“An extremely consoling form of religion” flourished in Erie and across the United States and Europe through the early 20th century.
Spiritualism, based on the belief that the living can communicate with the dead, began with purported communications with the departed by Kate and Margaret Fox in upstate New York in the mid-19th century.
The religion that evolved from the Fox sisters’ “spirit rappings” gained followers through the century and eventually gained respectability in the 1920s, after the First World War had killed an estimated 20 million people and the so-called Spanish influenza had killed even more…