If you want to understand Victorian séances properly, we need to go beyond the familiar image of a dark room, a round table, a medium whispering to spirits, and a candle suddenly going out. The actual history involves grief, religion, scientific experimentation, stage magic, fraud, psychology, and a society struggling to understand death.
I'll take you through the whole subject, including how séances worked, what participants believed, the different methods of spirit communication, famous mediums, the supposed physical manifestations, the scandals, and what historians and investigators eventually discovered.
One distinction is important from the beginning: Victorian spiritualists genuinely believed they were communicating with the dead, but the existence of supernatural communication has never been established by reliable scientific evidence. Some reported phenomena were later explained through trickery, suggestion, misperception, or ordinary physical causes.

1. What exactly was a Victorian séance?

A séance is a gathering intended to communicate with spirits, usually through a person known as a medium.
The word comes from the French séance, meaning a sitting or session. In English, it became particularly associated with spiritualist gatherings during the nineteenth century.
A typical séance might involve several people sitting around a table in a quiet room. The lights might be dimmed or extinguished. Participants could join hands, sing hymns, pray, or remain silent while the medium attempted to establish contact with the spirit world.
During the gathering, participants might report:
- Knocking or tapping sounds with no apparent source.
- A table moving, tilting, or lifting.
- A medium speaking in a voice different from their ordinary voice.
- Messages supposedly coming from deceased relatives.
- Automatic writing, in which words appeared to be written without conscious control.
- Apparitions, strange lights, or figures seen in darkness.
- Objects moving, musical instruments playing, or unexplained touches.
Not every séance involved all these things. Some were quiet and devotional, resembling a prayer meeting. Others were elaborate performances featuring supposed physical manifestations.
The purpose was not always entertainment. Many participants wanted evidence that death did not end personal existence.
For a grieving parent, widow, or sibling, the possibility of hearing a deceased loved one's voice was an extraordinarily powerful promise.

2. Why did séances become popular in Victorian Britain?

To understand spiritualism, you have to understand the nineteenth century.
Death was an ordinary part of life
Infant mortality was high, infectious diseases were common, and medical treatment was far less effective than it is today. Families could lose children, parents, spouses, and siblings with little warning.
Victorian mourning customs gave grief a highly visible social form. People wore mourning clothes, preserved photographs and locks of hair, and observed formal periods of mourning.
Death was not an abstract subject. It was a constant possibility within family life.
Spiritualism offered something that conventional mourning could not necessarily provide: the possibility of continued personal contact.
Instead of merely remembering the dead, believers hoped they could speak to them again.
Traditional Christianity was being questioned
Britain and America were experiencing religious and intellectual changes. Some people remained deeply Christian, while others questioned traditional doctrines about heaven, hell, resurrection, and the soul.
Scientific developments, biblical criticism, geology, and new ideas about the natural world challenged certain inherited assumptions.
Spiritualism appealed to people who wanted evidence of an afterlife without necessarily accepting every teaching of an established church.
Importantly, spiritualists were not all atheists or opponents of Christianity. Many understood their beliefs as compatible with Christian ideas about immortality, moral improvement, and divine purpose.
Science had become culturally prestigious
The nineteenth century also saw remarkable developments in electricity, telegraphy, photography, and the study of physical forces.
People were becoming familiar with invisible forces that nevertheless had observable effects.
Some spiritualists reasoned that spirits might communicate through an unknown natural force, much as electricity transmitted messages over a wire.
This analogy made spirit communication sound like a scientific possibility to some contemporary audiences, although the analogy itself was not evidence that spirits existed.
The home became a place of investigation
The Victorian middle-class home was not merely a private domestic space. It could also serve as a place for religious meetings, demonstrations, experiments, and intellectual discussion.
A séance could be organized in a drawing room without requiring a church, laboratory, or public theatre.
That accessibility helped spiritualism spread through ordinary social networks.

