Do you believe in life after death? Can the ghosts of the dead communicate with the world of the living? Would you find this comfort… or curse?  With the special exhibition of Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums, the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art transports visitors back in time to the Age of Spiritualism, when enchanters and illusionists held court with kings, mystics and mesmerists held society in their thrall, and a world being remade by dazzling new technologies dared to believe that the answer to life’s—and death’s—greatest mysteries were finally within reach. On loan from the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, the newly created exhibition comprises an impressive near-200 artifacts from the period, ranging from crystal balls and talking skulls, spirit cabinets and spectral illusions, to authentic hair lockets, death masks and a wide-ranging assortment of illustrated pamphlets and posters advertising occultists of all sorts—not to mention a pair of Harry Houdini’s own handcuffs. Each a curiosity on its own, Conjuring places them in dialogue to explore their greater context and tackle larger questions of ontology and human behavior, sifting gems of truth from an age of exploration led by these ecstatic conquistadors on the shores of the spirit world.

“It’s a timely moment to have these conversations about what we believe and why,” says Jennifer Lemmer Posey, Tibbals Curator of Circus at The Ringling. “What does it really take to convince us?”

The Age of Spiritualism was full of enterprising individuals—both the hucksters and the hopeful—asking that very question. Using stagecraft and theatrics, artifice and ingenious contraptions, they would test their powers of persuasion against nightly audiences, pushing the boundaries of belief to their breaking point. Some became stars. Conjuring tells their stories—and their secrets. Audiences will meet the famous Fox Sisters of Rochester, Maggie and Kate, who claimed to communicate with the dead, who would then respond with a series of resounding cracking noises—one for yes, two for no—so loud they could fill a theater. In 1849, they held the first paid public demonstration of spiritualism. Skeptics cried foul but the sisters enjoyed popular support for decades from the likes of Horace Greeley, James Fenimore Cooper and the abolitionist Sojourner Truth. Were they actually communicating with the dead? One of the sisters came clean in 1888 and the truth is somehow even more unsettling.

And while mediums and mystagogues like the Fox Sisters borrowed from the Victorian Gothic side of the aesthetic, others leaned more into the theatrical tradition of showmanship and spectacle, such as the Davenport Brothers, a pair of Vaudeville illusionists who became famous for their “spirit box.” A great cabinet full of musical instruments, the brothers would be tied and bound before being placed inside and the doors shut. When music began to emanate, the doors would be opened and the brothers would appear still bound, claiming the spirits did it. When it worked, it worked. When it didn’t, the audience would storm the stage and smash the cabinet.

But maybe that’s why the exhibition includes a replica. Conjuring is replete with these tales—Mina ‘Margery’ Crandon, the telekinetic investigated by Scientific American and championed by none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Howard Thurston, the stage magician who performed “The Levitation of Princess Karnac” and traveled with a train eight cars long—saved from the grave of history,  given new life and a tactile reality for modern audiences. The experience even gets interactive, with a 21st-century version of the rapping hand—a wooden hand possessed by spirits that would answer questions with taps a la the Fox Sisters—and a recreation of Pepper’s Ghost, an optical illusion that results in a ghostly apparition. First popularized in an 1862 stage production of Charles Dickens’ The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, the effect is still used today at Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion.

Technology plays an important role in the exhibition, as it did in the Age of Spiritualism itself. The advent and advance of photography and radio not only opened new possibilities for art and communication but changed the way people thought about the world. Boundaries were falling, barriers were broken and the world began to wonder what impossible thing might be a reality tomorrow. Thomas Edison even tried to invent a “spirit phone” to talk to the dead.

Photography, in particular, sparked interest with the occulting crowd. Flares and spots and strange shadows and shapes that audiences today would recognize as optical illusions or technical malfunctions ignited imaginations in spiritualist circles, who suspected this new technology was actually capturing images of spirits or ghosts. Some took advantage of this, using tricks like double exposure to create ghostly artifacts in their photographs. Conjuring features some such photographs by the celebrated French illusionist Henri Robin, who once performed at Windsor Castle for Queen Victoria. But there’s more to Conjuring than curiosities.

“You can appreciate everything in the show as a beautiful object and you can appreciate its role in history,” says Lemmer Posey, “but it also leaves space for us to have bigger conversations.”

And among the spirit bells, the Ouija boards and all those eye-popping prints promising miracles and magic, the careful inclusion of personal items from the time—tokens of remembrance and private expressions of grief—remind viewers that there is more to this experience than quaint theatrics and old-timey theories. That underneath the glamour and stagecraft lay something very human and all too familiar: the pain of living and fear of death, a collective yearning for a comforting truth and an earnest hope that this world is filled with more wonder than we know.