Kathleen Goligher and the Belfast Circle
From 1914 the Belfast engineer William Jackson Crawford studied the Goligher family circle and wrote three books about the psychic rods with which sixteen-year-old Kathleen raised the table; he weighed her, photographed her by red light and worked out an entire mechanics. After Crawford's death in 1920 the physicist Edmund Edward Fournier d'Albe took over the circle. He sat twenty times and published his report: the ectoplasm in the photographs was ordinary white cloth hanging from under her skirt, and Kathleen lifted the table with her foot, which he once saw plainly. She was not seen in public again.
Helen Duncan and the Last Witchcraft Trial
The Scottish medium Helen Duncan produced ectoplasm from her mouth, out of which the shapes of the dead were formed. In 1931 Harry Price obtained a sample after a London sitting: cheesecloth stitched to paper and stiffened with egg white. On 19 January 1944 police arrested her in the middle of a séance in Portsmouth — above the naval port preparing for the Normandy landings, where she had been telling relatives that a ship was lost before the Admiralty said so. She was tried at the Old Bailey under the Witchcraft Act of 1735, for pretending to call up spirits, and given nine months. It was the last conviction under that Act in British history; the Act itself was repealed in 1951.
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