3. The beginning: the Fox sisters and the mysterious knockings of 1848

The modern Spiritualist movement is usually traced to an incident in Hydesville, New York, in March 1848.
The central figures were two young sisters, Margaret Fox and Catherine (Kate) Fox, who lived with their parents in a house where strange knocking sounds were reportedly heard. Their older sister, Leah Fox, later became involved in public demonstrations.
The first alleged communication
According to the family's account, knocking sounds seemed to respond to questions. The family began treating the noises as evidence of an intelligent presence.
The supposed entity was eventually described as the spirit of a murdered travelling salesman. In the story that developed around the events, the spirit supposedly indicated that it had been killed in the house and buried beneath it.
This became one of the founding narratives of modern Spiritualism. However, the story of the alleged murder and the details of the supposed spirit's identity were not established as verified historical facts.
The sisters demonstrated a system in which people asked questions and interpreted the resulting knocks as answers. News spread, and the girls began attracting audiences.
How the knocking system worked
The basic idea was surprisingly simple.
1. Someone asked a question aloud.
2. A knock or series of knocks supposedly followed.
3. The participants assigned meanings to the knocks, such as yes and no.
4. More complicated questions could be answered by spelling words through the alphabet, with a knock indicating a letter.
5. The audience interpreted the resulting message as communication from a deceased person.
The apparent simplicity was part of its appeal. A person did not need to see a ghost to believe that an intelligent presence was answering questions.
Imagine asking, "Are you the spirit of someone who lived here?" and hearing a knock. For a believer, the response could feel deeply personal. For a skeptic, the same event raised questions about who or what produced the sound and whether the answers were being interpreted selectively.
How the story became a movement
The sisters' demonstrations spread to other American cities. Their performances helped establish the idea that certain people possessed a special ability to communicate with the dead.
By the 1850s, Spiritualism had expanded beyond the Fox family into a movement involving public lecturers, professional mediums, private séances, and religious communities. It subsequently spread to Britain and continental Europe.

The confession and controversy

In 1888, Margaret Fox publicly claimed that the original rappings had been produced through bodily manipulation, particularly by cracking joints. She demonstrated a method of making knocking sounds and described how the family had helped sustain the phenomenon.
The following year, she partially recanted her confession, saying that she had been pressured and paid to make it. The sisters' accounts and later interpretations have consequently been disputed.
The important point is that the Fox sisters' story did not provide reliable proof of communication with the dead. Nevertheless, their demonstrations helped launch a movement that would influence religious practice, popular culture, and investigations into alleged paranormal phenomena.

4. The Victorian séance room: what actually happened during a sitting?

Let's reconstruct a typical nineteenth-century séance from the accounts and conventions of the period.
There was no single standardized ritual. A private family séance, a paid demonstration by a professional medium, and an investigation conducted by a researcher could look very different.
Still, many gatherings shared recognizable elements.

Stage one: preparing the room

The participants might meet in a private home, a rented room, a spiritualist meeting hall, or the residence of a well-known medium.
The room could contain:
- A table, sometimes round or oval.
- Chairs arranged closely around the table.
- Curtains drawn to reduce outside light.
- A lamp or candles that could be dimmed.
- A bell, tambourine, small musical instrument, or other object associated with physical manifestations.
- A cabinet or curtained recess in some séances, used by certain physical mediums.

The cabinet deserves special attention. It was not an essential feature of every séance, but some mediums used a curtained enclosure where they claimed spirits could manifest or where the medium's body supposedly entered an altered state.
Skeptics argued that darkness, curtains, and restricted observation could also make deception easier.

Stage two: the participants take their seats

People often sat around a table, sometimes holding hands or placing their hands flat on its surface.
Hand-holding had several possible purposes. Believers thought it helped create a shared spiritual atmosphere or a continuous circle of energy. It could also make certain kinds of movement harder to attribute to an individual participant.
The medium might sit in a prominent position, sometimes at the head of the table or near the cabinet.
Participants were generally expected to remain quiet and attentive. Some gatherings discouraged cross-talk or disruptive skepticism because believers thought doubt could interfere with communication.
This created a curious social environment: the participants were waiting for an extraordinary event, but they were also shaping one another's expectations of what might count as extraordinary.

Stage three: prayer, hymns, and the opening

Some mediums began with prayer or a short religious address. Hymns were common in certain spiritualist circles, especially among people who understood Spiritualism as an extension of Christianity.
Other groups used silence, conversation, or an informal request for spirits to make themselves known.
The atmosphere was often intended to be solemn rather than frightening.
Spiritualists did not necessarily regard the dead as monsters or demons. Many believed that deceased people continued to develop morally and intellectually in the afterlife and could offer comfort or guidance to the living.
The popular image of every séance being a sinister ritual conducted by candlelight is therefore misleading. Some séances were deliberately theatrical, but others resembled religious meetings.

