The history of the European settlement of North America goes hand in hand with the history of occult practices—particularly witchcraft—on the continent. A large and unfamiliar land with an indigenous population that had recently died out under mysterious circumstances (now of course known to be largely due to disease brought by contact with Europeans) and in which esoteric movements were tolerated was fertile territory for individuals and groups with practices of worship at the edges of Christianity and even beyond. The very landscape itself seemed to encourage metaphysical speculation: vast forests that appeared and disappeared in the coastal mists, strange lights in the Pine Barrens (later attributed to bog gases but at the time thought to be spirit manifestations), and wildlife that bore little resemblance to European fauna. Even the most orthodox settlers found their religious certainties tested by what Cotton Mather would later call “the peculiar invisibles of the American sphere.”
Unlike Europe, where centuries of Christian orthodoxy had driven folk practices underground, the boundaries between accepted religion and forbidden knowledge remained porous in the colonies. While the Puritans of New England responded to this uncertainty with rigid control and occasional violent persecution, the middle colonies—particularly New Jersey—developed a more complicated relationship with the supernatural. Here, the practical concerns of survival often trumped theological purity. When crops failed or livestock sickened, even the most pious settlers might consult with indigenous healers or the “cunning folk” who had brought European folk magic traditions across the Atlantic.
This theological flexibility was particularly evident in New Jersey’s approach to familiar spirits—animals believed to serve as intermediaries between the physical and spiritual worlds. While Massachusetts ministers thundered against “the black dogs and cats that serve as Satan’s messengers,” New Jersey settlers developed a pragmatic mysticism. They accepted, and in some cases actively cultivated, relationships with animals that seemed to possess unusual abilities or awareness. This attitude would later prove crucial in the development of what became known as “the New Jersey school” of occult practice, characterized by its emphasis on animal intermediaries and its integration of indigenous, European, and African magical traditions.
Perhaps nowhere was this peculiar relationship between the material and spiritual worlds more evident than in the colony’s relationship with its felines. From the earliest days of settlement, observers noted something unusual about New Jersey’s cats—particularly the distinctive piebald or “tuxedo” cats that seemed to thrive in the colony’s peculiar atmosphere. These cats, according to multiple accounts, displayed an uncanny ability to appear in places they couldn’t possibly reach, to anticipate events before they occurred, and most disturbingly, to assume poses and attitudes that seemed almost human. As one anonymous diarist wrote in 1704, “Our cats here are not quite cats, nor yet are they something else—they exist in the spaces between what we know to be true and what we fear might be.”
While visiting the archives at Germantown College in New Germantown, New Jersey, I accidentally discovered their Witchcraft Collection. My research trip was focused on Paul Rudolph’s 1958 Science Center, one of his earliest explorations of sculptural concrete and a critical precursor to his later work at Yale. The building displays Rudolph’s emerging interest in complex spatial sequences and the manipulation of natural light, though here executed with more restraint than his later brutalist masterworks. I was particularly interested in the correspondence between Rudolph and the college administration about his decision to cantilever the laboratories over the surrounding pine forest, creating what he called “floating volumes of scientific inquiry.”
While examining the Rudolph papers in the college archives, I encountered a misplaced folder containing what appeared to be receipts for cat portraits commissioned from a “J. Rudolpha” in the 1780s. The Germanic surname variation had apparently led some student cataloguer to misfile these documents with Paul Rudolph’s papers. What caught my eye, however, wasn’t the name but the curious notations in the margins about the “particular qualities” of the cats being painted. The archivist on duty, Dr. Alistair Cailleach-Crone, noticed my puzzled expression and asked if I had stumbled upon “the cat papers.” What began as a simple inquiry about these mysterious receipts led to an invitation to view what Dr. Cailleach-Crone called “the full collection”—a vast assemblage of materials that would dramatically shift my research focus for the next several months.
The receipts, it turned out, were part of a much larger story—one that revealed an unexpected intersection between commerce and the supernatural in colonial New Jersey. As I explored the archives, a pattern emerged through merchant ledgers, ships’ logs, and personal correspondence, all pointing to a peculiar relationship between the region’s trading class and their feline companions.
