PORTLAND —The Victoria Mansion isn’t haunted. At least, that’s what Stacia Hanscom, director of education and public programs, says.

But the mansion, a mid-19th century national historic landmark, welcomed spirits Saturday for a one-day fair to kick off the Halloween season. Featuring divination, a spooky poem performance, a visit from Dracula and more, visitors came to “A Bizarre Victorian Bazaar: An Exhibition of Oddities and the Obscure” to immerse themselves in the October mood and learn about a lesser known side of Victorian history — the gothic.

“It’s looking at the oddities and the things that we think are strange today, but that the Victorians believed in and tried,” Hanscom said. “They were experimenting.”

A costumed juggler paced around the mansion’s lawn, throwing pins. People lined up for tarot card readings and fortune telling under a tent. A mummy, which a party of Victorians would have been eager to unwrap, lay inside for viewing.

Bunny Rose, a tarot cart reader from Gorham, shuffled her deck of tarot cards and spread them out on the table.

She said the Victorians used tarot cards and other forms of divination to explore the rise of spiritualism. Some wanted to connect to people they had lost in the Civil War, and others were trying to bridge the gap between traditional religion and emerging science, Rose explained.

Katherine Doughty facilitated a divination reading called automatic drawing, where she placed a black cloth over a client’s hand and let them blindly draw on a paper underneath, letting their subconscious guide them. In the Victorian era, a medium would have done an automatic drawing themselves after connecting to a spirit.

“There’s a feeling the whole Halloween season, what we call ‘in between the worlds,'” Doughty said. “There’s more electricity and energy; there’s more opportunity for that in this time.”

A “cabinet of curiosities” stocked with keys, miniature mirrors, shells, dollhouse furniture, tiny shoes and other small treasures demonstrated “the hoarding nature of Victorian life” and a “mishmash of ideas,” said Anatole Brown from the Dyer Library and Saco Museum.

He said a few of the objects were “signs of death,” including a corvid skull, or a crow’s skull.

“A corvid skull is a definite form of occultism,” Brown said.

By the lawn’s edge, a basket of tiny “fire lighters” filled up as Andrew Harris repeatedly demonstrated how to fold the particularly flammable contraptions out of newspapers, which were “everywhere” and cheap in Victorian days.

Harris, who usually impersonates Charles Dickens, multitasked, also reading Penny Dreadfuls —cheap, serial literature produced in Great Britain — to interested passersby. The subjects of the stories were sensational, focused on crime or the supernatural. Since many Victorians were illiterate, people would read them out loud on the street for pennies.

Using the full range of his dynamic actor’s voice, Harris read a passage from the perspective of a dead man who had just been buried.

“If he (a Victorian) was a good reader, he could make a living at it,” Harris said. “A penny would have gone a long way.”

Not every part of the event was ominous. Sullivan House Bakery brought Victorian-themed treats, namely a “Victoria Sponge,” and costume designer Anna Halloran presented on Victorian fashion.

Nancy Noble, having just finished an oracle card reading, said it made her feel optimistic. She retired four months ago and is in a time of transition. Unlike a Victorian, she took a picture of her result with her phone to further study it later.

“I liked that it wasn’t like, here’s a death card,” Noble said.