William Crookes’s investigations of spiritualist phenomena

Record summary

William Crookes conducted and reported investigations of spiritualist phenomena in London during the early 1870s, involving mediums including D. D. Home and Florence Cook and claims such as movement, levitation, and materialization. His reports are important because they illustrate Victorian attempts to place séance phenomena within a scientific framework, while also exposing conflicts over controls, access, replication, and investigator commitment. The reports are identifiable through Crookes’s publications and correspondence. Their interpretation remains contested, and later historians debate whether the experiments were sufficiently controlled to support the conclusions he drew.