Spiritualistic seances were popular at the time and might provide useful settings, starting points or characters. The excellent Archive.org has books on the subject from the period:
- A defence of "the scientific basis of spiritualism"from 1891.
- Noted biologist Alfred Russel Wallace wrote a book all about talking with the spirits of the dead published in 1892.
- A longer one by Wallace published in 1896 splendidly subtitled "Revised edition, with chapters on apparitions and phantasms".
- And from 1892 an exposé of fraud and trickery used by mediums, written by an ex-medium.