Florence Cook was a young woman from Hackney who, according to the Hackney Citizen, said she received a spirit message to join the Dalston Association of Enquirers into Spiritualism, whose secretary Thomas Blyton took her under his wing. Learning under an established medium, Frank Herne, she became able to summon a full-body spirit named Katie King at will.
The method was a spirit cabinet or curtain: after 30 or 40 minutes the pallid Katie King would appear all in white and could be touched by guests as she mingled with the living. Some were concerned that she looked strikingly like Florence Cook. Sir William Crookes, who produced the photograph of Cook, King and himself, attended seances at the modest Cook family home in Hackney trying to get definitive proof that the two were separate. One Russian investigator grabbed a lamp and rushed behind the curtain, only to find Cook still there, bound and tied as before the seance.
The Citizen article says nobody was ever able to conclusively prove fraud on Cook's part, unlike her mentor Herne. The case was a Victorian sensation and is part of the history of spiritualism, and the article describes it as a scandal that shook the movement. It belongs here as a documented episode of spirit mediumship rather than a haunting, and the pin is approximate to Hackney as the home is not given a street address in the source.
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