Sharon Vanorny
Lochlan Masters gave up a career in engineering to pursue magic and spiritualism.
Seven strangers sit in a darkened room, holding hands and hoping to make contact with spirits from beyond the grave.
It’s a classic Victorian-era séance — part ghost story and part dinner theater, steeped in nostalgia and reimagined for modern times. The stage is set with the usual trappings: a century-old Ouija board, a spirit cabinet used by three generations of railroad carnival performers, gilded tarot cards, brass spirit bells and antique patient logs from a shuttered British insane asylum rumored to have once housed Jack the Ripper.
“I’m freaking out already,” says attendee William Hakizimana, who happened upon the get-together after a day of work at 100state, the coworking space at 30 W. Mifflin St., the same building where the séance is being held.
The medium, Lochlan Masters, is a well-known local performer who left a career in engineering to pursue his lifelong love of magic — a fascination rooted in curiosity about “things people can’t completely understand or explain.”
Illuminated by candlelight, Masters tells his guests about the afterlife — an ancient belief, shared across cultures — and spiritualism, a 19th-century movement whose followers believed in communication with departed souls.
“At one point, even the queen of England was holding séances,” Masters says, referring to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s famous fascination with spiritualism.
Though skilled in sleight of hand and well-versed in illusions, Masters says the séance requires a deeper, more intuitive brand of magicianry — one that stems from an understanding of body language and an ability to read guests’ emotions.
Masters doesn’t contact any spirits known to the séance guests — this is supposed to be fun, after all. Instead, he conjures beings associated with his haunted items — Beatrice, a strict Catholic nurse at the insane asylum, and Norman, a young male patient who may or may not have been murdered at the hospital.
Candles flicker. A bell rings. The Ouija board’s pointer, called a planchette, goes flying across the table. Beatrice apparently hates the Ouija board. Disembodied voices fill the room.
“Wait, can you guys hear that too?” Masters asks. We determine the noise is coming from people gathering at the top of State Street, but still, it’s a nice effect. Spookiness level is about 6 out of 10.
With the veil between the world of the dead and the living seemingly parted, it’s time to speak directly with the spirits, Masters tells us, passing out papers and pencils for us to write questions for the visiting spirits.
We write our queries secretly, fold the papers twice and hand them in for shuffling. I glance over at friend and photographer Sharon Vanorny and wonder if any of the guests are in on the trick.
This is where things get real — in a previous séance, one of the guests ran from the circle crying after the spirits predicted an untimely death. This is also the part where a true skeptic would ask, “How is he going to pull this off?”
But one by one, Masters identifies and answers the questions — flawlessly and without looking at what’s written. Two inquiries about the meaning of life, one request for the story of how the spirits died, one plea for insight into what the future has in store. The ghosts didn’t like that one — they answered by telling the guest to repent for her sins. Good advice for anyone, probably.
I try to beat the system by asking an intentionally vague question about relationship advice; Vanorny asks what her cat loves most in the world.
Masters and his ghost team call out my shenanigans; we learn that the cat is probably plotting murder. I upgrade the séance experience from “entertaining” to “damn impressive.”
“How do you think he did it?” Vanorny asks as we leave the building. Mentalism? Trick props? Real evidence of a link between this world and the next?
“I can’t figure it out,” I answer. “But it freaked me the hell out.”
Birth of spiritualism movement: March 31, 1848, in Hydesville, N.Y.
Famous people who attended séances: Queen Victoria, Mary Todd Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Ghosts contacted at Madison séance: Beatrice, Norman
