Theresa Cheung - The Element Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Hauntings - The Complete A–Z for the Entire Magical World

Cook’s most prominent control spirit was called Katie King. Cook would retire into a cabinet and be tied to a chair with rope, the knots sealed with wax. After a few minutes King, who could not speak but only nod and smile, would emerge in front of the cabinet. After the spirit disappeared, the sitters waited for Cook’s instructions to release her, and they always found her in the cabinet still clothed and tied and exhausted from the experience.

Cook was not reluctant to allow the press in, and a reporter from the Daily Telegraph attended several of her séances. On the first occasion, he saw faces, and the following year he witnessed the materialization of Katie King and took photographs of her. In view of the precautions taken, such as Cook being bound with seals, ‘he was baffled’.

Cook’s abilities led to various prominent persons attending her séances, and in 1872 she begun to receive financial support from the businessman and spiritualist Charles Blackburn. She also attracted the attention of spiritualist investigators, including the British scientist Sir William Crookes.

The appearances of Katie King were investigated many times, with sitters regularly reporting that they were able to see Katie and Cook at the same time, for the cabinet would be opened and Cook would be visible in the back while Katie appeared out front. Many sitters also reported that Katie King and Florence Cook were very similar in appearance, and some charged that Cook and Katie were, in fact, the same person.

Cook was caught at least twice in fraud. On one occasion a sitter grabbed a spirit hand and found he had grabbed Cook. On another occasion in 1880, Sir George Sitwell noticed that King was wearing corsets. He seized her and pulled aside the curtain to reveal an empty chair and the ropes untied.

Sir William Crookes vigorously investigated the case, taking photographs, witnessing both Cook and Katie at the same time and even attaching Cook to a galvanometer to record Cook’s movements while Katie appeared. Despite allegations of fraud, Sir William and other supporters remained convinced that Florence Cook was a genuine medium.

In 1874 Katie King departed. Afterwards first Leila, and then a French girl calling herself Marie became Cook’s controls. Marie remained her control until shortly before Florence Cook’s death in 1904. A photograph was taken of her at a séance in about 1902, which later appeared in Psychic Science (January 1927); one of the sitters made the important observation that those present ‘saw the form of the tall slim young woman that appears in the picture; Mrs Corner [Florence Cook] being short, rather stout, and of darker complexion’.

Grace Cooke, born in London in 1892, became a spiritualist medium in 1913. Unlike most mediums of the day, intent on communicating with the dead, Cooke focused on spiritual development, which she felt the world badly needed.

From an early age Cooke experienced psychic visions of a Native American spirit guide called White Eagle, who told her they would accomplish great spiritual work together. In 1936 White Eagle instructed Cooke to form a church for people ready to be light bearers and to practise brotherhood and sisterhood. After several false starts, the White Eagle Lodge was established in Hampshire in 1945. It soon grew into an international organization publishing tracts and books.

Until her death in 1979 Cooke emphasized living by the light of love and healing. In her later years she experienced vivid memories of previous lives, and the stories of these past lives are recorded in her book The Illuminated Ones .

According to British folklore, corpse candles are mysterious candles that float through the air by night and hover near locations where death is imminent. They are said to vanish when approached and warn of death to those who see them or of the death of a loved one. In Welsh folklore a pale bluish corpse candle is said to presage the death of a child, a bigger candle the death of an adult and multiple candles a multiple loss.

Although corpse candles have been witnessed all over the British Isles, their origin is supposed to date back to fifthcentury Wales. Legend says that St David, the patron saint of Wales, was concerned that the people he served were always unprepared for death, so he prayed that they might have some kind of warning. He received a vision in which he was told that the Welsh people would always be forewarned of a death by the dim light of mysterious candles.

Corpse lights are similar to corpse candles in that they are seen at night and are believed to be death omens. They are believed to be phosphorescent lights in white, red, or blue that can appear almost anywhere, inside or outside a house, on the ground, on the roof or over a person’s chest. They are also known as jack-o’-lanterns, ignis fatuus, corposant, fetch-candles and fetch lights. It is possible they are produced by atmospheric gas, but in folklore there are many reports of their seemingly mysterious and supernatural appearance.

A fascinating and curious case that was the inspiration behind the 1971 best-selling book by William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist . In the book, later made into a film, a young girl is possessed by the devil and subject to exorcism by a Roman Catholic priest, but in the original 1949 case that inspired the book, the subject was a 13-year-old boy.

The case began in Cottage City, Maryland. The family of a young boy, called in some newspaper reports ‘Roland Doe’, began to experience poltergeist activity. It started with scratching noises from the house walls, and then the boy’s bed began shaking and moving on its own, with similar events occurring at school.

A psychiatrist was called in to examine the boy but could find nothing wrong with him. The family called in a minister who believed that a ghost, perhaps the spirit of the dead aunt, might be involved. Some reports say that a Lutheran minister performed an exorcism or a series of exorcisms, while other reports say exorcisms were performed by a pair of Jesuit priests.

After the movie appeared, new reports surfaced of a detailed diary kept by one of the Jesuit priests of the entire exorcism process. The diary says that the exorcism took place in a hospital, the boy’s reactions to the exorcism were violent and that it took four months for the ‘demon’ to be expelled. Afterwards the boy remembered nothing and the case was quietly buried. The room at the hospital where the exorcism took place was rumoured to be haunted in the years following. Many people who worked near the room continued to report cold waves of air and unusual noises coming from inside the room.

What truly happened in the case remains a mystery. Were there natural or psychological explanations for what occurred in the case? Or was this simply the story of an attention-starved boy tricking the adults around him into believing he was possessed by the devil?

In July 1917, 16-year-old Elsie Wright and her 10-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths claimed they could see fairies in the small wooded creek behind Elsie’s house in Cottingley, West Yorkshire. Elsie’s father dismissed their claims, and so one day the girls borrowed his camera to take a picture of them.

The picture, when developed, showed Elsie with a group of fairies dancing in front of her. A month later the girls took a picture of Elsie with a gnome. Elsie’s parents were startled by the photographs, but her father remained unconvinced. Her mother, however, took the pictures to a Theosophist meeting one evening, and soon the photos were published. The girls’ most famous supporter became Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle printed the first two pictures in Strand Magazine in 1920 and three more photos a couple of years later. He then expanded his articles into a book, The Coming of the Fairies. Shortly after, Frances’s family moved away from Elsie’s, and the girls stopped seeing fairies.