Stage four: waiting for a response

The room might become quiet while the medium concentrated.
Participants reported hearing taps, raps, scratching, or other noises. A medium might announce that a spirit was present, ask the audience to listen, or claim to feel a change in the atmosphere.
Sometimes a participant would ask a question and wait for a response.
The longer people waited, the more significance a faint noise or unusual sensation could acquire. A creaking floorboard might be dismissed as ordinary in one setting but interpreted as a spirit's answer in another.
This does not mean every witness was dishonest. It illustrates how expectations affect the interpretation of ambiguous experiences.

Stage five: interpreting the message

Once a sound or movement occurred, the medium or participants decided what it meant.
One knock might mean no, three might mean yes, or a series of knocks might spell a word. The exact conventions varied.
In some cases, the medium supplied the interpretation directly. In others, the participants collectively attempted to establish a code.
A successful message could be emotionally convincing, especially if it referred to a deceased relative or an intimate family matter.
However, a message could also be vague, mistaken, or open to reinterpretation. Historical reports need to be evaluated carefully because an account written by a believer may record the apparent successes more prominently than the failures.

Stage six: the séance ends

The medium might announce that communication had ended, offer a prayer, or allow the participants to discuss what they had experienced.
People could leave feeling comforted, astonished, skeptical, disappointed, or convinced that they had encountered something supernatural.
Some attended repeatedly, while others visited only once.
The central feature of a séance was not necessarily a ghost appearing. It was the attempt to establish a meaningful exchange between the living and the supposedly surviving personality of a dead person.

5. The different methods of communicating with the dead

This is where séance history becomes particularly interesting, because mediums developed numerous ways to make supposed spirit communication appear possible.

A. Table-turning

Participants placed their hands on a table and waited for it to rotate, rock, or tilt. Some believed spirits supplied the force. In other cases, unconscious pressure from participants could account for the movement.
Table-turning became a fashionable pastime in Europe in the early 1850s, sometimes treated as entertainment and sometimes as a serious spiritual experiment.

C. Trance mediumship

The medium entered a state described as a trance and spoke as though a deceased person or another spiritual entity were communicating through them.
Some mediums adopted distinctive voices or manners attributed to particular spirits. Believers regarded this as evidence of possession or spirit control; skeptics considered ordinary performance, altered states, and unconscious processes as possible explanations.

D. Physical mediumship

This category included alleged movements of objects, unexplained lights, touches, musical sounds, and the appearance of forms identified as spirits.
Such demonstrations could be spectacular, but they were especially vulnerable to concealment, misdirection, and inadequate observation when performed in darkness.

E. Spirit photography

Photographers claimed that cameras could record spirits invisible to the naked eye. The resulting images sometimes showed faint faces or figures beside living subjects.
Double exposures, reused photographic plates, and other photographic techniques could produce such images without supernatural causes.

6. What did Victorian spiritualists believe happened after death?

Spiritualism did not have one universally accepted theology. Nevertheless, several ideas appeared frequently in its religious literature.
The personality survives
Many spiritualists believed that the person who died continued to exist as an individual. They did not merely believe in an impersonal force or an abstract soul; they hoped that memories, emotions, character, and relationships survived bodily death.
That distinction explains the emotional appeal of séances.
The goal was not simply to establish that an afterlife existed. It was to discover whether your particular mother, husband, child, or friend was still there.
The dead could communicate
Spiritualists believed that some living people were naturally or unusually capable of receiving communications from spirits. These people were called mediums.
In this worldview, the medium functioned as a link between two worlds. The spirit supplied the message, while the medium provided the means through which it could be expressed.
Believers disagreed about how this happened. Some imagined an exchange of spiritual influence; others described trance, inspiration, or physical manifestations.
The afterlife could involve continued development
Many spiritualists rejected the idea that the dead were permanently fixed in a state of eternal punishment. Instead, they described the afterlife as a realm where souls continued learning and developing.
Some traditions incorporated ideas about moral progress and reincarnation, although reincarnation was not a universal belief among British and American Spiritualists.
French Spiritism, associated with Allan Kardec, developed its own more systematic account of spirits, moral development, and reincarnation. It should not be treated as identical to every form of Anglo-American Spiritualism.

The living could receive comfort or guidance
Supposed communications from the dead could include expressions of love, reassurance, advice, apologies, or descriptions of a peaceful afterlife.
For grieving participants, the idea that a loved one remained aware of them could transform bereavement. Spiritualism offered a way to interpret grief not as the final severing of a relationship but as a separation that might be overcome.
This emotional dimension was one reason the movement persisted despite controversies over particular mediums.

