Katie King

The séances at which the figure appeared followed a form that was standard in the materialisation mediumship of the 1870s. The medium, Florence Cook, was placed in a curtained recess or an adjoining room, sometimes bound, sometimes sealed in with tape and thread, and the sitters waited in near darkness in the room outside. After an interval a figure in white drapery came out through the curtain, walked among the sitters, spoke, allowed itself to be touched, and withdrew.

William Crookes, a chemist of established reputation who had already published on the physical phenomena of mediumship, took the case up in 1873 and 1874 and held sittings in his own house in London. He photographed the figure by artificial light on a number of plates. He published his account in the spiritualist press, stating that he had compared the figure with the medium on points including height, complexion, ear piercing and pulse rate, and that the differences convinced him they were two persons; on one occasion he reported seeing figure and medium at the same time.

The conditions that made his testimony possible are also what has always undermined it. The light was low, the photographs show a draped figure whose face is often obscured, and the arrangements gave him private access to the figure inside the cabinet in a way no controlled protocol would allow.

The atlas records Katie King as a figure that was claimed and photographed under those conditions, not as a person who lived, and the entry that follows sets out why the case has never been closed.

Twice the figure was seized. In December 1873 a sitter named Volckman grabbed it during a séance; there was a struggle, the figure got back behind the curtain, and the medium was afterwards found in the cabinet with her clothing and the tapes reported as intact, which supporters treated as vindication and critics as evidence that the check had been arranged. In 1880, at a different sitting under a different spirit name, Sir George Sitwell held on to the figure and it proved to be the medium in her underclothes. That second episode is not seriously disputed.

Around the same case a further argument runs about Crookes himself. Some historians have argued that his conduct was shaped by a personal relationship with the young medium and that his published testimony cannot be treated as disinterested; others have held that the charge rests on late and second hand claims and that his scientific reputation was otherwise unimpeachable. Trevor Hall's 1962 study is the fullest statement of the first position, and it has been contested since it appeared.

What can be said without taking a side is that nothing survives from the sittings that would satisfy any modern standard of control. There was no continuous illumination, no independent observer inside the cabinet, no protocol drafted in advance by a party without a stake, and no chain of custody for the photographic plates.

The case has therefore stayed exactly where it was: the most fully documented materialisation of the Victorian period, documented by a participant, in conditions designed by the people whose claim was being tested.