When it came time for John Seybold to place the ring on his bride’s finger, he was given a warning: he must not touch any other part of her body or risk death.

That should have been enough to alert the 71-year-old retired Kansas farmer that things were not as they seemed, but love does weird things to people. He proceeded with the ceremony, held in a darkened séance room, and later sat during a festive wedding dinner next to an empty chair reserved for his spectral bride.

Seybold was in love with “Sarah,” the ghost of a girl he had known in his youth back in Ohio, and he trusted the spirit medium who had summoned her from the great beyond.

The medium, 36-year-old Nellie Moore, had been holding classes in spiritualism in Wichita for the curious and the credulous. She had introduced other

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