Sarah Kanning

Ray Hyman discusses how unconscious expectations can cause such allegedly psychic phenomena as dowsing, table tipping and table rapping, automatic “spirit” writing, and form the basis of some diagnostic methods in alternative medicine in this excellent article from Quackwatch: How People Are Fooled by Ideomotor Action.

For fictional applications of some of this information, I recommend Sarah Waters’ novel, Affinity, a sort of romantic suspense novel set in Victorian England; several aspects of Spiritualism are central to its plot.