Getting clarity on a historic curiosity

By Danielle Harris-Burnette, Museum Educator

If you look closely at this crystal ball, odds are that you’ll just see your own reflection. Dartmouth Librarian and collector Harold G. Rugg donated this crystal ball to the Vermont Historical Society in 1958 as part of a larger collection. The donation did not include the original owner, and larger history of this object. So why is the crystal ball in our collection today?

Beginning in 1859, Burlington Vermont became home to quarterly spiritualist conventions. Spiritualism is a socio-religious movement that gained momentum in the second half of the 19th century, which suggested that the dead could communicate through living people known as mediums. Famed Vermont medium Achsa Sprague attended several of these conventions, where she would enter a trance during her séance sessions to communicate with spirits. Other methods used in seances included rapping, in which the spirit allegedly knocked on a door or table to answer yes or no questions, and psychography, in which the medium and other participants would write down words based on a stream of consciousness.

Over 8 million Americans participated in the spiritualist movement at its height in the 1880s. There is a novelty factor that contributed to seance sessions as sources of entertainment and relief in the aftermath of the Civil War, and objects such as crystal balls and Ouija boards were mass produced in the late 19th and early 20th century to meet the demand for séance sessions. While this crystal ball has no direct manufacturing connection to Vermont, it is an object that would have been on display in the home of a Vermont spiritualist in the hopes that they could gain insight into an unknown future.