she left out the last glass of water he drank from. She made death trendy,” White said.

Combine that with industrialization, including the invention of the telephone — “suddenly you could talk to someone who wasn’t in the room, and maybe even on ‘the other side’” — and the séance craze was born.

The invention of photography played a part, too. “Some people believed photographs were the work of spirits,” White said.

Mediums

People hired a medium to lead séances. Only a medium could hear through the spirit trumpet, and only a medium could interpret the “spirit writing.”

Mediums worked in collaboration with others who knocked on doors and helped create the illusions.

White talked about sisters Kate and Maggie Fox. When they were 12 and 14, they said they heard “knocking in the house” that would spell words in Morse code. They went on tour and drew large crowds.

“At one point a policeman was brought in to try to see what they were doing,” she said. Ten years later, one of the sisters died of severe alcoholism, and the act fell apart.

“Maggie said it was all fake. They played a trick on their mother years ago, and their act spiraled from that,” she said

Even famous people got in on the craze. Thomas Edison tried to invent a spirit phone. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, invented a spirit. Mary Todd Lincoln held séances in the White House after her son died.

When mirrors were invented, people feared the mirrors could see their souls, so “they would cover mirrors so their spirits wouldn’t get trapped in the mirrors,” White said.

Houdini knew mediums were taking advantage of the bereaved. He could see the tricks immediately because he knew the medium would direct people’s eyes so they couldn’t see what he was doing.

Houdini and his wife created a secret phrase so they could communicate after death, but after his death, his widow used that secret phrase on his birthday for the next 10 years. He never replied.

Roughly 90% of séances “were taken over by charlatans and scammers who took advantage of greedy people,” White said. “Most of the ‘mediums’ were like the foreign scammers who ask us to send them money on the internet. But it was dark and cold, with a very effective psychological impact. Throw someone in there who wants to believe, and they will believe.

“People were convinced it was real. They wanted to believe they were communicating with passed-away loved ones.”

York understood how that could happen. After the séance, he said that “practicing this without a crowd was one thing, but once it started, energy filled the room, and you can see how people start believing.” Mediums played off that energy, White said.

“We all hope for evidence of a life beyond this one. The power of the human mind is something.” she added.