"As they sat in the darkness or semi-darkness, the members of the séance would see much less than they would touch, taste, smell and, most importantly, hear." (Connor, 1999, p.210)

There appears to be a relation between the evolution of ghost phenomena and the evolution of a developing logic of technological communication that can be traced from the 19th century séance and other Spiritualist practices through to present day ghost-hunters armed with digital cameras.

The famous rapping tables of the early Spiritualist movement had by 1871 transmogrified into spirit telegraphy, complete with Morse code sent on by deceased telegraph operators. (The spirits had in fact claimed to have invented telegraphy in advance of its invention in the human world, though, as Connor points out, one might wonder what they had invented it for). (p.211) Similarly, mediums may act as telegraphers through the process of automatic writing, taking on the person of such famous ghosts as Shakespeare and producing new works of literature. One extreme experiment saw the Spiritualist John M. Spear impreganate a machine, known as an "electrical infant" with a Spirit, and thus invest it with a life-force. P.T.Barnum, a fierce critic of Spiritualism, was said to comment at the time "that if things like this were going to happen, the ladies will be afraid to sleep alone in the house if so much as a sewing machine or apple-corer be about." (Cottom, 1991, p.62)

But just as sound had provided the stage on which an increased technological mediation of culture was taking place, in the form of the telephone, telegraphy and the grammaphone, speaking to the dead was at the heart of Spiritualism's practices.

Early mediums had provided the voices for the spirits in a process known as 'personation'. The medium was necessary for decoding and passing on the spiritualist message in their own voice. This practice changed, in a kind of parallel evolution communications technologies, to what were known as 'direct voice' manifestations. Direct voice mainfestations shifted the site of production of spiritual communication away from the body of the medium to a voice facilitated by but independent of the medium's vocal organs. Devices such as trumpets were used to make the spirit communicatation audible in a manner that seems to mimic the newly developed phonograph.

In essence, the move from personation to direct voice spirit communications involves a shift from somatic to telematic processes of relay - a move which neatly characterises the impact on communications of the new communications technologies of the time.