French author Victor Hugo spent the early 1850s in political exile on the island of Jersey, where he became obsessed with table-turning spiritualism and conducted hundreds of seances to contact the dead.

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French author Victor Hugo spent the early 1850s in political exile on the island of Jersey, where he became obsessed with table-turning spiritualism and conducted hundreds of seances to contact the dead. He claimed to have held deeply profound, philosophical conversations with the spirits of Shakespeare, Galileo, Jesus Christ, and an entity calling itself the Shadow of the Sepulchre. It is honestly pretty convenient that every single cosmic entity and historical genius he summoned from the afterlife just happened to speak fluent French and shared his exact, highly specific political opinions regarding the contemporary French monarchy