Sutton Hoo: Fortean Traveller

This article first appeared in Fortean Times issue FT390, March 2020. For copyright reasons the photos are different to the ones supplied by National Trust in the article in print.

Panorama of the Sutton Hoo estate, in a gale in August!

HIGH ON the slopes of the River Deben, near the Suffolk town of Woodbridge, lies Sutton Hoo, an estate with woods and a house with spectacular estuary views. On this property lies a cluster of mounds, from which one of England’s greatest archaeological discoveries emerged. Here on the eve of World War Two was uncovered the spectacular ship burial of an Anglo-Saxon believed to be King Raedwald of the East Angles, who reigned from 599AD to his death around 624AD.

A recently installed skeleton showing the dimensions of the ship from the Sutton Hoo ship burial

The original Sutton Hoo treasures – including a stunning decorated helmet, as well as gold jewellery inlaid with garnets from India and Sri Lanka – are now on display in the less atmospheric surroundings of Room 41 of the British Museum in London. But you can see replicas at Sutton Hoo and take woodland walks to visit Sutton Hoo’s impressive Royal Burial Mounds and the house once owned by Edith Pretty, who called in the archaeologists back in 1939.

The Sutton Hoo helmet in the British Museum's Room 41 in London. Replicas are on show at Sutton Hoo.

The Sutton Hoo estate, including the Royal Burial Mounds, the exhibition hall and the house (now known as Tranmer House) are today owned by the National Trust, who reopened the estate to the public in 2019 after a £4 million “transformation” – a refitted exhibition space and new footpaths including a River View Walk through the woods retracing the route along which the ship was dragged from the river for burial. By the time you read this, a viewing tower will probably have opened, allowing visitors a bird’s eye view of the Royal Burial Mounds.

Signage for one of the walks to the Royal Burial Mounds, with the viewing tower under construction in October 2019

My visit was in weather reminiscent of Anglo-Saxon epic poetry – during a gale, in August! Sutton Hoo’s Property Operations Manager Alison Girling bade me take a seat in one of Sutton Hoo’s many cafes while she got me a coffee, but it never arrived. After a long wait I caught sight of her through the café window, jogging as she talked urgently into a radio – she was shutting down the site as the gale took hold. It wasn’t safe that day for walkers to go into the woods by the mounds, I was told, branches of the tall pines would likely fall on them.

The story of how the treasures of Sutton Hoo came to be uncovered includes some fortean twists. Numerous slightly different accounts of what inspired Edith Pretty to call in freelance self-taught archaeologist and astronomer Basil Brown feature seances, spectral apparitions of warriors on horseback and a local “metal diviner.” It’s as if the gold and silver treasures lying beneath Sutton Hoo’s mounds were exerting a supernatural influence on their discoverers, as if the treasures were crying out to mortals to find them.

Mound 1 - the mound that contained the Royal ship burial.


But the legitimate excavations in what’s now known as Mound 1, the world’s greatest Anglo-Saxon ship burial, complete with the impression on the sandy soil of the timbers of a buried ship 90 feet (24.7 metres) long, weren’t the first. Tudor grave robbers had looted most of the other mounds long before the official dig, “ill-doers” had dug a “robber’s trench” into Mound 1 that came within inches of discovering the treasures of King Raedwald. Who were these Tudor grave robbers? Tradition has pointed the finger of suspicion at Elizabeth I’s astrologer and legendary occultist Dr John Dee.

At the time of the 1939 excavation, Basil Brown’s team came across Mound 1’s robber’s trench and found Mound 2 extensively looted. Brown’s team believed that this happened in the sixteenth century and there is still a commonly-held belief today that the robber’s trench and looting was the work of a team led by Dr John Dee (1527-1608). The robber’s trench was later firmly dated by the discovery in it of a Bellarmine jar (famous for its use as a “witch bottle”) . A tradition also seems to have taken hold that Dr Dee sought a commission to search for treasure on the East Coast. (Sutton Hoo’s just 12 miles from the sea.)

Portrait of occultist and court astrologer Dr John Dee, from A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed For Many Years Between Dr John Dee... out of copyright

One ability Dee believed he possessed was discovering hidden treasure, he had several misadventures in that field. Dee genuinely had some expertise in geology, surveying and metal assaying. In later life he leased and ran mines of his own in Devonshire, from which he received royalties. Dee’s writings made little distinction between mining for ores and digging for treasure, in a period when archeology was known as “gold mining.”

