Lone Star Séance: A History of Texas Spiritualism

In the mid-nineteenth century, a strange new fire swept across the American landscape. It was Spiritualism: the radical belief that the living could—and should—commune with the dead. While historians have long looked to the North for the heart of this movement, John Benedict Buescher reveals a darker, wilder, and distinctly Texan story.

Lone Star Séance is a journey into the borderlands of belief, where parlor tables rattled in the same rooms in which pistols were drawn. From the invisible counsel pursued by Sam Houston and Anson Jones to the mystical visions of Quanah Parker and Francisco Madero, Buescher brings the shadows of the Lone Star State into the light.

It is a saga of independent minds rejecting religious dogma to become their own prophets and the tragicomic backlash that followed. Part occult history, part frontier Western, this is the story of a "cultural infection" that became a Texas obsession. Forget the Alamo for a moment—and remember the séance.

• Publication date: 20 October 2026
• Page count: 416
• Publisher: Texas A & M University Press
• Format: Paperback
• ISBN-13: 9781682833179