Stella Cranshaw’s London sittings with Harry Price produced one of the most detailed early twentieth-century records of claimed physical mediumship. Price’s 1924 report describes moving and broken tables, musical instruments sounding beneath a table, lights, cooling and an apparent prediction of a newspaper advertisement. It also records changes of apparatus, unsuccessful tests and a quieter sitting after a change of venue. Reading those particulars gives a more useful case than a list of wonders.
The main document is Price’s account of thirteen sittings in 1923, published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. Later experiments in 1926–1928 belong to the same history of Cranshaw’s mediumship and are noted here without treating them as additional canonical cases. The report is an investigator’s claim about what happened under his arrangements, not an independent modern demonstration of a paranormal mechanism.
A nurse and an experimental circle
Price introduced Stella C as a young hospital nurse and dispenser who had not previously sat with a research circle. His description of her earlier experiences—occasional breezes, raps, lights and small-object movements—came from what he had learned about her before the tests. Those accounts should be distinguished from the sittings he actually attended. He also corrected the suggestion that she worked without payment: she received compensation related to her ordinary employment.
The first sitting took place on 22 March 1923. Price used a room next to the offices of Light, the Spiritualist periodical. Regular participants included Mercy Phillimore, L. E. Pratt, Eileen Garrett, Nellie Tom Gallon, Colonel W. W. Hardwick and others. Visitors included Eric Dingwall and members of the Society for Psychical Research. Their participation shows that the sittings were witnessed and discussed; it does not make every interpretation in Price’s narrative a finding of those organisations.
Lighting, control and the written record
The room was generally lit by a sixty-watt lamp behind red photographic glass, sometimes reduced or switched off. Price used a musical box and, in earlier sittings, incense. He explained that he wanted conditions which he thought would encourage results, rather than beginning with brighter white illumination. The choice is relevant both to the historical setting and to how confidently hidden movements could be excluded.
Price usually sat on Cranshaw’s left and Pratt on her right, controlling a hand and foot on each side. Other sitters linked hands and kept their feet in contact. The door was locked and the key removed. Nets, trellis barriers and specially constructed tables were introduced as the series progressed. These were deliberate safeguards as described by the investigator, but the strength of each observation still depends on the conditions of that sitting rather than on a general claim that control was perfect throughout.
After the first session, Price used consecutively numbered forms. Notes, often taken by H. W. Pugh, were assembled into a report within two hours, typed in triplicate and submitted to the sitters for signature or comment. He recorded times, lighting, health, temperature, pulse and seating. That procedure gives the narrative a recognisable documentary basis. The published account remains a compilation prepared by Price, and readers need to distinguish the reports from his enthusiastic explanatory remarks.
Tables and a developing apparatus
In the first sitting, the table tipped and moved while hands touched its surface. Price reported three complete lifts after the red light was extinguished, with some daylight entering through the window screen. A pale column of light was reported by Garrett rather than by all sitters. In later sessions a lighter table was used, followed by a structure with a protected inner compartment and a flap in the top.
One table broke during the third sitting. In discussing it, Price included Hardwick’s description of the order in which supports failed and the remaining structure was held steady by fingers. A broken object is a surviving consequence of an episode, but does not by itself identify the force that broke it. The testimony about contact, illumination and sequence is therefore as important as the damaged furniture.
By the ninth sitting, Price was testing his telekinetoscope. Its contact-maker sat inside a brass cup sealed with a soap film and covered by glass. Closing the contact should light a red indicator elsewhere on the table. Price reported that the indicator lit briefly and that Pugh found the film and covering intact. The description preserves a specific experimental claim. Price’s further assertion that this absolutely excluded fraud or error is his interpretation; the observed lamp signal and his explanation of what it established are different propositions.
The temperature figures need careful reading
A self-registering thermometer was mounted high on a wall, away from the circle. Price associated the strongest table movements with cooling. His table, however, distinguishes the temperature at the beginning, the intermediate minimum and the reading at the end. For the fifth sitting, 19 April, it gives 63.5°F initially, a minimum of 43°F and 64.5°F at the finish. The fall from the starting point is therefore 20.5°F; 21.5°F is the rise from the minimum to the finish.
That distinction prevents a figure from one column being presented as something it is not. Price’s comparative table uses the larger intermediate variation when ranking the sittings. A relationship between reported activity and a thermometer curve would still require scrutiny of calibration, local conditions and the method of comparing episodes before it could identify a transfer of psychic energy. The publication provides the readings and Price’s theory; it does not independently establish that theory.
The newspaper-advertisement claim
The fourth sitting, on 12 April, included a reported vision of a Daily Mail page dated 19 May 1923, large lettering involving Andrew Salt, a boy, a man and white powder. Price connected it with the later Andrews’ Liver Salt advertisement showing a distressed boy and spilled product. He wrote that the details had been recorded and signed at the sitting, and that he subsequently contacted the manufacturers and newspaper about the advertisement’s planning.
The correspondence as described by Price is part of the claim’s evidential trail. Some details were treated as literal matches, while the supposed doctor was interpreted symbolically in relation to the product’s medicinal purpose. That mixture matters: a symbolic match has a different status from an exact advance description. This treatment preserves the alleged prediction without assuming that Price’s assessment of its specificity, information routes or impossibility has been independently established.
Weaker results and later sittings
The eleventh sitting includes negative results with the telekinetoscope and other equipment. It also records disagreement over marks on a sooted plate: one sitter thought they were already present before the session. At the twelfth sitting, held after a break and in rooms supplied by the SPR, the light was brighter and fewer effects were described. These details prevent the record being represented as a uniformly successful sequence.
There is a dating inconsistency worth retaining rather than silently correcting. The temperature table labels the last sitting 4 October, while the heading of the thirteenth sitting in the transcription reads 14 October. Both are in 1923, and no exact day is needed to assign the incident year. Price ended his report with Cranshaw’s decision to stop because of her work and the tiring effect of the sessions.
The SPR’s later overview describes renewed sittings in 1926–1928 and points to the archive and subsequent publications. Those later series are included in the case’s year list. Their complete original protocols have not been audited here, and this article does not imply that the first series ended the history of the claim.
Assessment, archive and location
The outcome is Insufficient evidence. Price’s detailed record documents what an experimental circle reported, including safeguards and failures, but does not independently establish the cause of the claimed effects. The red-light and dark conditions and reliance on the participants’ accounts limit retrospective checking. This classification does not accuse Cranshaw of fraud, invent a mechanical explanation or treat a lack of an exposed trick as proof of psychic action.
The map pin is an approximate Queen Square/Bloomsbury reference for the early London setting. A contemporary 1923 issue of Light gives the London Spiritualist Alliance’s Queen Square address; the coordinate is a nearby postcode reference. It is not an exact séance-room location, does not represent every later sitting and is not a visitor destination. The photograph shows Senate House because it holds the Price archive, not because the 1923 sittings took place there.
Sources
Harry Price, A Record of Thirteen Sittings for Thermo-Psychic and Other Experiments, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 18/5 (May 1924), pp. 305–362: original-report transcription, especially pp. 307–315 (arrangements and recording), 337–339 (advertisement), 349–352 (apparatus) and 358–362 (later sittings in the first series). The linked version is a transcription; modern commentary is separately attributed.
For the source trail, see the University of London’s Harry Price archive description and public catalogue, including the Stella C material. The photograph has its own linked credit and licence. The historical locality reference uses Light, December 1923, Alliance notices and the WC1N 3BG coordinate record.