7. The most famous mediums of the Victorian era

Certain mediums became celebrities, attracting wealthy patrons, intellectuals, aristocrats, and ordinary members of the public. Their reputations were often controversial because the more spectacular their claimed abilities became, the harder it was to distinguish unusual experiences from possible deception.

Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–1886)

Home was a Scottish-born medium who became famous for physical phenomena. Witnesses reported that tables moved, objects lifted, musical instruments played, and Home himself appeared to levitate.
Unlike many professional mediums, he was known for holding séances in private homes and among elite social circles. Some educated and influential contemporaries believed his demonstrations were genuine, while others remained skeptical. Historical reports of his performances are intriguing, but they do not amount to conclusive proof of supernatural powers.

William Stainton Moses (1839–1892)

Moses was an educated clergyman and schoolteacher who became involved in Spiritualism during the 1870s.
He reported trance communications, unexplained lights, sounds, movements of objects, and other phenomena. His case interested spiritualists partly because he had a conventional professional and religious background rather than being known primarily as a stage performer.
Critics argued that his experiments did not sufficiently exclude ordinary explanations.

William H. Mumler (active from the 1860s)

Mumler became famous for photographs that appeared to show deceased people standing beside living sitters.
His clients included grieving relatives seeking reassurance that their loved ones survived death. He faced accusations of fraud and a highly publicized trial in New York in 1869. He was acquitted, but the supposed spirits in his photographs were not established as genuine.
His story illustrates how new technology could lend credibility to supernatural claims.

8. The strangest alleged phenomena: levitation, spirit hands, and materialization

The most theatrical séances involved claims that spirits could interact with the physical world.
Spiritualists sometimes divided mediumship into two broad categories:
- Mental phenomena: messages, visions, trance speech, impressions, and automatic writing.
- Physical phenomena: sounds, moving objects, apparent levitation, lights, and alleged materializations.
The distinction mattered because physical phenomena appeared, at least in principle, to offer something observable by several witnesses.
Levitation
Some mediums were reported to rise above the floor without visible support. Home was particularly associated with these claims.
Accounts vary in their details and in the conditions under which the events supposedly occurred. Low lighting, obstructed views, and the absence of continuous independent observation made many demonstrations difficult to assess.
Spirit hands and touches
Some witnesses claimed that invisible hands touched them or that disembodied hands appeared during a séance.
Such reports became especially controversial when a medium sat inside a cabinet or when the participants could not see the medium clearly. Skeptics suggested that a medium or accomplice could produce the effect using ordinary physical means.
Materialization
Materialization referred to the supposed appearance of a visible spirit form, sometimes described as a face, hand, or entire figure.
In certain performances, mediums used gauze, fabric, or other objects in darkened rooms. Apparitions were often reported under conditions that made detailed identification difficult.
These events were central to the debate between believers and investigators: did they reveal a new phenomenon, or did they demonstrate how easily people could be misled when observation was restricted?
The historical record contains reports of these phenomena, but a report that something occurred is not the same as establishing its supernatural cause.

9. Why darkness mattered so much

Darkness became one of the defining features of the séance, but its significance is more complicated than simply creating a spooky atmosphere.
The spiritualist explanation
Some mediums claimed that intense light interfered with physical manifestations. They argued that spirits required special conditions to become perceptible or interact with matter.
Other participants believed that darkness helped them concentrate and avoid distractions.
The skeptical explanation
Darkness also made it more difficult to see exactly what was happening.
A participant might hear a sound without locating its source, see a pale shape without distinguishing its features, or feel a touch without identifying who or what caused it.
In such conditions, a person's expectations could influence how an ambiguous event was interpreted.
For example, someone who had been told that a deceased child might appear could interpret a faint shape as the child's spirit. Another observer might regard the same shape as fabric, an optical illusion, or an ordinary person moving through the room.
Neither interpretation becomes true simply because it feels convincing. Independent observation and reliable controls are necessary to establish what actually happened.
Why some researchers demanded light
Investigators increasingly argued that a medium's claims should be tested under conditions that allowed the relevant movements and objects to be observed.
If a table supposedly lifted itself, could its supports and the participants' hands be monitored? If an object moved, could the room be inspected? If a spirit appeared, could the event be recorded without relying entirely on memory?
These questions marked an important transition from accepting a séance as a social or religious experience to treating it as a claim requiring investigation.

