Houghton, Georgina (d. 1887)
Houghton, Georgina (d. 1887)
Nineteenth-century English private medium, author of Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance (1882) and Chronicles of the Photographsof Spiritual Beings and Phenomena Invisible to the Material Eye (1882). Houghton never sat for research and knew nothing of test conditions. Her mediumship, which developed after a visit to Mary Marshall, appears to have consisted of automatic drawing, other acts of automatism, minor telekinetic phenomena, unconfirmed cases of levitation or floating above the ground while apparently walking like anyone else, apports, and the ability to see colored auras about the heads of others.
She claimed a band of 70 archangels as her guardian spirits and implicitly believed and obeyed every subconscious impulse, even to the extent of leaving it to the spirits to choose the wallpapers and carpets in her house.
The spirit photographs in her book Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings were taken at the studio of Frederick Hudson, the first in England to practice spirit photography, but who was later exposed as a fraud. The pictures themselves—which include spirit forms of Joan of Arc, the wife of Manoah (mother of Samson), and St. John the Evangelist—are for the most part obvious fakes but have a certain nineteenth-century charm.