Is Anybody There?:Elvis And The Celebrity Seance Cult.

"I am the resurrection and I am the life" - I Am The Resurrection, The Stone Roses.

Over two thousand years ago, the leader of a violent death cult called Christianity, a Mr Jesus Christ, was said to have come back to life after being crucified in Golgotha. How was this possible? And if Jesus Christ can return from the dead then why can't other people? For example, Elvis Presley, Princess Diana, William Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, or, more topically, even Norman Tebbit?

I was at The Duke of Greenwich, Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub, to hear the engaging, well informed, and very funny Dr Kate Cherrell (or, as OK magazine has her, the goth from Grimsby) talk about just that subject in her lecture (a word that makes it sound far more po-faced than it actually was) Has Elvis Really Left the Building? A Short History of Celebrity Seances. The talk began, as you might have guessed by its title, with the King of Rock'n'Roll himself.

It's long been held that the only place that the living Elvis stepped foot on in Britain was Prestwick Airport near Ayr when a US Air Force plane carrying him home from West Germany in 1960 stopped to refuel there. But dead Elvis? That's a different question. He turned up, just two years after his death, in Watford. And not at Vicarage Road to cheer on Graham Taylor's Hornets.

Dr Cherrell confessed to having two main interests. (1) Spiritualism and (2) tat. Which has led to her having a house like Lovejoy's antique shop - if he lived in a council house. This had led her to take an interest in celebrity seances and to understand that people simply love celebrities. Be they alive or dead. Parasocial relationships are something we've heard a lot about in recent years. One sided irrational relationships where members of the public, often lonely people, invest a lot into a relationship with a famous person who, quite frankly, has no idea they even exist.

It can lead to stalking (stans!) and, oddly, the parasocial relationship doesn't have to end when the celebrity dies. Certainly not in the case of Elvis. Some, of course, say he isn't dead but some of those who accept he is dead do it with the caveat that he can still communicate with the living and where better for him to do that in Hertfordshire's largest town.

On 24th July 1979, about two years after his death, Elvis 'appeared' in a spiritualist church in Watford. He was chatting to a Carmen Rogers who had form when it came to seances. Rogers had previously spoken to Jack the Ripper from beyond the grave and it turned out Jack's real name was Charlie and he was a fish gutter.

Dead Elvis's revelations were, sadly, even less interesting. The most notable thing was that he complained of people exploiting his name following his death (imagine!) and at one point it seems Rogers got a bit irked with Elvis for getting too emotional. The seance was recorded and released on an album called The Elvis Presley Seance. Check out the cover!

Elvis was just joining a long list of those who had spoken to us from beyond the grave. At the height of the Spiritualist movement in the late 19th century many long dead people came forward to speak. Jesus, Genghis Khan, Abraham Lincoln, Aristotle, and Shakespeare among them. All of them, surprise surprise, said they were big believes in Spiritualism.

George Washington, described by Dr Cherrell as a "chatty chap", kept popping up but so did Buddha, military leaders, and poets like Dryden and Pope. Industrial and print developments helped spread these stories and somebody, or several people, got very rich on the back of them.

A case in hand comes in the form of the 'Essays from the Unseen' book printed in 1885. It featured accounts of interviews conducted via seance with many noted dead celebrities and the book was credited to the barrister Andrew Thomas Turton Peterson and his collaborator and personal medium Willliam Lawton. Who, as it happened, was also a convicted fraudster.

Often the revelations delivered from the beyond were less than fascinating. Shakespeare didn't like "busybodies" and was very keen to point out he was not, as many have said, of 'low lineage'. He also claimed he didn't write his own plays and was merely a conduit for a ghostly spirit who wrote through him. Shakespeare's spirit was evoked so often that by the time of 2011's Twitter seance (an actual real thing that happened) he was too tired to even type.

The Irish spiritualist Hester Travis Smith got in contact with Oscar Wilde after he died and Wilde had it that he was in purgatory (he'd had it in life that he didn't want to go to heaven, none of his friends were there), he thought James Joyce's Ulysses was utter filth, and that he was absolutely definitely not gay. Not all.

