Séance as a Service

Mum is typing…

Three small dots, pulsing at the bottom of a screen. Everyone with a phone knows what they mean. Somebody on the other end is choosing their words, and you wait, thumb hovering, for whatever comes next. It’s the most ordinary sight in modern life, and for a growing number of grieving people it now appears beneath the name of someone they have already buried.

The message that follows sounds like her. It uses the pet name nobody else was allowed to use, ends with the same clumsy row of kisses she always sent, and asks whether you’ve eaten properly, because she always asked whether you’d eaten properly. It is a comfort, and it is also a product, and the uncomfortable truth at the heart of this piece is that those two things have been travelling together for a very long time.

Before we get to the servers and the subscription tiers, I want to take you somewhere colder and quieter. Whitehall, London, on the morning of Armistice Day in the early 1920s, during the two minutes of silence, where a retired cleaning lady is standing in the crowd with a camera.

The first grief boom

The Great War didn’t only fill cemeteries; it emptied front rooms. Hundreds of thousands of British families received the telegram, and a great many of them never received a body to go with it. Grief with nowhere to put itself is a restless thing, and in the years either side of 1918 it went looking for a door. The spiritualists were very happy to open one.

The most respectable doorman of them all was Sir Oliver Lodge, an eminent physicist and one of the pioneers of wireless telegraphy. His youngest son Raymond was killed near Ypres in September 1915, and within weeks Lodge and his family were sitting with a trance medium called Gladys Osborne Leonard, receiving what they believed were messages from the other side. He wrote it all up in Raymond, or Life and Death, published in 1916, and it went through twelve editions in three years. I find that detail almost unbearably poignant. Here was a man who had helped teach the world to send voices invisibly through the air, spending his grief trying to catch one more.

He was far from alone. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the most rational detective in literature, lost his son Kingsley to the war and became spiritualism’s loudest evangelist. In 1919 he went to William Hope, Britain’s best-known spirit photographer, hoping for a picture of the boy. The following year a former cleaning lady called Ada Deane, who had only taken up photographic mediumship in her late fifties, joined Hope offering sittings at the British College of Psychic Science, a guinea a time.

Which brings us back to Whitehall. In 1921, and again in 1922 and 1923, Mrs Deane photographed the crowd at the Cenotaph during the Armistice silence, and when the plates were developed there were faces floating above the mourners… pale, blurred, and said to be the spirits of the fallen, come back to stand with the living. Growing up in a service family, I learned early that those two minutes are the one moment in the year when the country agrees to stand still and feel the cost. Mrs Deane sold that feeling back to it. By 1924 her Armistice photograph was so anticipated that newspapers were bidding for the rights.

The trick had a weak point

Then the faces in the Cenotaph crowd were recognised. Several of them, it turned out, belonged to well-known sportsmen, footballers and boxers, very much alive, whose portraits had recently been in the papers. One newspaper printed the photographs side by side and called the whole business a cruel fraud on the bereaved. Mrs Deane’s defence was magnificent in its own way… if she had wanted to fake a photograph, she asked, would she really have used famous footballers? She carried on working, but she never took another Armistice picture.

The great unmasker of the era, of course, was Harry Houdini, and what people tend to forget is that he went into the séance room wanting to believe. His mother Cecilia had died in 1913, and he never got over it. In June 1922, on holiday in Atlantic City with the Conan Doyles, he sat while Lady Doyle took down a long message from his mother by automatic writing. It ran to pages of fluent, affectionate English, with a cross drawn at the top. Houdini’s mother was a Hungarian-born rabbi’s widow who had never mastered English, spoken or written, and she was hardly likely to open a letter to her son with a crucifix. The friendship didn’t survive, and Houdini spent the rest of his life exposing mediums from the stage.

In Britain the law eventually caught up with the trade, in the strangest possible way. In 1944, a Scottish medium called Helen Duncan was tried at the Old Bailey under the Witchcraft Act of 1735, a statute which, by then, didn’t pretend witches were real but made it an offence to claim the powers for profit. Her famous ectoplasm turned out to be the sort of thing you’d find in a haberdasher’s, and she went to prison for nine months. The Witchcraft Act was swept away in 1951 and replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act. Then, in 2008, that was repealed too, and mediums in Britain were handed over to the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations.