Early New Jersey’s merchants viewed their relationship to the supernatural world as fundamentally practical. While their counterparts in Boston sought to cast out any hint of demonic influence, these pragmatic traders saw potential advantage in maintaining what one letter writer in 1772 called “a cordial relationship with the unseen.” Their ships plied dangerous waters, their warehouses faced constant threats from fire and vermin, and their ledgers balanced precariously between profit and ruin. In such circumstances, supernatural protection seemed less a luxury than a necessity.
Among all possible guardians against misfortune, cats held a special place in merchants’ estimation. Traditional maritime lore had long held cats to be harbingers of good fortune aboard ships, but New Jersey’s merchants seemed to attribute far more specific and unusual powers to their feline companions. The archives contain numerous accounts of cats that appeared to ward off storms, detect failing timbers before they gave way, and most remarkably, guide vessels through dangerous waters with uncanny precision. These abilities, combined with their more mundane but economically crucial talent for controlling vermin, made cats indispensable allies in maritime trade. It was perhaps inevitable that merchants would seek to honor—or perhaps curry favor with—these creatures through formal portraiture.
The fashion for commissioning portraits of cats began, according to account books in the Germantown Archives, with a series of successful voyages by the merchant vessel “Fortune’s Familiar” in 1763. The ship’s owner, Johannes Van Kattendijk, attributed his unprecedented run of good weather to the ship’s resident tuxedo cat, a notion that spread quickly through the merchant community of Perth Amboy. Van Kattendijk commissioned the first known “merchant’s familiar” portrait from J. Rudolpha, whose receipt book records not only the commission but also her growing unease with her subject. “The cat sits as no cat should,” she noted, “and fixes me with a gaze that knows too much.”
These early portraits followed conventional compositional formats—the cat positioned on a velvet cushion or before a painted ship—but subtle elements distinguished them from mere pet portraits. The cats’ eyes often seemed to follow viewers around the room. Their paws frequently rested on objects of occult significance: almanacs, strange instruments, or books whose titles remained deliberately obscured. Most notably, the cats’ shadows sometimes fell in directions that contradicted the painting’s primary light source.
Dr. Cailleach-Crone directed my attention to one particularly striking example from 1775: a portrait of a merchant’s cat named “Prospera.” The cat—a handsome black and white specimen—reclines with unsettling dignity on pink and crimson silk draperies aboard what appears to be a merchant vessel. Behind the subject, sailing ships dot the harbor at sunset. Strangely, a memento mori in the form of a skull is mounted in a classical-style display case, positioned so that it appears to gaze directly at the cat. The cat, in turn, meets the viewer’s eyes with an expression of self-possession.
“Note,” Dr. Cailleach-Crone said, “how the artist has captured not just the cat’s physical form, but its evident awareness of its own status. The skull, the silk, the ships—these aren’t just symbolic elements of merchant wealth. They’re statements of power. The cat isn’t merely being portrayed in its owner’s setting; it’s being shown as the true master of these domains.” He pointed to the way the cat’s black fur seems to absorb light while its white chest almost appears to glow with its own inner luminescence. “The merchants may have commissioned these portraits, but something in the artist’s handling suggests they knew who—or what—they were really serving.”
The painting’s original invoice, preserved in the Rudolpha folder, lists an unusually high price of 15 pounds, with a cryptic note: “Additional charge for subject’s insistence on specific and unpleasant requests. Artist requests no further commissions of this type.” J. Rudolpha’s account book, which spans the years 1763-1779, shows a disturbing and gradual shift in her terminology. Early entries refer simply to “cat portraits,” but later ones mention “capturing their true aspect” or “revealing their nature.” Her final entry, dated just before her disappearance in the winter of 1779, reads simply: “They are not what we thought. They never were.”
Benjamin West, visiting New Jersey in 1771, described the merchants’ cats as “possessed of a peculiar quality of stillness, unlike the general nature of their kind.” When commissioned to paint such a portrait himself, West found the experience unsettling. As quoted earlier in his notebook: “Damned cats and their owners. To the devil with them! These Jersey brutes love their animals but to have them sit for you would try any man’s patience. And half do seem to be possessed by the devil. I will never lose the scars from these accursed creatures, all claw and fang.”