10. The psychological side: why people believed they had contacted the dead

This is one of the most important parts of the entire subject.
A séance could be emotionally convincing without proving that a spirit was present.
Grief and the desire for reassurance
Imagine someone who has lost their child. A medium claims to have received a message containing a familiar phrase or an affectionate expression.
The parent may experience intense relief. The message can seem to restore a relationship that death appeared to have ended.
That experience is psychologically meaningful, regardless of whether the communication was supernatural.
Researchers examining spiritualism have recognized that purported spirit photographs and other spiritualist practices could provide consolation to grieving people.

Suggestion and expectation

If a medium announces that a spirit is present, participants may become more attentive to noises, shadows, sensations, and coincidences.
An ambiguous sound that would normally go unnoticed can suddenly feel significant.
This does not require anyone to be foolish or dishonest. Human perception naturally involves interpretation, especially when the available information is incomplete.
The ideomotor effect
The ideomotor effect describes small movements produced without conscious awareness of their cause.
It has been used to explain some instances of table-turning, pendulum movement, and planchette writing. Participants may sincerely feel that an object is moving independently of them because they do not consciously intend the movements that help produce it.
This is not an explanation for every reported séance phenomenon, but it demonstrates that an experience can feel external even when ordinary bodily processes contribute to it.
Cold reading and the interpretation of messages
Some mediums used statements that could apply to many people, followed by questions or adjustments based on the sitter's reactions.
For example, a vague reference to an older male relative might lead a participant to think of a father, grandfather, uncle, or family friend. Once the participant supplies more information, the medium can refine the apparent message.
Not every medium necessarily used this approach, and not every successful-sounding message can be explained in this way. However, the technique illustrates why a message's apparent personal relevance is not enough to establish its source.
Selective memory
People tend to remember emotionally striking successes more readily than unremarkable failures.
A medium who makes many statements might produce a handful that appear unusually accurate. Those statements can dominate the memory of the session, while the incorrect guesses are forgotten or reinterpreted.
For this reason, careful investigations need to record both successes and failures, ideally before anyone knows which interpretation would be most convincing.

11. The fraud scandals that damaged Spiritualism

Not every medium was necessarily a deliberate fraud, but the history of Spiritualism includes numerous accusations and demonstrations of trickery.
The reasons varied. Some people may have believed in their own abilities; others used performance techniques to create phenomena; and some exploited vulnerable clients for money or prestige.
Common methods associated with fraudulent demonstrations included concealed objects, misleading lighting, staged sounds, misdirection, and photographic manipulation.
Spirit photography provides a particularly clear example.
How a spirit photograph could be created
In nineteenth-century photography, images could be combined through multiple exposures or the reuse of photographic negatives.
A photographer could produce a portrait of a living person with a faint figure appearing behind them. The transparent appearance might be interpreted as a ghost, even though the effect could be created using ordinary photographic processes.
The Science Museum's historical accounts of spirit photography explain how such techniques were used to produce apparently supernatural images.

The emotional power of the photograph often came from the sitter's interpretation. A person grieving a spouse might recognize the faint figure as that spouse and experience the image as a final reunion.
That reaction could be entirely sincere, even if the photograph itself had been manipulated.

Why catching fraud was difficult

A séance was often a private event. Investigators might not control the room, the lighting, the objects, or the medium's movements.
Even when a demonstration appeared convincing, observers could disagree about what they had actually seen.
An investigation that failed to detect a trick did not necessarily prove that no trick had occurred. Conversely, a general suspicion of trickery did not establish precisely how every individual event had been produced.
This is why the strongest historical conclusions come from specific documented cases rather than sweeping claims about all mediums.

12. When scientists began investigating séances

Spiritualism did not merely attract religious believers. It also drew the attention of scientists, philosophers, physicians, and other intellectuals who wanted to determine whether any reported phenomena could be verified.
Some investigators approached séances with genuine curiosity. Others were openly skeptical. Some initially accepted particular phenomena but disagreed about their interpretation.
The Society for Psychical Research, 1882
The establishment of the Society for Psychical Research in London in 1882 was a significant milestone.
The organization was created to investigate claims involving psychic phenomena, including mediumship and alleged communication with the dead. Its membership included people from a range of intellectual and professional backgrounds.
Its stated purpose was investigation and understanding rather than adopting a collective verdict that paranormal phenomena were real or unreal.

What did investigators examine?