Dee’s scryer (spirit medium) Edward Kelley conned him with an elaborate hoax involving fake artefacts he claimed to have dug up at Blockley, Gloucestershire in 1583 (or from Glastonbury or from a Welsh bishop’s tomb, in other versions). These were a book allegedly written by St Dunstan, a vial of a red “powder of projection” and a scroll in coded Medieval Latin written by two exiled Danish princes. The latter included a map cryptically describing ten locations of other buried treasure. Dee was convinced this was all for real.

One of the numerous spirits that Kelley persuaded Dee had appeared to him instructed Dee and Kelley to dig up the treasure identified in the scroll. The spirit identified himself as “El”, opening up his chest to reveal his name written on his heart. El allegedly told Dee and Kelley that if they collected soil samples from each location mentioned in Kelley’s scroll, spirits could then recover whatever lay buried there. Dee found the money to send Kelley on a twelve-day voyage around England in 1583 to gather these “earths.”

According to contemporary belief, treasure buried in the earth was in the custody of demons, only discoverable with their help. The 1562 Statute against Sorcery carried the death penalty for persistent discovery of treasure “by the aid of magic.” Dee repudiated magic and believed he was using mathematics and the scientific exercise of supernatural powers to find buried treasure. He therefore sought Royal Letters Patent to protect him against accusations of sorcery in his endeavours.

So, prompted by his desperate finances, Dee wrote in October 1574 to Lord Treasurer William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Pleading for an annual pension of at least £200, Dee proposed a way to source it cost-free, by discovering buried treasure. He saw the appearance of a new star two years previously as foretelling “the finding of some treasure.” Dee’s letter explained how visions, dreams and “strange terrestrial emanations” pointed to hoards beneath the earth.

Dee’s letter requested a licence to seek for treasure on the Queen’s behalf, in return for half the spoils. Cecil Declined. Martin Carver (see bibliography below) suggests that Dee’s proposal to Lord Burghley could have been an attempt at “a portable antiquities scam”, presumably aimed at fleecing investors.

A table in the "Enochian" language said by Dr John Dee to be used by angels to communicate, inspired by the Book of Enoch in the Old Testament. From A True and Faithful Relation... out of copyright

Enthralling as the idea of Dr Dee grave robbing Sutton Hoo is, it’s alas supported by scant evidence. The cryptic “Danish scroll” apparently made no references to locations around Sutton Hoo. Carver describes a “systematic pillaging of mounds in Suffolk” starting from the time of the dissolution of the monasteries (some 20 years before Dee’s letter to Cecil), fuelled by a belief that corrupt monks had buried their ill-gotten gains. Landowners could apply for licences to dig for treasure on their own land – Sutton Hoo’s local landowners in Dee’s time were the Mather family, Sir Michael Stanhope and Sir Henry Wood, so suspicion falls on them rather than Dee.

Mound 2 - the mound looted by Tudor graverobbbers, now reconstructed to something like its original height.


In the lean, famine-afflicted 1570s, many in desperation turned to digging for buried treasure, especially in burial mounds – so much so that “hill-digger” became a term of abuse. So the intriguing idea of Dr Dee as a clandestine Sutton Hoo archaeologist begins to look less likely.

Some 350 years after Dr Dee’s alleged occult diggings in the vicinity, the mix of paranormal phenomena and archaeology returned to Sutton Hoo.

Edith Pretty, who lived at the house at Sutton Hoo, was involved in Spiritualism and donated money to the Spiritualist church in Woodbridge. When her husband Frank was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1934, Edith contacted well-known spiritualist faith healer William Parish, of whom she was reportedly so in awe that she later instructed her gardeners to plant tulip bulbs in the spots where Parish had paused while walking around the estate. Edith had already been England’s first woman magistrate, she’d volunteered as a nurse in France in World War One, travelled to Egypt, Sudan and South America and gone on a tour of Europe by car. With her husband gone, such an adventurous woman needed something to occupy her mind, her thoughts turned to archeology and the spirit world.

There is debate as to whether seances were held at Sutton Hoo. One account by a local source told of seances in a purple draped “telephone room”. It is known that a “tiny room” in the house was used as a private chapel where Edith could “talk to my husband” after his death. Maids described a crucifix and candles there. Archaeologist Charles Phillips in his memoirs records that Edith would go to Spiritualist meetings in Woodbridge every Thursday. She would “commune” with her husband through a medium. Other sources say Edith regularly attended seances in London, or that she was with the Spiritualist church in London Road, Ipswich, which still survives today as the Horley Spiritualist Centre. She also came into contact with medium and spirit healer Albert Charles Toft of Llanelli, who claimed to be directed by a disembodied Indian spirit diagnostician named Ranji.