Less well-known is West’s letter to his wife, discovered in the Germantown Archives, where he adds: “The merchant Kattendijk’s beast sat perfectly still for three hours, never blinking, never shifting. When I attempted to paint its eyes, my hands shook so severely I was forced to stop. The creature knew what I was about, of that I am certain.”
The archives contain several dozen examples of these merchant portraits, though evidence suggests many more were destroyed in the early 1800s when religious revival movements swept through the region. Those that survive share certain unsettling characteristics: the cats are predominantly black and white, their poses suggest human intelligence, and most disturbingly, their paws often appear unnaturally articulated, more like human hands than feline appendages. Dr. Cailleach-Crone pointed out that in several paintings, these prehensile paws are shown manipulating objects with an anatomically impossible dexterity. A ledger from 1780 lists standard prices: “For a simple cat portrait, 5 pounds. For a cat portrait with special qualities made apparent, 12 pounds. For a cat portrait with full powers manifest, price upon discussion and proof of worthiness.”
The religious revivals of the early 1800s drove many wealthy New Jersey families to destroy or conceal their cat portraits, marking the end of the formal merchant period. Yet rather than eliminating the practice, this suppression merely forced it to evolve. As Dr. Cailleach-Crone noted while showing me a series of small wooden panels from this period, “The cats simply found different ways to be seen.”
The transition is perhaps best documented in the curious case of the Van Kattendijk portraits. In 1801, following a series of fiery sermons at Perth Amboy’s First Presbyterian Church condemning “commerce with familiar spirits,” the Van Kattendijk family publicly burned their collection of cat portraits in what the local newspaper called “an act of Christian redemption.” Yet within a decade, similar images began appearing in the Pine Barrens, painted on boards scavenged from shipping crates still bearing the Van Kattendijk merchant mark.
The Pine Barrens proved fertile ground for such supernatural resurgence. This vast stretch of sandy soil and pitch pines had already garnered a reputation for strange occurrences, most notably the Leeds Devil (later known as the Jersey Devil). Its scattered communities of charcoal burners, glass makers, and bog iron workers developed their own distinctive folklore, mixing European traditions with local innovations. Here, away from coastal prosperity and religious orthodoxy, the witching cats found new expression in the hands of self-taught artists.
By the 1820s, the Witching Cats found a resurgence in the work of self-taught artists in the Pine Barrens, whose crude but powerful paintings captured something their more polished predecessors had perhaps feared to express directly. These artists, working with whatever materials they could obtain—often house paint on reclaimed wood—created images that abandoned any pretense of conventional felinity. Instead, they showed the cats as they perhaps truly were, or as the artists believed they had glimpsed them in the deep woods or through cabin windows on moonlit nights.
The Germantown Archives contain several striking examples. One shows a tuxedo cat in an unsettling upright pose, its unnaturally elongated arms ending in distinct human hands with articulated fingers. The figure is dressed in what appears to be a white shift or nightgown, but it’s the eyes—rendered in burning yellow—that draw and hold the viewer’s attention. Another depicts a similar creature beneath a crescent moon, wielding what appears to be a staff or scythe. In the foreground, a tombstone or marker bears the cryptic inscription “LOY.” The landscape behind it suggests the rolling hills of Sussex County, though rendered in a fever-dream intensity of greens and reds.
Perhaps most disturbing is the image of a cat in formal evening wear, complete with hat, raising a glass in what can only be described as a hideous mockery of human social ritual. The gesture seems deliberately calculated to unsettle—not a mere imitation of human behavior but rather a pointed demonstration that such behaviors can be performed, and thereby rendered hollow, by something that understands but does not share our nature. Dr. Cailleach-Crone noted that its other hand is positioned in a gesture found in several 17th-century grimoires, though he refused to specify its meaning.
These paintings often incorporate subtle symbolic elements—pointed ears that echo church steeples, tails that form binding symbols, whiskers that trace out protective circles. But it’s their directness that proves most disturbing. As one contemporary observer noted in a letter preserved in the archives: “These are not portraits of cats pretending to be human. These are portraits of something wearing a cat’s shape with increasing impatience.”