Researchers investigated reports of:
- Apparitions and unusual visual experiences.
- Trance speech and automatic writing.
- Messages supposedly containing information unknown to the medium.
- Physical movements and sounds.
- Claims of telepathy or other forms of communication.
- Experiences surrounding death and the apparent appearance of deceased people.
One central question was whether a medium could provide specific, verifiable information that could not reasonably be attributed to ordinary means.
This was more demanding than asking whether a séance felt convincing.
The problem of controls
Suppose a medium gives a message containing information about a deceased person.
To evaluate the claim, an investigator would need to consider whether the information was already known to the medium, whether it could have been obtained from the sitter, whether the statement was ambiguous, and whether incorrect statements were being overlooked.
A convincing investigation would also need to minimize opportunities for deliberate or unconscious information transfer.
The historical record is mixed. Some reports describe careful observation, while others lack the controls needed to rule out ordinary explanations.
The existence of organized research into mediumship should not be confused with scientific confirmation of communication with the dead.

13. What happened to Victorian séance culture?

Spiritualism did not disappear when the nineteenth century ended.
It continued into the twentieth century, and its popularity was reinforced by the enormous grief associated with the First World War and subsequent bereavement.
People who had lost sons, husbands, brothers, and friends sometimes sought mediums as a way of maintaining contact with the dead.
Spirit photography continued to attract attention, too. William Hope and his Crewe Circle became known for photographs that appeared to show deceased relatives beside living people. Their images were subsequently discredited through investigations that identified photographic manipulation.

The persistence of Spiritualism demonstrates that its appeal was not solely dependent on whether individual demonstrations survived skeptical scrutiny.
For many participants, the underlying promise remained compelling: death might not be the end of personal existence.
The movement also left a substantial cultural legacy. Séances became familiar elements of ghost stories, detective fiction, stage magic, horror films, and modern depictions of occult gatherings.
Today, some spiritualist communities continue to practice mediumship. Their beliefs and methods vary, and their claims remain distinct from established scientific evidence about the afterlife.

14. A Victorian séance, reconstructed from beginning to end

To bring everything together, imagine a hypothetical séance in a middle-class British home around 1875.
This is an illustrative reconstruction based on historical practices, not a record of one specific gathering.

⏲ 8:00 p.m. — The guests arrive

Several guests gather in a drawing room. One has recently lost a relative. Another is curious about Spiritualism. The host introduces the medium and explains that no particular manifestation can be guaranteed.

8:10 p.m. — The room is prepared

Curtains are drawn, the lighting is reduced, and the participants take their places around a table. A short prayer or hymn establishes a solemn atmosphere.

👂 8:20 p.m. — The first sounds

A faint tapping is heard. The medium asks whether anyone present recognizes the sound as a possible communication. One guest asks a question, and a further knock follows.

💬 8:30 p.m. — A message is interpreted

The medium suggests that a deceased relative may be present. A guest offers a name or asks a personal question. The resulting sounds are interpreted according to the group's conventions.

👥 8:45 p.m. — The group reacts

Some guests become excited; others remain doubtful. A movement of the table or an unusual sensation is reported. Participants disagree about whether it is significant.

📖 9:00 p.m. — The sitting concludes

The medium announces that the session is over. The guests discuss the experience. One leaves comforted by what seemed to be a message from a loved one; another wonders whether ordinary movements and expectations explain what occurred.

The reconstruction captures the central tension of Victorian Spiritualism: the same event could be experienced as a religious encounter, an emotionally meaningful reunion, a psychological phenomenon, or a possible deception.

15. The essential timeline

The chronology reflects several interconnected histories: religious belief, new technology, changing attitudes toward death, public entertainment, and the development of psychical research.

16. What should you believe about it?

There are three separate questions worth distinguishing.
First: Did people genuinely believe they were communicating with the dead?
Absolutely. Many participants described powerful experiences, and Spiritualism became a serious religious movement for some of its adherents.
Second: Were all mediums deliberate frauds?
No such blanket conclusion is justified. Historical cases differ. Some demonstrations were exposed as fraudulent, some reports remain inadequately documented, and some participants may have sincerely interpreted their experiences as supernatural.
Third: Have Victorian séances proved that the dead can communicate with the living?
No. The historical reports have not established that conclusion through reliable, independently reproducible evidence. Emotional conviction, unexplained events, and sincere testimony do not by themselves establish a supernatural cause.
That distinction allows us to study séances without either dismissing the people involved as foolish or accepting every reported manifestation as genuine.

My overall takeaway;

Victorian séances were not simply spooky gatherings. They were an attempt to answer one of humanity's oldest questions using the religious beliefs, technologies, social customs, and investigative methods of the nineteenth century. Their most enduring significance lies in the intersection of grief and belief: people wanted evidence that those they loved had not vanished completely, and séances promised that the conversation might not be over.