My fieldwork concerned belief and practice in Spiritualism in contemporary England. There has not been, as far as I know, any recently anthropological investigation concerning Spiritualism in western societies. The exception is Swatos' study of a famous Icelandic medium, but still, that study is not contemporary. My choice of ethnographic region was England because Britain was the first European country which opened itself for Spiritualism when it first came from the US to Europe in the late 19.th century.

Then, in the last part of the 19.th century and the first part of the 20.th century, Spiritualism grew rapidly and spread to all parts of the population in England and in the continental Europe.

All the spiritualists I have spoken to agrees on this: do not use the Ouija-table in your seances. That's because you don't have any control with whom or what you might be able to come in contact with.
If not the spirits should be dangerous, don't forget what the human mind might be able to...As a general rule: never, ever try to make any seance alone! That is really dangerous.

But anyhow; using a Ouija-table or practising table-tilting is one way to try to develop mediumism, or to get the first contact from the other side. The trick is to not attach to deep reliability to the messages given, since they, as told above, could be corrupt in many ways. Also, it is essential to develop a circle (for the purpose of a sitting) with good conditions (see the Noah's Ark Society) and try to attend regular sittings. The quality of the sittings depends on time, and some of the best mediums have spent a lot of years developing their gifts. Don't expect anything, since every sitting (seance) is to be considered as an experiment. Also bear in mind that physical mediumship is far more rare than mental mediumship (as platform mediums in spiritualist churches).

Consider the following event: Someone in you (r circle!) should fall into trance during a seance, stay cool. Maybe the spirits appear through a control-spirit through the medium (in trance), and the communication might be open. Usually the medium does not remember anything from the seance, as far as I know. The eventually mediums must be treated well, since the medium him/her self will then not be able to watch their own achievements, unless you get the permission to tape-record the seance.

Duncans case: A warning: The famous Scottish medium Helen Duncan was exposed to flashlight from a small army of journalists during her last seance, when she was in trance. No one had given any permission to take photos. Well, this was Duncans last seance. Later she passed over.
(according to spiritualists ectoplasm will disappear quickly when exposed to white light, and a fast dissolving of ectoplasm back into, specially the medium, will cause harm. It is said that this process will burn the medium, and Duncan had burning marks on her tummy from where the ectoplasm appeared and disappeared.), and her death (and imprisonment because of witchcraft(!)) made her the first martyr of Spiritualism.  

Ectoplasm: During physical seances, according to the spiritualists, the spirits use a psychic substance that they extract and build from the medium (in trance) and in smaller quantities from the spectators (the sitters), which is called ectoplasm. This substance can seriously harm the medium if exposed to sharp white light, when the substance will subtract too fast back into the medium, as mentioned in the Duncan case above. 
Ectoplasm is the substance from which the spirits form materialization's and are able to make physical phenomena occur. That is one of the reasons why it is important to practice safe physical mediumship. The Noah's Ark Society (named after the medium Noah Zerdin) can teach you how to practice safe physical mediumship.