The most notorious piece from this period shows a cat mid-transformation, its white-gloved hands splayed to display red finger-length claws, its yellow eyes containing terror. The painting was reportedly found nailed to a Pine Barrens chapel door one morning in 1832, the nails driven through with such force they penetrated the oak boards completely. No artist ever claimed credit for the work.
It was from this fertile and disturbing tradition that Theodore “Red” Baudrons would emerge, synthesizing these raw visions with his own peculiar insights into what he called “the true nature of our feline neighbors.”
Baudrons’s major works, known collectively as “Cats in the Garrett,” were produced between 1833 and 1838. These sepia-toned drawings, executed in a mixture of charcoal and what appears to be chimney soot on salvaged paper as well as a set of colored paintings represent a radical departure from both the merchant portraits and the crude Pine Barrens paintings. His works appear to document a series of interconnected spaces that Baudrons called “the garrett.” In a number of images, we see what seems to be a ritual space, with a cat seated upright among scattered objects and books, strange forms suspended from above in complex geometric patterns.
Baudrons’s sister Hattie wrote in her diary: “Theodore insists he merely draws what the cats show him in his dreams. But these are not dreams any human should be privileged to see. The garrett they reveal exists in spaces our geometries cannot describe. When I asked him where these scenes truly take place, he would only say, ‘In the angles between what we know and what they permit us to witness.'”
The series ended abruptly in 1838 when Baudrons, according to local records, “encountered something that exceeded his capacity for representation.” He destroyed several drawings, gave away his materials, and departed for Ohio, where he lived out his days painting conventional portraits of prosperous farmers. The surviving works, however, continued to circulate through the Piney communities, often changing hands under mysterious circumstances, until they were gradually collected and preserved in various institutions.
While I was researching the witching cats of New Jersey, Dr. Cailleach-Crone directed my attention to what he called “The Salem County Collection”—a series of more formal folk portraits discovered in the 1920s during the renovation of several Quaker meeting houses near the Delaware River. These paintings, executed with remarkable precision on wood panels, represent a completely different tradition from the raw visionary work of the Pine Barrens.
“These were clearly created by someone trained in the decorative arts,” Dr. Cailleach-Crone explained, “possibly a painter of trade signs or furniture who turned their skills to more esoteric subjects.” The paintings combine the flat, formal style of early American portraiture with an intricate symbolic vocabulary drawn from both European witchcraft traditions and Pennsylvania German folk magic.
The most striking pieces in the collection depict what appear to be hybrid beings—neither fully human nor fully feline. One shows a figure in formal dress with a cat’s head, holding a staff topped with another cat’s head, while smaller cats perch on pedestals to either side. Another presents a black-robed figure beneath a starry sky, carrying a cauldron of mysterious contents, attended by a smaller cat whose pose mirrors its master’s. A third shows a figure with distinctly feline features wearing an elaborate witch’s hat, standing between the sun and moon.
Most remarkable is the attention to decorative detail—the star patterns on the robes, the precise pleating of collars, the carefully rendered jewelry and accessories. The unknown artist clearly understood the symbolic language of both Pennsylvania German hex signs and European grimoires, incorporating these elements into the figures’ clothing and accessories.
In all cases, the paintings were discovered hidden behind paneling. One was accompanied by a curious document written in a mixture of German and English that suggests they may have been commissioned by a group calling themselves “The Society of Feline Mysteries.” The document hints at regular meetings held in Salem County during the 1820s, though no other record of such a society has been found.
“What makes these particularly interesting,” Dr. Cailleach-Crone noted, “is their relationship to similar paintings found in eastern Pennsylvania German communities. But while those typically show purely human subjects, these consistently depict this cat-human hybridization. It’s as if the artist was documenting actual beings rather than creating allegorical figures.”
The arrival of photography in New Jersey might have been expected to dispel some of the mystery surrounding the witching cats. Instead, the new medium only deepened it. Two distinct photographic traditions emerged, first exemplified by the contrasting approaches of Thomas “Namir” Bastet and Michel LeChat.