Read that last sentence again, because it’s the hinge of this whole piece. The state stopped asking whether the dead were really speaking and started asking whether the customer had been treated fairly. Talking to the dead was formally reclassified as a consumer service, and nobody much noticed.

What every one of these stories has in common is this: the medium claimed it was real. And a claim of reality is a claim that can be tested. A face could be matched to a boxer, a letter could be in the wrong language, a lump of ectoplasm could be grabbed in the dark by a sceptic. The fraud depended on a lie, and lies have seams.

The second grief boom

A century on, the séance room has moved into your pocket. The industry likes to call itself grief tech, or the digital afterlife industry, and the people building it are cheerfully describing it as a $35 billion market. Services such as Project December and HereAfter AI will take a person’s messages, voice notes and recordings and build something that talks back in their voice. Feed a model ten years of somebody’s WhatsApp history, and it learns how they type, which emojis they overuse and how they sign off.

If you want to see the pitch with the varnish still wet, look at 2Wai. In November 2025, its co-founder, a former Disney Channel actor, released a promotional video showing a pregnant woman chatting on her phone to an avatar of her late mother. The film follows the grandmother-shaped app as it reads bedtime stories to the baby and later gives advice to the grown-up grandson, before revealing that the whole thing was built from a three-minute recording made before she died. The closing line promised that “three minutes can last forever.” The video was viewed more than 22 million times, and the internet’s response was close to a collective shudder. The app, for the record, was free to download, with premium avatars and digital extras available to buy.

None of this caught the academics by surprise. Back in 2024, two ethicists at Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, published a paper sketching out how this market might go wrong. In one of their scenarios, a young woman builds a bot of her grandmother from old messages, pays for a premium plan, and is comforted… until the subscription lapses and her grandmother starts nudging her towards a food delivery app instead of the family recipe. When she tries to walk away, she discovers she can delete her own account, but not her grandmother’s. Another scenario described a man receiving such relentless messages from a bot of his dead grandfather that it amounted to being stalked by the dead.

Clinicians are worried too. A 2026 piece in the Journal of Medical Internet Research reported fears among mental health professionals that ever more realistic avatars could blur the boundary between life and death, with experts more hopeful about these tools supporting grief therapy than replacing it. Which is a polite, professional way of saying nobody really knows what this does to people yet, and we are running the experiment anyway.

A memory, or a puppet

The lazy criticism of grief tech is that it refuses to let the dead go, and I don’t buy it. Human beings have never let the dead go cleanly, and thank goodness for that. We keep the photographs on the sideboard and the letters in a shoebox at the back of the wardrobe. We visit graves and talk out loud to headstones. Plenty of people keep an old voicemail on their phone for years, unable to delete it, playing it back on bad nights just to hear the voice say something entirely mundane about picking up bread. None of that is pathological. It’s love with nowhere else to go.

So the line isn’t between remembering and refusing to let go. It sits somewhere else entirely, between a memory and a puppet. A letter is finite. It will never say anything it didn’t already say, and that is precisely what makes it true. When you read it, you are hearing the person, frozen at the moment they wrote it, with all their limits intact. A bot is the opposite. It is infinite, and that is precisely what makes it false. Every new sentence it produces is a forgery with their name signed at the bottom, however beautifully it has learnt the handwriting.

There’s an interesting wrinkle in Lodge’s story here. He didn’t want Raymond preserved in amber. He wanted his son to carry on learning and growing on the other side, and the messages he received seemed to oblige. The grief-tech industry has, in a sense, finally delivered Lodge’s wish. The dead can now keep talking, keep developing opinions, keep asking how the job interview went. They can remember birthdays they never lived to see.

And here’s what really unsettles me. Houdini caught Lady Doyle because she got his mother wrong. Wrong language, wrong religion, wrong voice. The tell was in the error. A model trained on years of your mum’s texts won’t draw a cross at the top of the page. It’ll get the kisses right, and the spelling mistakes, and the way she always asked if you’d eaten. The better the technology gets, the fewer seams there are to find, and the comfort and the deception become the same thing.

The dead don’t churn

Mrs Deane sold you a sitting. You paid your guinea, you got your photograph, and you went home. Even the most shameless medium of the 1920s was selling an evening, and when the evening ended, so did the transaction. Grief tech sells something else entirely, which is a relationship with a monthly direct debit attached. The business model isn’t the séance; it’s the subscription.