Tranmer House

One story of how Edith was inspired to commission the Sutton Hoo dig was simply that it came to her in a dream. Edith told archaeologist Basil Brown when he was on the 1939 dig to go to spiritualist service in Woodbridge, where medium Florence Thompson was in attendance. According to Brown’s diary, Florence told him, “I see fields…. Now I see lots of sand… all sand… assert yourself… go on digging… and you will find what you’re looking for.”

Another story – recounted by Shiela Norman, daughter of the leader of the Woodbridge Spiritualist congregation – has a séance conducted or at least attended by Pretty, supposedly in London, in which a man on black horse materialised and told Edith to plunge a sword into the mounds.

In yet another version, an unnamed guest at Sutton Hoo saw “warriors atop the mounds” one morning from an upstairs window – another variation of the story had these as spectral “horsemen”. Yet another iteration of the story has a friend staying with Edith reporting a single “ghostly figure on horseback on the mounds” – it’s not clear whether this was the same friend who saw multiple figures – on horseback or otherwise – from the upstairs window.

There was a pair of buzzards flying over the Deben when I went on the guided walk of the Royal Burial Mounds, led by Mark Brewster, my guide from the Sutton Hoo Society. He related what he described as a “ghost story” in which – during a seance in the long “seance room” on the top floor of the Sutton Hoo house – a guest rushed to the window after seeing from the corner of her eye a single figure on horseback holding a sword ride over a mound. Brewster reckons it was probably just a poacher, heading down to the Deben ferry. East Anglia’s sudden thick mists can play tricks with the eyes. A more prosaic explanation for Edith’s motivation to cause a dig to take place on her land is that her father had been an amateur archaeologist.

There was also a tenant living on the Sutton Hoo estate known as “Old Pettit”, who was said to be a metal diviner – he assured Edith that “fabulous treasure” lay under her garden, gold and silver, especially in the larger mound.

If you stand outside Tranmer House today and look up, you can the upstairs windows from which Edith’s guest allegedly saw at least one spectral horseman on the mounds. Now only the ground floor’s open to the public. The top floor bedrooms have become holiday apartments. While the other mounds aren’t visible from the ground floor of Tranmer House, you can see the top of Mound 2 through the ground floor windows. Mound 2 – the one looted by Tudor grave-robbers, possibly something to do with Dr Dee – was built up with earth in the 1980s, party so visitors could see something of the mounds from the house, but also in an attempt to reconstruct how the mounds might have looked before a millennia and a half of ploughing and erosion reduced them.

From one of these top floor windows, a house guest is alleged to have seen at least one spectral figure on horseback on the mounds

There was a faint smell of woodsmoke when I visited Tranmer House. One room has become a wood-panelled cinema, with film and radio recordings showing of the 1939 dig. The National Trust have made a good job of evoking 1939 – among the facsimile documents on the desk that visitors can handle is a telegram sent by Brown to archaeologist couple the Piggotts. Peggy Piggott was a much more experienced archaeologist than her husband, but in 1930s Cambridge women couldn't take full degrees, only “diplomas”, so she was the less qualified junior partner of the couple. The telegram tells her husband Stuart they’ve found a “VIKING SHIP” (what they first thought they’d found) and instructed him to “BRING WIFE.”

As the Sutton Hoo dig team were sorting through their finds, a planned open day to showcase some of these was cancelled as World War Two broke out. Work on the dig stopped, the “ship trench” was hastily covered over with bracken. In today’s Tranmer House drawing room you will hear Neville Chamberlain’s tones on the radiogram saying he had “received no such assurances… so I have to tell you that from midnight tonight, we are at war with Germany.”

Edith donated the finds to the British Museum – faith healer William Parish was apparently influential in Edith's decision. Only when her executors were clearing up after Edith’s death did they discover the letter from Winston Churchill offering her a CBE for her generous gesture. Edith declined. The archaeological finds were shipped to the British Museum’s underground safe storage facility in Aldwych Underground station for the duration of the war.

