2.Séances were popular after the First World War, a time when millions of families were grieving.
3.These photos were taken by Scottish brothers Craig and George Falconer, a pair of con artists who regularly duped the public with ghosts made out of materials like cotton wool and paper.
4.Spectators at the séances also took part in the photographic process: loading film, shooting pictures, processing prints.
5.The brothers were arrested and convicted in 1931 in South Africa, when two plainclothes policemen posing as audience members exposed the pair as fraudsters.
6.Lots of pictures of séances exist in other photo archives, spanning over a century, including this picture of a table apparently moving of its own accord in Paris around 1900.
7.Spiritual medium Marthe Beraud is seen having an uncomfortable encounter with ectoplasm in 1910.
8.The 'substance' looks like it could be the face of a little girl.
9.It wasn’t just seances that were popular — the Victorians loved staging theatrical pictures of ‘ghosts’, like this one from the 1860s.
10.A man clings to a tree in terror when confronted with an apparition in 1865.
11.Here he drops to his knees in shock.
12.A spook hovers over a sleeping baby in a crib in the 1860s.
13.A couple are 'terrified' by a ghost in the 1880s.
14.The 'ghost' of a woman appears to a girl at prayer by her bedside in 1865.
