In 1883, the University of Pennsylvania received a bequest from Henry Seybert (1801-1883). He was a wealthy Philadelphian who had commissioned the casting of the Centennial Bell for the city’s 1876 celebration, which contains metal smelted from British and American cannons from the Revolutionary War and from Union and Confederate cannons from the Civil War. It now hangs in the belfry of Independence Hall.

The first part of the gift established the Adam Seybert Professor in Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, named for Seybert’s father, who earned a medical degree from Penn in 1793, served on the faculty, and later was a member of Congress. It was one of the earliest endowed chairs at the university and still exists today.

However, there were strings attached to the gift. The duties of the professor who held the chair included taking part in an investigation to find grounds for belief in a spirit world. Thus, the Seybert Commission for Investigating Modern Spiritualism was created in 1883 at Penn.

A playbill from 1864 advertising the performance of a magician that claimed to be able to contact the dead. | Image courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia

In the 19th century, spiritualism was a popular subject whose adherents believed it was possible to communicate with the dead, particularly with the assistance of a medium. Increased interest in the subject occurred in the aftermath of the Civil War, prompted by the massive number of casualties. Numerous self-proclaimed mediums flourished, especially in New England and the mid-Atlantic, often operating in suspect ways.

The “proof” of the mediums’ communications with the spirit world included slate writing, moving objects, and rapping sounds, all seemingly generated by ghosts, and purported photographs of spirits as shadowy figures alongside the actual human subject.

The officials at Penn took the requirement seriously and appointed a commission of distinguished faculty. In addition to the first Adam Seybert Professor George Fullerton, it included the University’s Provost, physician William Pepper (who went on to found the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Penn Museum, and the Wistar Institute), biologist Joseph Leidy, neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, chemist George Augustus Koenig, and Horace Howard Furness, a Shakespearean scholar who provided quotes from the Bard of Avon for the stained glass windows of the Penn library designed by his brother Frank Furness, now the Fisher Fine Arts Library.

Members of the First Association of Spiritualists in front of their temple at 12th and Thompson Streets in 1917. | Photo courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia

“This was a big deal. It was an important civic project,” said John Pollak, curator of research services at the Kislak Center, which houses special collections and rare books at Penn. “These were the major minds of the nation in a way and certainly of this university. They took on the responsibility of doing a formal study of what they called modern spiritualism.”

Furness served for a time as the acting chair of the commission and as such read newspaper accounts of mediums’ activities throughout the Northeast, visited many of them, and often paid them to demonstrate their abilities. He kept meticulous notes of his investigations, as well as newspaper advertisements and business cards advertising mediums’ services, expense ledgers, and correspondence from people interested in the commission’s findings. “This was news at the time,” said Justin McDaniel, professor of religious studies at Penn, whose focus on southeast Asian religious practice often looks at supernatural beliefs. “You would have the front page of the Inquirer say ‘Group at Penn to prove the existence of ghosts.’”

A playbill from 1865 advertising an evening with illusionists and spirit world summoners Professor and Madame Wiseman. | Image courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia

The Seybert Commission met from 1883 to 1887. Despite their best efforts, and their charge in Seybert’s will to investigate “all systems of Morals, Religion, or Philosophy which assume to represent the Truth, and particularly of Modern Spiritualism,” they were unable to verify the existence of a spirit world. Although their report in 1887, published by the J. B. Lippincott Company, was titled “Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University of Pennsylvania to Investigate Modern Spiritualism in Accordance with the Request of the Late Henry Seybert,” it was never followed by a final report and the commission was disbanded.

Furness’s papers are held today by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and Penn’s Kislak Center houses the records of the Seybert Commission, as well as the Henry Seybert Library of Modern Spiritualism, a collection of printed materials on the subject.