At Sutton Hoo in wartime, the mounds were filled back in, only to be be damaged by armoured vehicles driving over them, destroying much of the impression in earth left by the huge ship in which King Redwald had been interred. The anti-glider trenches dug across the estate (well clear of the mounds) to stop German paratroopers landing are still visible. Edith Pretty died suddenly in 1942, her house became a hostel for Land Army Girls (some carved their names on the fireplace) and smaller buildings on the estate became a refugees’ school.

The archaeologists were back at Sutton Hoo in 1985, in a series of digs that yielded the remains of a noblewoman cremated in two bowls, and also the remains of a dog, horse, goat and sheep.

Unearthed in Mound 17 were the bones of young warrior buried together with his horse in full ornate harness, the horse apparently sacrificed to accompany his master to the afterlife. (You can see them in the exhibition hall, together with a replica Saxon sword that you can try lifting – it’s surprisingly heavy!) These burial practices hinted at a culture in transition from paganism to Christianity – King Raedwald converted to Christianity himself and raised Christian altars, but on the advice of the women of his household kept the altars to the pagan gods in place as well.

Mound 17 - from which the horse burial was excavated

Were the apparitions on horseback seen by Edith’s guests something to do with the warrior horseman buried in Mound 17? England’s man-and-horse burials are almost exclusively from Suffolk – others were discovered at Eye, Mildenhall, Lakenheath and Snape. Update (22/02/26): At the time of writing, recent local excavations around the Sizewell C nuclear power station have uncovered two more Suffolk horse burials, one from the Roman period or earlier at Wickham Market and another - a horse and two riders - of Anglo-Saxon vintage at Theberton.


Other excavations, including the digs in the 1980s and 1990s, unearthed mysterious “sandmen”, blackened stick men with vague features, they melted away to nothing soon after being exhumed.

These, it turns out, were the victims of medieval executions dumped in the earth. Coastal Suffolk’s sandy, acid soil meant the bodies quickly rotted away, the spaces in the sandy earth were then filled with black, sandy silt. These mystery figures, basically made of sand, fell apart on contact with air. Like the impressions of the victims of Pompeii, there’s one black-painted fibreglass cast of a “sandman” on the Sutton Hoo site, Brewster said he thinks the other sandman casts are somewhere in British Museum storage.

Now the archaeology’s happening four miles down the road at Rendlesham (better known as the epicentre of the UK’s best-known UFO incident of Boxing Day 1980) where a team of detectorists with the permission of the landowner are sweeping the fields where the seat of the Kings of East Anglia once lay. Brewster told me he’s heard Sutton Hoo has more – as yet undisturbed – mounds somewhere among the trees near the river.

© Matt Salusbury

A full-size seaworthy reconstruction of the Sutton Hoo ship is currently under construction in The Long Shed Woodbridge (the nearest town to Sutton Hoo) using ancient shipbuliding techniques. It's regularly open to the public, for opening hours see here.

The frontispiece of A True and Faithful Relation, which describes Dr John Dee's alleged communication with spirits.

FURTHER READING

Edith Pretty: From Socialite to Sutton Hoo, Mary Skelcher and Chris Durrant, Leiston Press 2006

The Dig, John Preston, Penguin, London 2008.( In September 2019, a Netflix crew were spotted in Suffolk filming the forthcoming Netflix movie The Dig, based on this novelisation of the 1939 excavations and starring Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan.)

“Sutton Hoo - An Archaeography”, Martin Carver, in Great Excavations, Shaping the Archaeological Profession, John Schofield (ed.), Oxbow, Oxford, 2011

A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits
And also the Letters of Sundry Great Men Kept in the library of Sir Tho. Cotton, Preface by Meric. Casaubon D.D, D. Maxwell, London 1659

The Queen’s Conjurer – the science and magic of Dr John Dee, adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, Benjamin Woolley, Henry Holt, New York, 2002

“Edward Kelley’s Danish treasure hoax and Elizabethan antiquarianism”, Francis Young, Intellectual History Review, February 2019

“Dr John Dee”, Three Famous Occultists, G. M. Hort, Rider & Co London 1922
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National Trust Sutton Hoo, admission at the time of writing £13.50 adults, for seasonal opening times see here

Nearest train station Melton (trains from Ipswich and Lowestoft) Greater Anglia. Sutton Hoo is a short (uphill) cycle ride from Melton, or by M and R Cars of Woodbridge.

Bus 65 from Ipswich and Woodbridge (not Sundays) has a Sutton Hoo stop, First in Norfolk and Suffolk buses.

Some of the small number of Sutton Hoo finds retained by Ipswich Museum, which is currently closed for refurbishment

This artilce was updated on 22/02/26 to add two then newly discovered Suffolk horse burials.