Oh, and he was also a big fan of mediumship. Natch. Rosemary Brown (1906-2001) was an interesting case. She claimed she'd been visited by the ghost of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and during his visit found that she could play piano, and compose, like a pro. Her hands controlled by Liszt as if he'd put on a pair of ghoulish gloves.

Later she was visited by more composers. Among them Bach, Mozart, and Debussy. She gave notes on their characters. Rachmaninov was reserved, Berlioz explosive, Beethoven had been cured of his deafness, Grieg was a friendly ghost, and Chopin was something of an irritant who warned Rosemary Brown that her bath was overflowing.

She claimed she once visited Tesco with the spirit of Frans Liszt and he complained about the price of bananas. Celebrities of a more recent era have also been in touch. Comedian (I'm told) Freddie Starr has written material from beyond the grave and is now touring the afterlife with Bobby Ball in support. Tommy Cannon is still alive so when he finally goes it'll be interesting to see if Ball sticks with Starr or reunites with the Oldham bruiser.

In the US, the Viewers Channel have done remarkably well - financially - out of pay per view seances. Princess Diana being particularly popular. The psychics who claimed they could speak to her tactfully chose to do this, among other places, in the Parisian tunnel in which she died and also used Diana's own tenuous yet well intended links to mumbo-jumbo to justify their own 'investigations'.

She had, it is claimed, once foreseen the heart attack of one of then Prince Charles's favourite horses. Diana now hangs out with Mother Teresa in the afterlife. I wonder if she's still with Dodi? The man behind the Diana seance, Paul Sharratt, did alright out of it so he turned his attention to the spirit of John Lennon (with a guest appearance from the dead George Harrison) who even revealed an exclusive new song to Sharratt and his audience. Like most of the dead celebrity via seance creative output, it's almost impossible to distinguish from the sort of AI slop that clogs up all our social media feeds these days.

Next up was Michael Jackson. On Sky. A live seance. Just six months after The King of Pop had died. Presented by June Sarpong (who got a nice new kitchen out of it), it was voted the worst television programme of the year. The seance itself was overseen by Derek Acorah (the Skeptics audience let out a collective groan at the mention of Acorah's name) and although Jackson didn't offer up much (though Acorah did claim that Jackson spoke once but, unfortunately, it was during the adverts) the event left some hardcore fans in attendance traumatised,.

 

Their trauma was then packaged as entertainment in its own right. And that, sadly, appears to be what these celebrity seances are all about. Entertainment of the lowest kind. A mean spirited grift to part lonely and often damaged people with their money. Often while causing great harm to the families and friends of the departed, Interestingly, Derek Acorah himself has never spoken from beyond the grave and other mediums say he should be left alone as it would be disrespectful to bother him. If only they'd shown that level of respect to the people whose memories they have besmirched and to those they have ripped off with false hope.

Another great night at Greenwich Skeptics. Thanks to Jade, David, Paula, and Andy and the rest of the crowd (plus three dogs) for joining me, thanks to the staff at the Duke of Greenwich, thanks to Goddards Pie & Mash for feeding me beforehand (and for playing some good tunes while I ate:- Band Of Gold, You're So Vain, We've Only Just Begun), thanks to host Professor Chris French, and thanks most of all to Dr Kate Cherrell for her time and knowledge.

A Q&A took in the Witch of Endor, Helen Duncan, Norse mythology, Orientalism, demonology, Pythagoras, James Randi, Houdini, Lee Harvey Oswald, necromancy, post-Christianity, Norman Tebbit's mischievous spirit, John the Baptist, the ghost of a masturbating monkey, and a sad snake who wanted to have a television in his room because his best friend had died. If that sounds like the sort of brilliant nonsense you'd enjoy then you should join us at Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub. You never know what might happen and it's better than talking to a pretend dead Elvis. Who has now, I must report, finally left the building.