Spiritual & Psychic

Gill Hall and the Beresford apparition: the black ribbon, the death pact and the family manuscript
Gill Hall estate area, near Dromore, County Down, Northern Ireland · Apparition traditionally placed in October 1693; later family manuscript and print versions

The Angelystor of Llangernyw: the tailor, the east window and the parish death roll
St Digain’s Church, Llangernyw, Conwy, Wales · Undated local tradition; recorded by Elias Owen in 1896

William Lilly and the Great Fire: the 1651 images, the plague and the parliamentary questions
Westminster and the City of London, England · 1651 publication; Great Plague 1665; Great Fire and examination 1666

Anna Eva Fay in Crookes’s laboratory: the electrical test, the bell and the disputed letter — Camden area, London, England · London experiment reported 12 March 1875; later correspondence in 1875–1877

Alexis Didier in Brighton and Hastings: blindfold cards, hidden objects and Edwin Lee’s 1849 sittings — Brighton, Hove and Hastings, Sussex, England · January 1849 sittings, collected by Edwin Lee in 1866

Noel Paton’s mother’s dream: the family gallery, scarlet fever and the letter of 1847 — Dunfermline area, Fife, Scotland · Childhood family experience; reported in a letter dated 31 May 1847

The artist Joseph Noel Paton described a childhood dream of his mother’s which seemed to anticipate a devastating family illness. In it, the children stood in a dark gallery while a threatening figure moved towards them. His later letter is valuable for its sequence of remembered events—and for the dates it leaves unstated.

Mrs Veal at Canterbury, 1705: the visiting friend, the silk gown and the news from Dover — Canterbury city area, Kent, England · Reported visit on 8 September 1705; pamphlet published in 1706

Mrs Bargrave said an old friend visited her in Canterbury, talked about death and friendship, and walked away towards the market. Only afterwards did she learn that Mrs Veal had died in Dover the previous day. The famous account is unusually rich in small details: a scoured silk gown, a proposed letter, a missing cup of tea and a disagreement about where gold was kept.

Scorrier’s Perceval dream: John Williams, the Commons lobby and a difficult chronology — Scorrier area, Cornwall, England · Dream associated with Spencer Perceval’s assassination on 11 May 1812; later accounts

A Cornish businessman dreams repeatedly of a shooting in the House of Commons. He tells his family and visitors, then hears that the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, has been killed. The Scorrier account is one of Britain’s best-known political dream stories, but its date and its changing identification of the victim deserve as much attention as the apparent match.

William Blake on Peckham Rye: the tree of angels and a lifetime of vision — Peckham Rye, London, England · Childhood vision in the 1760s; recorded in nineteenth-century biography

A boy looks into a tree on Peckham Rye and sees its branches crowded with angels. At home, his father threatens punishment for what he considers a lie; his mother intervenes. William Blake’s childhood vision has become one of London’s most enduring encounters with the unseen, and the early biographies place it within a much larger visionary life.

Windsor’s warning to Buckingham: Sir George Villiers, the three visits and the road to 1628 — Windsor Castle area, Berkshire, England · Warnings associated with the Duke of Buckingham’s assassination in 1628

A dead father is said to return at Windsor to warn that his powerful son will soon be killed. The messenger hesitates, receives further visits and finally reaches the Duke of Buckingham. The tradition survives in differing accounts, with different names and private tokens, and is most interesting when those versions are allowed to remain distinct.

More historical case files

The Belfast Goligher Circle: the recorded knocks, the weighing machine and Crawford’s invisible beam — Belfast, Northern Ireland. Experiments published in 1916; later investigation in 1921.

Eusapia Palladino at Cambridge, 1895: the held hands, the disputed controls and the argument afterwards — Cambridge, England. August–September 1895 sittings; subsequent debate.

Henry Slade in London, 1876: the slates, the daylight sittings and the Bow Street prosecution — London sittings and prosecution, 1876; appeal in 1877. A clean slate, a scrap of pencil and the sound of writing beneath a table brought Henry Slade to the centre of a remarkable London dispute. In August 1876, Florence Jeffreys and Alfred Russel Wallace described daylight sittings they found extraordinary. Within weeks, Ray Lankester seized a slate and announced that he had caught the medium out. Their accounts preserve different moments in a controversy that soon moved from the séance room to Bow Street.

Helen Duncan at Portsmouth: the séance raid, the 1944 trial and the argument within Spiritualism — 1931 investigations; Portsmouth sittings and prosecution in 1944. Helen Duncan’s séances promised something more tangible than a message: figures said to be spirits could appear from a cabinet and approach the sitters. A Portsmouth police intervention in 1944 turned those performances into an Old Bailey prosecution. Behind the familiar label of Britain’s last witch lies a more complicated record of earlier investigations, opposed witnesses and disagreement among Spiritualists themselves.

Gladys Leonard’s book tests: the nineteenth volume, the missing spaces and Sidgwick’s 1921 report — London sittings and British sitters’ home libraries, England. A medium gives directions to a shelf, a book and a page. The sitter goes home to look for a message neither person is supposed to know. Gladys Osborne Leonard’s book tests turned private libraries into an extension of the séance room. Eleanor Sidgwick’s long 1921 study preserves both striking correspondences and failed instructions, with enough detail to follow how particular books were selected.

Eileen Garrett and R101: the London sitting, the shorthand record and the engineer’s annotations — London, England. At three o’clock on an October afternoon, a London séance arranged in the hope of contacting Arthur Conan Doyle took an unexpected direction. Eileen Garrett began delivering statements attributed to the captain of the airship R101, lost in France two days earlier. The original published record preserves the sequence, the words, questions from the room and an anonymous technical reader’s later comments. It is a much more complicated document than the familiar claim that a medium revealed the cause of an air disaster.