ABSTRACT
The only overtly scientific test ever made of Florence Cook’s mediumship was the electrical test devised by Varley. Crookes chose to use the test again while in the middle of his investigations of Florence in 1874, but on a different medium. This was the American performer Mrs Annie Eva Fay (1851-1927), whose stage act, ‘The Indescribable Phenomenon’, consisted chiefly of causing objects to fly about the stage while she was secured to a chair by ropes in a curtained-off part of the stage. Although the act was familiar to frequenters of music halls and vaudeville, it is one of the curiosities of the history of spiritualism that credulous spiritualists, stumped to explain how the tricks were done, sought an occult explanation. Born in Ohio, she had shown an early interest in Theosophy and sat at Madame Blavatsky’s feet during her sojourn in America before going on the stage circuit as a mind-reader. Annie Fay (aided and abetted by her husband, Henry Fay, who had practised as a medium) had therefore acquired ‘psychic’ powers by the time she visited London in June 1874 to perform at the Queen’s Hall in Hanover Square. Although she explicitly advertised her stage performances in America and London in the language of conjuring (‘mysterious manifestations’ and ‘series of bewildering effects’), she played along with the publicity that suggested she had mediumistic powers. Like Florence Cook, she was also stunningly good-looking, her dark hair falling in shoulder-length ringlets. Initially it was not just Crookes who was interested in testing her powers, but a roll-call of the future founders of the Society for Psychical Research, Henry Sidgwick, Frederick W.H. Myers, Lord Rayleigh and Edmund Gurney. Together with Crookes they planned to work as an investigative team after seeing her perform at paid sittings in November and December 1874 and January 1875.1 Mrs Fay, who was being handsomely paid, welcomed the investigations, perhaps because her ‘Indescribable Phenomenon’ stage act was being satirized by the magicians John Nevil Maskelyne and George Cooke at the Egyptian Hall with an act entitled ‘The Indescribable Seance’.
