British Library Tales of the Weird: Summoned to the Seance

Through the electric silence around the seance table, the rapping of an unknown hand spells out a horrible revelation. A posthumous journey through the spirit realm strips bare the mind of an avowed sceptic. A medium performing one last seance finds themselves in the cold clutches of a woeful spirit. In the mid-nineteenth century, public fascination with spiritualism surged, bringing forth a new literary craze for stories of ghost and demon summonings and communications with the dead via a medium.

Reviving a thrilling host of these spectral narratives from the birth of the movement through to its last days of popularity in the twentieth century and featuring stories by authors from Arthur Conan Doyle to Agatha Christie, this new collection invites you to a seat around the table, at the fragile threshold between the mortal world and the chilling realms of the dead.