Popular Culture Review
For a few decades, after the 1930s, there was no mention of either
King ghost at all; it was as if the fame has dissipated, gradually dwindling
with the fashions of the eras. But then in 1974, a successful Italian television
medium called Fulvio Rendhell announced that Katie King would appear at
his séance, and a young, Victorian clad woman, claiming to be the spirit Katie,
was witnessed by a huge audience in Rome.
This heralded a new dawn of interest in the once-renowned spirits. In
Cesenatico, a small Adriatic town between Rimini and Ravenna, a bookshop,
specialising in spiritualism and the occult, is named after her; she is still sighted
in various locations around Europe.
When I was writing the novel, I decided it was about time Katie was
introduced to the digital age, so I gave her a twitter account, @ghostlykatie,
tweeted a couple of times about non corporeality, and fake mediumship (the
ghost in my novel scorns fakery) and waited. In a short time she had over a
thousand followers.
Perpetuating a myth it seems was made even easier by the web. Yet,
I thought, it was a far cry from what she had once been, and I allowed my
protagonist to lament, “I am a ghost in the machine when I have been a spirit
that haunts humanity.”
novel that was also a book about biography and a treatise on the nature of faith,
of belief. Recently Professor Richard Wiseman has written papers carefully
describing the manner of trickery and prestidigitation used by Palladino.
Yet, I mused, while reading online comments and counter arguments on his
scholarly work, it had no impact on those who were convinced of the reality of
a spirit world.
‘The use of trickery, and its discovery, shows only that, not more.
Because some people create me, imagine me, impersonate me and use
trickery to do so, does not mean I do not exist and proves nothing, nothing at
all.’
Katie and John’s longevity, an odd term to describe something that
never lived, never existed at all, had outlasted those who would deny them.
3
Wiseman, Richard (1993) ‘Barrington and Palladino: Ten major errors’ Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 59 (830) 16-34.
18