Ask the Spirits: Laura Lee Bahr’s Readercon 2026 Talk & Reading

Watch the full reading here: https://youtu.be/JSZzvqyfoR4 

“When you write historical fiction, you don’t just research from a desk – sometimes you have to go stand where it happened.” That’s how author Laura Lee Bahr opened her talk and reading at Readercon 2026, titled “Ask the Spirits” – and by the end of the hour, the room had done a little more than sit and listen.

A Little Séance Before the Séance

Bahr began by asking the audience to picture Lilydale, New York – the real spiritualist hamlet she visited while researching her novel, The Knocking. Lilydale doesn’t require residents to be mediums, she explained, but it does require them to be members of the spiritualist church in order to own property. Bahr had arrived before the season officially opened, in the middle of a mediumship training, and found herself repeatedly asked, “Are you a medium?” Her answer was always no – she was a writer. But she told the Readercon audience that the line between the two had started to blur for her: a writer, she said, sits in a space, opens herself to some force moving through her, and tries to bring a message through. “That's not nothing like what a medium does,” she said.

From there, Bahr led the room through a short guided moment, asking attendees to notice the “magic” already surrounding them – electric lights, a microphone, air conditioning – the kind of everyday technology their ancestors might have called miraculous, or demonic. After settling the room into stillness, breath, and heartbeat, she moved the audience from the present moment into the fall of 1850.

Into the Book: The Knocking

Bahr then read from The Knocking, sharing the scene in which her narrator, E.A. Howe – the third-ever newspaper woman in America – unexpectedly ends up tucking eleven-year-old Kathy Fox into bed and hearing the story behind the knocking: a peddler, a landlord with something to hide, and two young sisters whose late-night encounter with a restless spirit would give rise to an entire religious movement.

In the novel, Howe has come to newspaper magnate Horace Greeley seeking his support against the Fugitive Slave Act, only to find him more interested in what the spirits have to say about politics than in her own arguments. She instead finds herself drawn into Kathy Fox’s world  – the raps on the floor, the alphabet spelled out letter by letter, a dead man’s story told through a child’s knuckles on the wood.

Belief, Feminism, and the Fox Sisters

The Q&A that followed turned to a question Bahr said she keeps returning to: what does belief give people, and what does it take from them?

Bahr, who was raised in a religious, insular community she later left, said her fascination with belief itself is what first drew her to the Fox sisters. She acknowledged the fraud that has long been associated with the origins of American Spiritualism, but argued the movement was also genuinely radical for its time. Citing the idea that “not every feminist was a spiritualist, but every spiritualist was a feminist,” Bahr noted that Spiritualism gave women a public voice at a moment when women were largely barred from speaking in public – being “taken over by the spirit” functioned, in effect, as permission to speak. Many of the same women active in the Spiritualist movement, she added, were also deeply involved in abolitionism, a connection she said sits at the heart of The Knocking.

Asked how an actor comes to write about mediums, Bahr pointed to her own background on stage. She described a specific, almost eerie sensation of inhabiting a character in a theater – something moving through a performer that isn’t quite “themselves.” That sensation, she said, felt familiar as she researched Kathy and Maggie Fox, particularly Kathy, whom Bahr described as the more overlooked of the two sisters next to Maggie’s larger public story. “I wanted to excavate her,” she said.

Bahr also confirmed details of the upcoming sequel, Love Letters from the Dead, which moves the story to 1862 in Washington City (not yet officially incorporated as Washington, D.C. at the time). Where Hydesville and 1850s New York required extensive digging to research, she said, 1862 Washington presented the opposite challenge: an overwhelming abundance of material, from the era’s photography boom to a flood of surviving letters. “I feel like I could write ten books just about Washington in that year,” Bahr told the audience.

The Book Is Almost Here

The Knocking, a gothic historical novel centered on Spiritualism, journalism, and the political upheavals of mid-19th-century America, releases July 14, 2026 from Little A. An audiobook edition and hard cover edition are also available.

Add it on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/244081752-the-knocking