REVIEW: When We Spoke to the Dead by Ilise S. Carter

BY: VIVICA VISCERA, Make It Weird Reviewer

When We Spoke to the Dead: How Ghosts Gave American Women Their Voice is Ilise S. Carter’s history of the Spiritualist movement, starting with the Fox Sisters and the mysterious knocking in their bedroom in 1848 and following it all the way to the séance rooms, suffrage halls, and wellness trends that grew out of it. I enjoyed my time with this one, and it’s a book I’ll be recommending to anyone who loves occult history.

A little about Carter. She’s a New York City writer and journalist, and her first book, The Red Menace, was a history of lipstick in America. She also has one of the best author bios I’ve come across in a while. Under her stage name, The Lady Aye, she’s worked as a sideshow performer (sword swallower, fire eater, and human blockhead, among other things) with acts ranging from Rob Zombie to Cirque du Soleil, and she’s appeared on shows like Oddities and Mysteries at the Museum. Someone who has spent years performing for a crowd turns out to be a great guide to the mediums of the 1800s, who were performers in their own right.

The book opens in rural western New York, where the Fox Sisters’ rapping spirits drew crowds right around the time of the Seneca Falls Convention. From there, Carter traces how Spiritualism tied itself to abolition, women’s suffrage, and other progressive causes, and how it gave women a public platform when few others were open to them. Along the way you get Civil War grief, Victoria Woodhull, Harry Houdini’s campaign against fraudulent mediums, and a look at how the same ideas echo today in televangelism and Goop-style wellness culture. Carter also gets out and does the legwork, visiting the Lily Dale Spiritualist camp, Salem, and New Orleans and talking with people who practice these traditions now. Her own story runs through the whole book, too. She started this project after losing her father to Covid, and noticed how much our moment has in common with the years of loss that made Spiritualism take off in the first place.

Occult history is a big part of what I read and write about, and I’ve spent years visiting haunted places and spiritual sites around the world, so this landed right in my wheelhouse. What I appreciated most is how Carter treats the women of this movement as real people. The Fox Sisters come across as young women swept up in something much bigger than themselves, and looking at the séance room as one of the few places a woman could speak with authority in the 1800s is a lens I found really rewarding. Carter comes at the subject with a skeptic’s eye, but she’s clearly fascinated by the people who believed, and that curiosity carries the book.

The profiles of the historical mediums were my favorite parts, and I’d have gladly read a whole extra section of them. The mix of history, travel, and memoir keeps things moving, and every time the book stepped back into a Victorian parlor I was happy to stay there as long as Carter wanted to keep me.

If you’re into Spiritualism, women’s history, or the roots of modern spirituality, this is well worth picking up. It’s thoughtful, easy to read, and full of stories I’m still thinking about.