There is nothing to fear

WEEK 22

The invitation to Saturday night’s séance requested cocktail attire. We were headed to the historic Norwood Mansion in Chelsea for a visit to the other side. Seeing as this was our first séance, Irena and I each wore something from a family member who had passed away – for me, a ring from my grandmother, and for Irena, an evening bag from her Aunt Pearl. We decided if anyone was going to make an appearance, it would be Aunt Pearl.

The Norwood Club, where we happen to be members, is a five-story townhouse that was built in the mid-1800s by a wealthy New Yorker named Andrew S. Norwood for his family. The building was later a boarding house and then a funeral home, and has been beautifully preserved, with its curved staircase, many marble fireplaces, high ceilings and carved moldings. Think hipster Victorian filled with contemporary art.

Our guide for the evening introduced himself as a mentalist who loves storytelling. He led us on a journey of strange illusions to recreate a true séance.

We started with a bespoke cocktail and Victorian-themed canapes. For their time, séances were firstly social gatherings, an evening of entertainment and absinthe that may or may not have ended with spirits being summoned and guests fainting.

As we also learned, the Victorian experience of death was so very different from ours today. People typically passed away at home and families would often pose in portraits with their recently deceased loved ones, which they called “memento mori.” Photography had been recently invented but was crazy expensive. That – combined with short average life spans – meant that post-mortem photography was the only option, quite the macabre family album.

I never thought the Norwood Club was haunted, but it may as well be. Mr. Norwood – apparently fascinated by the spiritualism movement that became an obsession in his era – held numerous séances in the downstairs parlor where we were seated on velvet-covered chairs arranged in a circle facing an elaborate floor mirror. Houdini himself was rumored to have spent time at the house.

Or so we were told. The whole evening walked the line of what is real and what is imagined. What we fear and the grip fear has on our lives. When asked who believes in ghosts, half our group of 17 raised their hands.

Our guide took a meta approach to the whole thing by weaving in the history of spiritualism in the mid-19^th century and using himself as a character to demonstrate how a spiritualist would use illusions to get the audience to believe. Credibility was important back then. The Fox Sisters, we learned, put Spiritualism (with a capital S) on the map, then confessed – shockingly – to fraud. To prove himself to us, our guide made a pair of eye glasses, borrowed from one of the guests, flip upside down and slide across the floor.

The best illusions of the evening involved each of us as theatre.

The mentalist put me in a pseudo-hypnotic trance (no, not really), standing in front of the group with my eyes closed and head bowed. Over the course of several minutes, I felt him tapping on my left shoulder blade and then brushing my nose lightly with a handkerchief. But it turns out he was across the room, touching another participant when I felt it on me. This one had us all stumped.

Next, we each held in our right hands a metal chain with a crystal pendulum hanging from the end, our elbows bent at our sides. On the magician’s instructions, we stared down at our crystals, held our hands completely still and used our minds to move the crystal in circles, ever wider, then back and forth, then stopping abruptly. There were gasps of delight as this worked for most of us.

Our guide’s ultimate trick involved him drinking an elixir (which apparently tasted terrible by the face he made) to slow his pulse and put him into an altered state able to divine information. Before the séance, we were each given a small card to write the name of a person who had passed away and a few details about them. A guest handed the mentalist three random cards, all in envelopes, and sure enough, he got the names and details right. Except for a tiny mix-up as he thought Irena’s card was someone else’s.

The evening ended with an attempt to speak to the dead. Or as our guide said, it’s easy to speak to the dead; it’s getting them to speak back to us that’s the tricky part.

We formed a special séance circle: left hand on our left knee (to ground us to the room) and right hand on the left wrist of the person seated next to us (to link us together). “Never break the circle, or someone could get hurt.”

The mentalist turned off the lights, and we chanted over and over and louder and louder: if there are spirits among us, make yourselves known. Yes, I felt several cool breezes. Yes, the floorboards creaked. Yes, doors slammed. I even felt like someone was standing behind me, although I couldn’t see a thing. It was a little creepy. But, alas, no one spoke to us.

Then it was time to head upstairs for a cocktail.