Britain's first spiritualist church, the Heber Street Spiritual Temple, sits in a quiet commercial side road in Keighley town centre. Founded in 1853, during the outbreak of the Crimean war, the sombre-looking church is a living reminder of a forgotten, miracle-hungry world.

An embroidered banner above the altar used to proclaim, "There is no death, what seems so is transition". The Saturday service promises clairvoyant news of the afterlife. Later in the week, a healing medium administers supernatural medicine to its small congregation.

Before writing Servants of the Supernatural, I had some inkling of spiritualism's popularity among mid-Victorian radicals and non-conformists, especially in the Aire Valley, but had little idea of how many of today's New Age beliefs were born in the ghostly heyday
of the séance-room.

No child of the 1960s counter culture, today's ministry of "Mind, Body and Spirit", appears to owe much of its bookshop curriculum to the spiritualist adventurers of the 19th century.

Yorkshire's spiritualist churches and lyceums were built on the foundations of the "holy science" of mesmerism. Aptly described as "Hypnotism before it wore good clothes, kept a carriage and asked Incredulity to dinner", mesmerism came to the North in the autumn of 1841, when Charles Lafontaine, a failed Swiss actor, roused "curiosity" and "wonder" by demonstrating the clairvoyant powers of two entranced "somnambulists".

As a legion of itinerant lecturers followed on Lafontaine's heels, bringing exhibitions of "mesmerism and clairvoyance" to the Mechanics' Institutes and Temperance Halls, professional clairvoyants began to advertise their far-seeing services to those wishing to trace lost items and missing persons.

"Emma", a maid of all work to a Bolton apothecary, Dr Joseph Haddock, achieved a measure of celebrity in the late 1840s after assisting a Bradford firm, Messrs PR Arrowsmith & Co, locate £650 in lost takings. Emma's role in the recovery of the misplaced money was widely reported in the local and national press, prompting numerous applications for assistance, including one from a naval colleague of the lost Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin.

In this instance, Emma's occult visions betrayed her. Despite her lucid descriptions of an imminent return, Franklin and his crew were found to have long perished – leaving a red-faced Dr Haddock to explain that Emma must have mistaken Franklin's ghostly vestiges for his living presence.

The wavering powers of detection that Emma and other clairvoyants demonstrated were soon eclipsed by mediums and spirit circles that claimed direct contact with the Other World – via table-tilting and rapping. In the mill towns of the West Riding, the spirits tapped a catalogue of ponderous messages. In 1854, 13 members of a spirit circle in Keighley attested to the procurement of a four-page sermon. Not long afterwards, a circle in Bingley received several messages from the Scottish bard Robert Burns, who became a trusted confidant to spirit circles across the valley. A new credo was born.

One of the first Keighley residents to become convinced of the truth of spiritual intercourse was David Weatherhead, a former Chartist agitator. A wealthy grocer who had recently lost a son, Weatherhead bankrolled a new publication The Yorkshire Spiritual Telegraph. Thanks to Weatherhead, Keighley established itself as the cradle of British spiritualism, encouraging the working classes to glean as much knowledge of the one place that knew no distinction of rank – Heaven's Republic.

Why were thousands of ordinary Yorkshire folk seduced by the phantoms of spiritualism? Though many, like Weatherhead, were initially lured to the séance-room by the promise of reunion with the departed, grief alone cannot explain the allure of spiritualism.

Above all, it was the culture of political radicalism and infidelity – with its inveterate appetite for all medical and religious heterodoxies, from homeopathy to Swedenborgianism – which encouraged self-schooled artisans and factory workers to explore the "revelations of the spirit". When Robert Owen, the grandfather of British socialism, announced his conversion to spiritualism in 1854, the mill-town freethinkers followed suit.

The popularity which spiritualism enjoyed in the North was exploited by a stream of American tricksters and stage entertainers. Ira and William Davenport brought their cabinet séances to English theatres in 1864. After inviting their audiences to tightly secure them in a large cabinet, the lights were dimmed. Uncanny music filled the auditorium. Instruments flew across the stage. When the lights were turned on, the Davenports were found sitting demurely, "bound head and foot with strong chords like the most dangerous malefactors".

It was a simple and effective act which led London spiritualists to champion the Davenports as powerful mediums. A frostier reception, however, awaited them in Leeds, Bradford and Hull, where police repeatedly struggled to contain angry mobs intent on storming the stage and smashing the Davenports cursed cabinet.

By the 1870s, spiritualist phenomena had been subject to countless exposures. At the Royal Institution, Michael Faraday had overseen an experiment which proved that table-tilting was due to the "unconscious muscular action" of sitters.

Mediums, psychics and somnambulists were investigated by amateur sleuths and scientists, denounced by clerics and satirised in the press. Yet the popularity of the séance endured.

Among the broad gallery of Victorians who found spiritual succour in the séances were quacks, bluffs and rogues, but also respected physicians, such as John Elliotson, an early champion of mesmerism, aristocrats and writers as real and rational as Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. John Nevil Maskelyne, the doyen of Victorian magic, had performed various spiritual burlesques which aped the counterfeit miracles which mediums like the Davenports had brought to the séance-room. Yet the spiritualist community remained unwilling to subject mediums to serious scrutiny, reluctant to insist on full light. Francis Ford Monck, a former Baptist minister, became renowned for séances in which materialised spirits were glimpsed in the semi-darkness. Monck's phantoms were investigated by a number of well-known believers, including the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who declared himself "absolutely certain" that the manifestations "could not be produced by any possible trick".

However, in 1876, after a séance at the home of a Huddersfield wool merchant, a sceptical visitor insisted on examining Monck's bags. Monck escaped via a window, leaving three boxes containing gloved spirit hands, musical boxes and other incriminating items.

Several weeks later, Monck was found guilty of intention to deceive. On
being sentenced to three months hard labour in Wakefield Gaol, he claimed to welcome the prospect of suffering for "the glorious truth of Spiritualism". After serving time, he purchased a new box of tricks and began to cash in on the wages of martyrdom.

n Servants of the Supernatural: The Night Side of the Victorian Mind by Antonio Melechi is published by Heinemann. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.
yorkshirepost bookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is £2.75.