The Florence Cook and Katie King séances

Record summary

London medium Florence Cook claimed to produce a materialized spirit called Katie King during séances in the early 1870s. Chemist William Crookes investigated and publicly supported the genuineness of the manifestations, while later observers and critics disputed controls, identity, lighting, and the possibility of impersonation. The episode is valuable for comparing spiritualist testimony, scientific authority, séance photography, and accusations of fraud. It should be reconstructed from Crookes’s reports, Spiritualist publications, contemporary newspaper accounts, and later Society for Psychical Research discussions rather than treated as settled evidence of materialized spirits.