When exciting new innovations in media technology emerge, two things tend to happen: practitioners use them to a) capture people in various states of undress, and b) attempt communication with the dead. This program derives from the latter impulse, from the commingling of progress and superstition, exploring the overlap between the early days of cinema and the Spiritualism craze of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Spiritualism began in our own backyard, so to speak, in Western and Central New York’s “burned-over-district,” long a hotbed of fringe practices during the Second Great Awakening of the mid-19th century. Like many religious movements, it spread by word of mouth, through traveling mediums, demonstrations, and hearsay. As the Industrial Revolution slowly widened the chasm between body and soul, mediumship and mesmerism achieved widespread popularity. In the more prosperous corners of Europe and the United States, Spiritualism reached its peak around 1897, when an estimated 8 million devotees counted themselves among the faithful. The increase in self-identifying Spiritualists dovetailed perfectly with a dramatic proliferation of media: photography evolved from a chemical science into an indispensable form of image recreation, small publications bloomed like ergot, and seances became the parlor game du jour, affording everyday people an opportunity to engage with the liminal spaces between life and death, flesh and figment. Arriving in the mid-1890s, cinema proved to be the ideal medium for both depicting supernatural phenomena and debunking Spiritualism. Whereas still photography provided ghost-hunters with the means to “catch” their elusive subjects on film, the invention of moving pictures opened up a new avenue into the realm of the phantoms. The mere idea of interacting with another, previously unseen world was enough to inspire countless artists and thinkers: if evidence of the hereafter could not be obtained, there was certainly no harm in ruminating on its look, feel, and aura, often to comic effect. The then-nascent art of trick cinematography augmented established practices like sleight-of-hand, effectively replicating—and later, replacing—turn-of-the-century audiences’ visual definition of the afterlife. "bye," spooked Jane.