Mrs Guppy's "transit" to 61 Lamb's Conduit Street

Agnes Elisabeth Guppy, later Guppy-Volckman, was a medium known for apports: flowers, feathers, live starfish, eels and lobsters. She lived with her husband, Samuel Guppy, at 1 Morland Villas, Highbury. The mediums Frank Herne and Charles Williams shared rooms at 61 Lamb's Conduit Street, about three miles away. Their séance room measured 12 ft by 10 ft 4 in. An oval table nearly filled it.

Saturday evening, 3 June 1871. Ten people sat in the dark: the two mediums and eight sitters. With the doors to the passage outside locked, one sitter joked that the spirits should bring Mrs Guppy. Another replied: "Good gracious, I hope not; she is one of the biggest women in London." The spirit "Katie" answered: "I will."

Within three minutes, a single heavy sound struck the centre of the table. W. H. Harrison, editor of The Spiritualist, heard "a heavy bump on the table and one or two screams." Herne was talking at that moment. Mrs Edmiston and Harrison were holding his hands.

A match was struck. Mrs Guppy stood on the centre of the table, motionless and trembling all over. One arm was over her eyes. She held a pen and an account book. She had no shoes on.

The last thing she remembered was sitting at home in Highbury, talking to Miss Neyland and entering household accounts. The ink in the pen was wet. The time was ten minutes past eight.

Then more things came. Slippers dropped to the floor. Keys fell into her lap. A bonnet, boots, Mr Guppy's overcoat and waistcoat, and four geraniums in pots followed.

That night the Edwardses, Herne and Harrison took her home in two cabs that kept close together. There, Miss Neyland said she had been reading a newspaper by the fire when she looked up and found Mrs Guppy gone. It might have been about nine o'clock, though the clock downstairs was half an hour fast. Ten people from the séance and Mrs Guppy signed a declaration that she could not have come "by natural means." According to later accounts, the spiritualist press called her "The Flying Enchantress."

Spiritualists accepted it. A. Campbell Holms wrote that the sitters "had no possible object in perjuring themselves." Arthur Conan Doyle agreed, and Nandor Fodor recorded her "famous transportation."

Sceptics did not. J. N. Maskelyne put a cartoon of her flying over London on the cover of Modern Spiritualism in 1876. Joseph McCabe saw "a blatant collusion of three rogues to cheat the public." Harry Price thought the sitters "were probably in the plot." In the critics' version, she was hidden nearby or let in quietly, Miss Neyland's story was arranged, and the gap between ten past eight and "about nine" left room for an ordinary cab ride.

Retellings drifted, with later versions having her lying across the table in a nightgown, or in a deep trance. Molly Whittington-Egan's 2015 book, Mrs Guppy Takes a Flight, presents her as "a humbug." The 1871 account has not changed: a locked room, a thud in the dark, and a trembling woman with wet ink on her pen.