Apports!

Agnes Guppy, the Apporting Medium

(This Ghost Report originally appeared as part of the 2/9/20 Ghost Magnet With Bridget Marquardt podcast)

John Nevil Maskelyne, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Let’s talk apports! First: what are apports? These are objects that suddenly appear out of nowhere, presumably brought by ghosts or poltergeists.  During the 1870s, when spiritualism was at its most popular, there was a British medium named Agnes Guppy who was famous for her apports. Sitters at Mrs. Guppy’s séances might find anything from snow to potted plants materializing before them. One visitor described a séance at which fifteen sitters asked that the spirits bring each of them a particular kind of fruit, and he claimed that the spirits would place the fruit each person had asked for directly in their hands. In one séance, a sitter even found live eels apported into his lap! 

However, Mrs. Guppy’s most famous apport took place during a séance hosted by two other well-known mediums named Herne and Williams. On the evening of June 3^rd, 1871, Herne and Williams were midway through a séance when one of the guests asked the spirits to produce Mrs. Guppy. Three minutes later, a heavy thud sounded from the middle of the table, and the lights were immediately brought up to reveal Mrs. Guppy, standing on the table, shaking all over, still holding a pen because she said she’d just been in her own home a few miles away writing up her accounts. The observers at the séance checked the doors and found they were all locked; and they claimed there was nowhere in the room where Mrs. Guppy could have hidden. Later, the famous magician and spiritualist debunker J. N. Maskelyne made fun of Mrs. Guppy’s apport by putting a cartoon of it on the cover of his book Modern Spiritualism…but he also never explained how it was done.