The Goligher Circle, Belfast

A working-class Belfast family in the textile trade began holding weekly Spiritualist sittings in 1912. They met in the attic of their home. Light came from a gas jet in a lantern with a red glass front.

The medium was the youngest daughter, Kathleen Goligher, born 27 June 1898. Her father, sisters, brother and brother-in-law sat with her in the circle.

In 1915 William Jackson Crawford joined them. He lectured in mechanical engineering at Queen's University Belfast. He heard "raps of all degrees of loudness from the slightest taps to blows which might verily be produced by a sledge-hammer." The raps answered questions. Three for yes. One for no. Two for doubtful.

Then the 10 lb 6 oz deal table moved. "The table rose about 8 in. into the air in an approximately horizontal plane," Crawford wrote. It hung there, "to all appearance quite steady in the air," and at times rocked "exactly like a boat pitching on a somewhat stormy sea." A handbell rang and a metal trumpet moved through the air. "Whitish, translucent, nebulous matter" came from the medium; Crawford found it "clammy, cold, almost oily."

In December 1915 the physicist Sir William F. Barrett found that the table "resisted our strongest efforts to push it down." In 1916 W. Whately Smith of the Society for Psychical Research pressed on it too. It "felt like pushing against a solid strut of wood or metal." The medium, he said, "sat absolutely motionless."

Crawford weighed, measured and photographed. When the table floated, he reported that Kathleen grew heavier by nearly its weight. He set out damp clay to catch what he believed were invisible cantilevers reaching from her body to grip the table, and called them psychic rods. The unseen "operators," he wrote, were "the spirits of human beings who have passed into the Beyond." On 30 July 1920, Crawford was found dead on Pickie Rocks, Bangor, having taken his own life; he had insisted his psychic work was "the most perfect work I have done in my life."

May 1921. The physicist E. E. Fournier d'Albe arrived in Belfast. He sat with the circle 20 times and tightened the controls step by step. The phenomena faltered. On 22 July he saw "the stool held by KG's foot and portion of leg."

The clay impressions all showed stocking marks. To him, the photographs of the "ectoplasm" showed "a strong suggestion of chiffon or other textile material." At the last test sitting, on 29 August, Kathleen's legs were tied and "no phenomena came, not even raps." His verdict: "all I had seen during the three months could be explained by normal means."

Whately Smith had already reported a "conspicuous and startling deterioration" in 1920. Joseph Jastrow called Crawford's work "unscientific." Yet E. J. Dingwall found Fournier d'Albe's conclusion "warranted neither by the book itself nor by common sense." He asked how plausible it was for a working family to perform tricks for four years without being paid. F. McCarthy Stephenson rejected the fraud verdict and sat with Kathleen again in the 1930s. She had given up mediumship in 1922.

Weighing experiments with Eusapia Palladino had produced a similar result. In 1922 the New York Evening World reprinted Crawford's photographs on a page about spirit photos discussed by Arthur Conan Doyle. Later, A. J. West turned the story into a novel, The Spirit Engineer, with Conan Doyle and Houdini among its characters.