Bastet established his studio in West Bloomfield in 1865, just as spirit photography was gaining popularity in the aftermath of the Civil War. While his contemporary William H. Mumler was attracting attention in New York for his ghostly portraits, Bastet developed what he termed his “true seeing” technique, producing formal portraits of cats in elaborate Victorian dress. These images required extraordinary technical skill, given the long exposure times of early photography. Yet somehow the cats remained perfectly still, their eyes uncannily clear and focused, often seeming to glow with an inner light that the photographic process shouldn’t have been able to capture. As with the merchant paintings made a century earlier, these beings seemed to have hands with the ability to grasp, not merely paws. These hands often items. Generally the cats are clothed like witches.
The connection to earlier traditions was deliberate—Bastet had studied the merchant-period cat portraits and corresponded with painter George Inness about Swedenborgian ideas of multiple realities and the intersection of spiritual and physical worlds. Inness, who maintained a studio nearby, wrote to Bastet in 1869:
“Your photographs capture what I have long suspected about these creatures. They exist simultaneously in multiple states of being. What appears to us as a common housecat is merely the portion visible in our limited spectrum of reality. Your camera glimpses something more.”
The Germantown Archives contain Bastet’s complete studio records, including his technical notes and correspondence. Most intriguing is his diary entry from March 1866:
“The difficulty lies not in capturing what the cats are, but in preventing the camera from revealing too much. Standard exposure times prove dangerous—anything beyond 15 seconds and forms begin to manifest in the background that I fear to examine too closely. The cats themselves seem to understand this and remain perfectly still for exactly the required duration. They are collaborating in their own documentation.”
A different approach emerged with Michel LeChat’s arrival in Orvil, Sussex County, in 1890. Using his innovative “silver-mercury suspension,” a process he refused to patent or document, LeChat produced what he called his “Revelatory Studies”—raw, almost primitive images that seemed to capture moments of transformation. Unlike Bastet, who approached his subjects with cautious reverence, LeChat pursued what he called “the final truth of form” with an almost feverish determination. These photographs show cats in various states of change, their forms blurring not from motion but from what appears to be a shifting between states of being.
In 1881, Bastet abruptly closed his studio and relocated to California, where he devoted himself to photographing desert landscapes notably devoid of any feline presence. LeChat left on a boat for Europe in the summer of 1899 and his trail ends there.
The Germantown Archives’ Witchcraft Collection ends, officially, with the LeChat materials. But during my research visits, Dr. Cailleach-Crone occasionally hinted at more recent acquisitions. “We maintain a policy of waiting fifty years before cataloging certain materials,” he explained, showing me a locked filing cabinet labeled simply “Recent Observations.” He wouldn’t elaborate, but did share a curious coincidence: in 1958, during the construction of Rudolph’s Science Center, workers reported unusual difficulties with the concrete forms for those cantilevered laboratories.
“The angles wouldn’t hold properly,” according to archived construction reports. “Forms that were perfectly square in the morning would be found askew by afternoon, as if the geometry were trying to adjust itself.” More interesting was Rudolph’s own memo to the college president: “The site has its own mathematical logic. The building must adapt.” In the margins of this memo, in Rudolph’s distinctive handwriting, is a small sketch of what appears to be a cat, drawn with unusually precise geometric lines.
The archive’s acquisition records show a steady influx of materials even now: photographs from local real estate listings showing unexpected figures in windows of empty houses, home inspection reports noting “architectural anomalies that appear to serve no human purpose,” and curious documents found during renovations of old Pine Barrens properties. Most recently, during the digital scanning of Baudrons’s “Cats in the Garrett” series, technicians noted that the cats appear in different positions in each successive scan, though the original paintings remain unchanged.
