TikTok Mediums, Victorian Séances and The Last Ever Witch

Kate Cherrell on Victorian séances, TikTok mediums, and why the dead never really go away.

In 1871, a woman called Mrs. Guppy was airlifted three miles across London by spirits and deposited, unconscious, onto a séance table. People at both ends confirmed she was there one minute, gone the next. Kate Cherrell tells this story in the first two minutes. It sets the tone exactly right.

Cherrell has a doctorate in Victorian Gothic and has spent nine years writing about graves, mourning, and séances. She believes spiritualism booms whenever the world is in upheaval, and she has spent decades trying to explain away the man in a blue suit she saw walking through a house in Grimsby, and failing.

In this conversation she explains how Helen Duncan was tried under an 18th-century Witchcraft Act for revealing a state secret during the Second World War, why mediumship was one of the only routes to female autonomy in the 19th century, what cold reading looks like up close, and why someone she knows lost a life-changing amount of money to a TikTok medium.

The Mrs. Guppy opening is delightful. The Grimsby house is unsettling. The TikTok medium section is the most important thing in the episode for anyone with a grieving family member.