Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

You're listening to our podcast that explores the history and stories of our six palaces.

These talks are a collection of some of our best live events.

I really hope you enjoy listening.

The Victorian era is defined by great leaps in cultural, technological and scientific innovations.

In this series compiled from our archive, we explore the fast-moving world of Queen Victoria.

This talk from historian Dr Chris Renick delves into the mysterious world of Victorian

seance, the craze for the supernatural and its connection to contemporary science.

It's worth mentioning as a kind of starting point for thinking about this is that so many of the

things that were part of that world are still with

us today. We still read so many of the books that were written at the time. We read books

by Charles Dickens, where ghosts were central plot devices or central characters. But perhaps

less well known, we still use words that were entered our language during the 19th century as part of those discussions.

Words like mesmerized, for example, words that we still use now, but originally had a quite technical meaning that was used to talk about the supernatural.

And so for that reason, it's kind of interesting to think about where these

ideas came from and what they meant at the time and trying to step into the kind of the way that

the Victorians saw the world and what the supernatural meant to them. Now, in order to kind of tell

you the story that I want to tell you today, there's a particular place, okay, that I want us to

start. And that is the 1st of October 1876, okay, at Bow Street Magistrate's Call. Now,

in the dock that day was an American by the name of Henry Slade.

Okay?

Now, Henry Slade had arrived in Britain about six months earlier, and he was a medium.

...