Kathleen Goligher was born Belfast, Northern Ireland, one of five children. All four of the daughters became skilled mediums, although Kathleen was the most talented. She was the only one who could enter a trance state and communicate with spirits in the form of rappings, table levitation and other phenomena.

The Goligher family formed a séance circle at their home which consisted of the father, his four daughters, his son and a son-in-law. The circle was held as a religious observance and was ordinarily private, but in 1914, psychical investigator, William Jackson Crawford convinced them to let him study the manifestations.

Crawford taught mechanical engineering at Queens University, Belfast. As a researcher, he recorded events and described what he called “psychic rods” made of ectoplasm which appeared to emanate from between Kathleen’s legs. They would sometimes solidify into visible objects which could be seen and felt.

Crawford took flashlight photographs of the ectoplasm and investigated Goligher’s mediumship at the house for six years. He wrote three books about the circle: The Reality of Psychic Phenomena (1916), Experiments in Psychic Science (1919) and Psychic Structures of the Goligher Circle (1921).

In 1920, something changed.  The Golighers began to welcome outsiders into their private circle and accept donations.  Crawford committed suicide.

Investigator, E. E. Fournier d’Albe, sat in the Goligher Circle 20 times after Crawford’s death. He reported few phenomena and concluded that Goligher was a fraud. He published The Goligher Circle in 1922. Kathleen retired from public mediumship shortly afterward but continued with private readings.

W. W. Carington, who attended the circle in 1916 and 1920, believed that genuine phenomena had occurred at those times. Psychic researchers William Barrett and Whateley Carington also believed it to be real. But others complained that Crawford did not conduct a scientific investigation by controlling the situation during the seances. Surgeon Charles Beadnell published a booklet in 1920 that debunked the experiments. Others, who never attended the seances, added their complaints.

Goligher married S.G. Donaldson in 1926. He conducted a series of experiments that he published in Psychic Science in 1933. Raps were the only physical phenomena reported, but photographs of ectoplasm were obtained at all five experimental sittings. Donaldson continued to record events with infrared photography, but the photographs were destroyed during the bombings in World War II. Goligher was last heard from in 1962.

Additional Reading:

Barham, Allan, “Dr. W. J. Crawford, His Work and His Legacy in Psychkinesis.” Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR)55 (1988): 113–38.

Donaldson, S. G. “Five Sittings with Miss Kate Goligher.” Psychic Science 12 (1934): 89–94.

Inglis, Brian (1984) Science and Parascience: A History of the Paranormal 1914–1939. London: Hodder and Stoughton

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