apportering

Apportering, also spelled apporting, is a claimed psychic or spiritualist phenomenon in which an object, known as an apport, appears or is retrieved during a séance. The item is said to have been produced from an unseen source or carried to the participants from a distance, sometimes in a way that suggests contact with a spirit or non-physical agency. Proponents describe apporting as evidence of psychic influence, intelligent forces, or the medium’s purported supernatural powers.

The term originates from the French apport, meaning “brought,” and is commonly used in spiritualist literature and parapsychology to distinguish the produced object from ordinary items. The phenomenon was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries during the growth of modern spiritualism, with reports appearing in European and North American circles. Researchers in this period, including members of the Society for Psychical Research, catalogued apport episodes, but interpretations varied widely and remained controversial.

Claims about how apporting occurs range from the intervention of spirits or trans-physical entities to room- or subject-specific psychokinesis. Skeptics point to natural explanations such as staged concealment, misdirection, or pre-hidden objects, and note that many reports lack verifiable documentation or reproducibility. In controlled settings, efforts to demonstrate genuine apporting have not yielded consistent, independently verifiable results, leading mainstream science to regard apportering as a fringe topic within parapsychology.

See also: parapsychology, mediumship, materialization, teleportation.