The topics of spiritualism and mediumship have always been, and will always be, controversial. It is important to note that as folklorists, we should not be judging whether such things are 'real' or 'imagined', but rather the role that the phenomenon and the stories associated with it play within our cultures.
What is certainly the case is that there have, through history, been people who claimed mediumistic powers when they had none.
In this episode of The Folklore Podcast, host Mark Norman examines some of the cases of séance room fraud through history, why people did it, how they did it and how the law brought them to book.