Mediumship, a profession that gained momentum in the 19th and early twentieth century, developed out of a spiritual movement that began with the Fox Sisters in an old house in Hydesville, New York. There in 1848, Magaretta, fifteen years old, and Katie Fox, only eleven years old, began to communicate with an entity who made his presence known through strange rapping noises. This spirit claimed to be a peddler who had been murdered in their house some years before. Whether their efforts were true Mediumship would be very much questioned. But the impact they made on the spread of Mediumship is incontestable. The Fox Sisters gave birth to the Spiritualist Movement, which became the cradle of Mediumship.

Strangely, this type of manifestation began to rapidly spread throughout the world even though ultimately Margaretta Fox confessed fraud, claiming her sister produced the sounds by 'cracking' her knuckles and various joints- and also using her toes. Although she was repentant about having started what she claimed now to be a 'fraudulent' movement, she could not stop the wave of Spiritualism sweeping throughout the world, igniting England, in particular, with a fascination for the strange world of Mediumship.

As Mediumship became more prevalent, the magician, Harry Houdini, obsessed with the death of his beloved mother, threw himself into the fray, reluctantly exposing fraudulent mediums, showing the mechanisms in which manifestations were produced and the elaborate intelligence gathering devices used feign the reality of Mediumship.

Houdini was not the only celebrity to become involved with Mediumship. There as, in fact, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who became an expert in Mediumship, sitting with more mediums than any other researcher of the time. His attempt to introduce Houdini to the value of Mediumship, utilizing his wife as a medium, failed miserably in Houdini's eyes. In this case, Houdini was alarmed that message, allegedly from Houdini's mother, was in English. Houdini's mother, despite her long stay in America, had been incapable of learning the language. Houdini didn't buy the idea that his mother had taken a course in English in the Afterlife.

But, although even Houdini would probably have admitted that Lady Doyle was well-intentioned in Mediumship efforts. Mediumship often was given a bad name, such as the time that the famous Eusapia Palladino who was found trying to levitate a table with her foot.

There were other mediums, however, like the American, Mrs. Leonora Piper, who did produce some remarkable information, but failed conspicuously in realizing that a man named Dean Conner, who was claimed to have been abducted, had actually died, creating a kind of scandal surrounding her Mediumship. Nonetheless, Mrs. Piper, who brought into the scientific world by the famous psychologist, William James, and studied by other leading parapsychologists, left more questions about Mediumship than ready conclusions based on fraudulent discovery.

Perhaps the most successful example of Mediumship was D. D. Home. D. D. Home, who levitated himself through windows. His Mediumship, often occurring in well-lighted rooms included the appearance of disembodied hands or a phantom with an accordion was never effectively exposed. To some extent, this was also true of Florence Cook, a despised competitor with home, whose ghostly apparition, Katie King, was studied intensively by the physicist, Sir William Crookes, who became a leading English Mediumship investigator.