When you think ‘Ectoplasm,’ your first thought might be that one scene from Ghostbusters. But the history of Ectoplasm dates back to the 19th century and early 20th century.
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Attempts to communicate with the dead have a long history, but the classic seance—with the darkened room, the circle of people, and the dead speaking through a medium—rose to prominence in the mid-nineteenth century.
Interest died down, but then, in the 1920s, after the First World War, séances spiked like never before as survivors tried to make sense of a world shattered by mass death and conflict. Struggling to process the loss of loved ones, people increasingly turned to the world of the paranormal as a source of comfort, hoping to speak to deceased family members as a way of processing their grief.
But many weren’t content with just sitting in a circle and having a medium claim they could hear voices of the dead. Notable figures like British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories and lost his son in the flu outbreak, became increasingly interested in proving the existence of spirits through physical evidence. And so began a widespread fixation on scientifically verifying a substance known as ectoplasm.
Most Images from Wikimedia Commons
Further Sources:
Ectoplasm and Spirits in the Material World - L. Anne Delgado: [ Ссылка ]
Basics of Ectoplasm - Kate Kershner: [ Ссылка ]
Clip from Ghostbusters copyright TM & © Sony
♫ Eternal Terminal by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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