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Three Spirits Claimed at the Seance Table

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Three Spirits Claimed at the Seance Table

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Apparitions gathers three figures the atlas records not as people who lived but as presences reported at Spiritualist seances, each claimed as a distinct personality manifesting through a named medium.

John King was the most widely claimed spirit control of nineteenth century physical mediumship, first manifesting through the Davenport Brothers in the 1850s and later claimed by a long list of mediums including Frank Herne, Charles Williams, Agnes Guppy-Volckman, William Eglinton and, briefly, Helena Blavatsky. He claimed in life to have been Henry Owen Morgan, the Welsh buccaneer later knighted as governor of Jamaica, and took a self described protective role directing raps and levitations at seances. Katie King, the best documented spirit associated with the medium Florence Cook in 1870s London, was presented as his daughter; William Crookes, a chemist of standing, sat with Cook, photographed the figure and published his conviction that it was distinct from the medium, though whether medium and figure were ever two people in the room is the question the case has always turned on.

Feda was the named trance control of the British medium Gladys Osborne Leonard, who rose to prominence during the First World War and was studied at length by the Society for Psychical Research. Feda claimed to have been a young ancestor of Leonard's who died around 1800, and Leonard's sittings with bereaved parents made her one of the most closely documented spirit controls of the early twentieth century. The atlas records all three as the figures that were claimed, not as people who lived.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Source Man, Myth and MagicRichard Cavendish (ed.)
Sources
Man, Myth and Magic
Richard Cavendish (ed.), Marshall Cavendish, 1970View the Source
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