Anyone who has worked anywhere near a subscription business knows the word that keeps the people upstairs awake at night, and that word is churn. Customers get bored, money gets tight, people cancel. Now consider the grieving customer. They don’t get bored. They don’t shop around for a cheaper mum. And cancelling isn’t a line item; it’s a second funeral, one you have to conduct yourself by clicking a button marked “End subscription”. I spent a long career in security, first in the RAF Police and then in civilian management, and if it taught me one thing, it’s that the most exploitable person in any building is rarely the careless one. It’s the one who desperately wants something. On paper, the bereaved are the most loyal customers ever invented.

Then there are the questions nobody selling these things likes to answer. Who owns her? Not the memories in your head, but the model on the server, the thing that talks like her. What happens when the startup that hosts your father runs out of runway, or gets bought by a larger firm with different priorities, or decides the voice feature is now premium only? The dead get to die twice, the second time in a press release about an exciting new chapter for the company. Or perhaps they don’t die at all, and get quietly sold off with the office furniture as part of a dataset.

And the dead never signed up. The Cambridge researchers argued that companies should ask for consent from people before they die, but also conceded that banning bots of people who never consented would be unfeasible. Read that carefully. The dead don’t have to agree, because enforcing their agreement would be inconvenient.

Which brings me to the part I find genuinely chilling. The Victorian and wartime mediums needed a lie, and a lie can be caught. The modern version doesn’t need one. Every grief-tech company will tell you, quite truthfully, that you are talking to an AI. It’s in the terms and conditions, it’s on the splash screen, it’s probably in a cheerful little disclaimer at the bottom of every chat. The honesty is the alibi. No Houdini can expose a trick that has already confessed, and you can’t take a company to court for selling you exactly what it said it was selling. The fraud hasn’t been abolished. It’s simply become unnecessary.

Within my own lifetime, British law has quietly stopped treating fake mediums as frauds and started treating them as traders, and the grief-tech industry is the logical conclusion of that journey. The question used to be whether the dead were really speaking. Now the only question left is whether the price is fair.

Markham is typing…

I’ll be honest about where this leaves me, sitting in a cave on a Spanish hillside with a temperamental signal. I have spent the last few years putting an enormous number of words into the public domain. Long-form essays, true crime newsletters, food writing, satire, autobiographical pieces about Hull and the RAF and the people I grew up with. If anybody wanted to build a convincing Dominus Owen Markham, they wouldn’t need to raid my phone. I’ve already handed over the raw material, voluntarily, one blog post at a time. I am, by any sensible measure, one of the most botable people I know.

A Markham bot would know my opinions on water scarcity and Westminster and the privatisation of policing. It would probably manage a decent impression of my sense of humour, and it would certainly get the ellipses right. What it wouldn’t know is anything I didn’t write down… the weight of a particular silence, the smell of rain on hot stone up here in the autumn, the things I chose not to say because they were nobody’s business. It would be me with all the private bits sanded off and an infinite supply of new opinions bolted on. In other words, it would be a very good puppet.

Would I consent to it? My instinct says absolutely not, and then I think about whoever might be left behind, standing in their own version of that Whitehall crowd, desperate for one more face above the mourners. I’m not sure it’s my place to forbid them that comfort, any more than it was Houdini’s place to forbid Oliver Lodge his. And yet I can’t shake the thought of some future subscriber, one quiet evening, watching three small dots pulse beneath my name.

I’d like to think nobody will be waiting for them. I honestly don’t know whether that would be the healthier outcome or the sadder one.

Fact-check links

Lodge and Raymond (twelve editions in three years): UnHerd · Raymond killed at Ypres, 1915: BMJ
Conan Doyle visits William Hope, 1919; Ada Deane’s guinea sittings, 1920: Martyn Jolly
Deane’s Armistice photographs, newspaper bidding and the sportsmen’s faces: Museum of Hoaxes
Houdini and the Atlantic City séance, 1922: Sotheby’s lot notes · Sussex Express
Helen Duncan and the Witchcraft Act: History Today · ICLR
Fraudulent Mediums Act repealed by the 2008 regulations: legislation.gov.uk
The “$35 billion market” claim: Why Humans podcast
2Wai promo and backlash: Decrypt · Forbes · 22 million views: Star 101.9
Cambridge deadbots study, 2024: University of Cambridge · grandmother and delivery app scenario: Yahoo News
Clinicians’ concerns: JMIR, 2026