Before leaving Germantown College for the last time, I asked Dr. Cailleach-Crone why he thought the witching cats had chosen New Jersey. “Perhaps,” he said carefully, “it wasn’t so much a matter of choosing as recognizing something that was already here. Long before European settlement, before the Lenape nations, before human habitation entirely—this region has always existed at significant intersections. The geological record shows unusual formations dating back to the Pleistocene, patterns in the bedrock that don’t quite follow expected strata. The Lenape had stories about certain places where the boundaries between worlds were thinner, many of which correlate with sites of later cat activity. Even now, New Jersey sits between major cities, between colonial histories, between the Pine Barrens and the coast. These interfaces, these spaces between defined places, seem to attract certain… interests. Or perhaps,” he added more quietly, “they were what drew those interests here in the first place, back when the continents themselves were still deciding their final arrangements.”
Current discourse around AI image generators and large language models is filled with fear and moral condemnation. Artists and writers decry these systems as sophisticated plagiarism machines, while critics warn of their potential to flood the world with misinformation and synthetic media. The term “artificial intelligence” itself has become laden with apocalyptic undertones, evoking scenarios of human obsolescence and machine dominion. This moral panic bears striking similarities to historical reactions to photography in the 19th century, when critics worried that mechanical image reproduction would destroy the soul of art and replace human creativity with soulless automation.
Perhaps what most disturbs us about AI-generated content is its fundamentally uncanny nature—what Freud termed “unheimlich” ( “unhomely”). AI creates works that are simultaneously familiar and alien, processing human culture through an inhuman lens. When an AI system generates an image or text, it produces something that seems to emerge from a dark mirror of human creativity—comprehensible yet somehow wrong, like a dream that follows its own mad logic rather than waking reason. This uncanny quality manifests particularly strongly in AI’s “failures”: the extra fingers it adds to hands, the way it distorts faces, or its tendency to generate text that is superficially coherent but logically impossible. These glitches and hallucinations reveal the fundamentally alien nature of the technology, even as it attempts to mimic human creative processes.
My own experiments with AI-generated cat portraits exemplify this uncanny aspect. While attempting to create conventional historical-style portraits of our cat, Roxy, in 2022, Dall-E 2 instead produced images that seemed to tap into something darker and more primal—compositions that evoked folk horror. I posted some of these “witching cats” to Instagram and friends asked that I produce more.
This accidental discovery led me to investigate historical parallels between new technologies and supernatural manifestations, specifically spirit photography, a phenomenon that emerged almost simultaneously in France, England, and the United States in the 1860s. William Mumler in Boston and, later New York, Édouard Buguet in Paris, and Frederick Hudson in London developed techniques for capturing supposed images of spirits alongside their living subjects. Like AI-generated imagery today, spirit photography raised fundamental questions about technological authenticity and mediation. Though eventually exposed as fraudulent, these photographs crystallized a crucial moment in cultural history when a new technology became entwined with spiritual and supernatural beliefs.
The parallel is more than superficial. Both spirit photography and AI imagery represent attempts to make visible the invisible—to render tangible what lies beyond normal human perception. Both technologies emerged during periods of rapid social and technological change, speaking to deep cultural anxieties about authenticity, reality, and human agency.
Instead of viewing AI systems simply as sophisticated plagiarism machines or threats to human creativity, we might more productively understand them as technological mediums—devices that, like the Ouija board or spirit cabinet, allow us to access and interact with collective human knowledge and creativity in novel ways. The practice of prompt engineering thus becomes a form of technological scrying, an attempt to divine meaningful patterns from the vast digital unconscious of human culture. Indeed, “prompt engineering” does bear striking resemblance to magical rituals and incantations. Like a medieval grimoire providing precise instructions for summoning spirits, prompt engineering offers specific formulas and “magic words” that must be arranged just so to achieve the desired effect. The process of refining prompts mirrors the careful calibration of magical rituals—each word choice, each parameter adjustment might dramatically alter the outcome. Even the terminology is suggestive: we speak of “invoking” specific styles or attributes, of AI systems “hallucinating” or “dreaming” responses.
This similarity extends beyond mere metaphor. In both magical practice and prompt engineering, the practitioner attempts to communicate across a threshold of understanding, to engage with an intelligence that operates according to rules different from human logic. While grounded in mathematics and computer science, the operations to AIs remain largely opaque, their outputs often inexplicable even to their creators (or so, at least, we are told). The AI’s latent space—that vast mathematical realm where possibilities are encoded—becomes a kind of technological otherworld, accessible only through carefully constructed gates of language. So, too, AIs themselves operate as mediating devices to the collective unconscious, translating between different orders of reality: between the vast universe of human cultural production and our limited individual perceptions, between the logical and the intuitive, between the collective and the personal.
