"Raps heard from entombed men."  From the Duluth Herald, 1911.

The Magic of Spirit Rapping, Writing Mediums, and Table Turning by John Henry Anderson, 1860.  See Seance Parlor Feng Shui.

There's an ironic subliminal message in this book cover — the middle of the word "exposed," "pos," is highlghted by the box behind it, suggesting "positive."  Spirit Rapping Exposed by John Henry Anderson, 1860.  See Seance Parlor Feng Shui.

From The Fashionable Science of Parlour Magic by John Henry Anderson, 1860.  See Seance Parlor Feng Shui.

Spiritualists tipping a table, from "Spirit-Rapping Made Easy," in Once a Week, 1860.

From "Spirit-Rapping Made Easy," in Once a Week, 1860.  This should be of interest: Seance Parlor Feng Shui.

"Casting out the evil spirits," plus the same scene in the ghostly realm (courtesy of the scanning process at Google Books), from The Rappers, Or, The Mysteries, Fallacies, and Absurdities of Spirit-rapping, Table-tipping, and Entrancement by A Searcher After Truth, 1854.

This recalls our repository of ghostly images that were never meant to be, entitled The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine.  The specters were conjured unwittingly, through a mechanical process of book scanning.  Their portraits technically do not exist, except within this context.  To explain: in old books, frontispieces were typically protected by a sheet of translucent tissue paper.  So thorough is the Google Books scanning process that even this page of tissue paper is scanned.  The figure in the plate beneath the tissue—"beyond the veil,” as it were—emerges as from a foggy otherworld.  The frontispieces were never meant to be seen this way.  Their wraithlike manifestations have been artificially "fixed" in time by the scanning process. In essence, timeless phantasms of dead writers have been captured and bound into a new age.  And so we call this phenomenon "unforeseen art," as it constitutes an aesthetic expression without original intent.  Just as artists often credit their inspiration to a Muse, the accidental art herein is in the domain of real ghosts; every author here has departed to the Other Side.  We call it "necromancy by proxy," as the scanning machine serves as our "spirit medium" or shaman.