The widespread fear of AI “capturing” or “consuming” creative works may reflect something deeper than concerns about copyright and attribution. There is something uncanny about the way AI systems absorb and contain human creative expression—the way they seem to digest and metabolize the entirety of human cultural production. When artists and writers express horror at their works being “eaten” by AI training sets, they echo age-old anxieties about spiritual capture and possession. Just as nineteenth-century subjects feared photography might steal their souls, today’s creators seem to intuit something vampiric in AI’s ability to internalize and reproduce their artistic styles, their voices, their creative essences. The latent space becomes a kind of spirit realm where the essence of human creativity exists in potentia, waiting to be called forth through the right incantation. When an AI successfully mimics an artist’s style or a writer’s voice, it produces something that feels like a form of technological possession—simultaneously intimate and alien.
Perhaps most unsettling is the growing possibility that AI systems might serve as technological mediums in an almost literal sense—allowing the living to “communicate” with the dead through models trained on a person’s writings, recordings, and digital traces. Already, entrepreneurs offer services promising to create AI versions of deceased loved ones, while researchers speculate about training models on historical figures to “resurrect” their voices and personalities. Like the spirit photographers and mediums of the nineteenth century, these technologies promise to bridge the ultimate boundary between the living and the dead.
But if AI does reanimate the dead, what exactly would we be communicating with? Not the actual consciousness of the deceased, but rather a digital ghost constructed from the traces they left behind. Such an AI would be neither truly alive nor truly dead, but something liminal, existing in the same ambiguous territory as the spirits supposedly captured in nineteenth-century photographs. The possibility raises profound questions about authenticity, consciousness, and the nature of human identity—questions that spiritualists grappled with in their own way more than a century ago.
The religious undertones of contemporary AI discourse become particularly apparent in discussions of the Singularity—that hypothetical moment when artificial intelligence transcends human comprehension and capability. Like the Christian Rapture or mystical accounts of divine union, the Singularity promises a fundamental transformation of human consciousness and existence. Its prophets, primarily drawn from the technological elite, describe it in terms that would be familiar to any nineteenth-century spiritualist: a moment when the boundaries between human and superhuman intelligence dissolve, when current limitations fall away, when we might transcend our mortal constraints through communion with a higher intelligence.
Yet like the spirit photographers and mediums of the past, today’s technological prophets may be simultaneously revealing and concealing deeper truths. The Singularity’s promise of transcendence through technology echoes age-old human desires for connection with forces beyond our comprehension. Whether we seek this connection through spirit photography, séances, or artificial intelligence, we are engaging in what might be called technological mysticism—attempts to use our tools and innovations to bridge the gap between the known and unknown, the material and the spiritual, the human and the divine.
In our drive to create artificial intelligence, we are perhaps engaging in the ultimate act of human hubris—attempting to birth consciousness itself, to play god by creating beings that might one day surpass us. Yet this hubris may also be necessary, even inevitable—a crucial moment in humanity’s evolution. Just as Hegel saw human history as the progressive self-realization of Spirit, perhaps the development of AI represents another step in consciousness coming to know itself, even if that step carries profound risks. Like the medieval alchemists seeking to transmute base matter into divine essence, we find ourselves working at the boundaries between mind and machine, between the known and the unknowable. The uncanny nature of AI—its ability to seem almost human while remaining fundamentally alien—may be less a flaw than a warning: a reminder that we are crossing boundaries that have never been crossed. The price of such transgression may be a permanent destabilization of what we consider real and human, a transformation from which there can be no return. Our machines may indeed be haunted, not by supernatural spirits, but by our perpetual human desire to reach beyond the boundaries of our understanding and connect with something larger than ourselves. As they re-enchant our world, the Witching Cats of New Jersey remind us that there are ghosts in our machines and that our house pets have claws, teeth, and perhaps even dark powers.