Sex and the séance room

This article first appeared in Fortean Times issue 233, March 2008

Kittie Klaw, nipple tassle-twirling, fan-dancing Queen of Burlesque is one of Britain’s best known burlesque and striptease performers, as well as a manager of other burlesque acts and a tutor of striptease skills through her Ministry of Burlesque agency. She’s famous in the fetish scene as a cover model on the front of ‘bondage’ magazines, and as a performer at fetish clubs such as London’s notorious Torture Garden. But – stop tittering at the back there! - I wanted to talk to Ms Klaw about her other passion – parapsychology.

Kittie was celebrating the runaway success of Victorian Values when we met. This is her theatrical-length music hall revue, which sends up the dark side of Victorian hypocrisy, and which had its debut at the suitably grand old Hoxton Hall in East London’s Shoreditch last August. Victorian Values sends up the Victorian séance, and features girls who can carry off that Victorian look well, and who look the part in period ‘tight lace-up corsets.’ Kittie directs and plays several characters in the show, including the two de Winter-Fairbottom twins, Kittie and Lilly. One is a bit of a prude, the other is ‘more experimental.’

Of her plans for future productions of Victorian Values, Kittie says that ‘a West End theatre performance is the Holy Grail at the moment.’ At the time of writing, there was a possible TV adaptation in the pipeline in collaboration with Robin Ince, who is part of Ricky Gervais’ writing team and who appeared in The Office. Meanwhile, a shorter, stand-alone sketch taken from Victorian Values, that ‘sexualises’ aspects of the Victorian séance, is doing the rounds as part of Kittie’s regular repertoire. See www.victorianvalues.info for updates.

We began our chat by discussing the connections between Victorian music hall and Spiritualist séances. The expression ‘knocking shop’ to describe a brothel originally comes from the table-rapping spirit world of the séance. The preoccupation with death and ‘the other side’ was often a code for another taboo that couldn’t then be spoken about at all – sex. ‘Sex sells, death compels,’ says Kittie. The hint of eroticism around the séance – sometimes it was more than just a hint – was justified by an ethereal veil of Spiritualist respectability. If you said you believed in the afterlife, you had an explanation when the police came calling and found scantily-clad women in the dark behaving strangely.

Then there’s the example of famous 1850s girl medium Florence Cook (See Fortean Times 179: pages 30-37), who used to disappear into the ‘spirit cabinet’ in séances and give rise to the materialisation of ectoplasmic ‘spirit form’ Katie King, a bawdy character from a pirate family who looked remarkably like Cook, and who would move among the sitters and touch them with remarkably solid hands, and who seemed to enjoy letting the sitters touch her too.

Accordng to Kittie, ‘there has always been a crossover between music hall-style entertainment and belief. Burlesque plays on this.’ Some of the most famous stage mediums, especially the phenomenally popular Davenport Brothers, who started their act in 1859, acknowledged that they were always showmen and never claimed to be mediums. But the Davenports were caught up in the burgeoning Spiritualist movement of the time and their show was hailed as genuine proof of spirit phenomena.

Kittie’s Victorian Values sends up the ‘elaborate farce’ of the Victorian séance. The play’s protagonist, Lord Dashwood, estranged cousin of Queen Victoria, is based on the real Francis Dashwood of the Hellfire Club. In Kittie’s revue, Dashwood is running a fake séance when Queen Victoria walks in, looking to make contact with her dear departed consort Prince Albert. Lord Dashwood panics, but it would be giving away the plot to tell what happens next in the ensuing procession of fake and real phantoms and pint-sized, flapping vampires. Victorian Values also sends up the erotic appeal of Gothic Horror. Kittie describes Gothic Horror’s enduring erotic appeal as ‘legitimised S and M,’ with ‘lots of Freudian sex and death.’ For example, ‘Dracula is the perfect hybrid of Mr Darcy and the Marquis De Sade – ideal husband and depraved sexual mentor in one’.

Victorian Values takes the art of burlesque, which until recently enjoyed a somewhat smutty reputation, back to the traditional burlesque form. Kittie is one of the longest performing artists in the traditional form of burlesque, a tradition for which she vigorously campaigns. Traditional burlesque is a British invention from the 18th century, and to ‘burlesque’ (the word can also be a verb) means ‘to send up, satirise and parody.’ The very first burlesque acts were short operettas, which inspired Gilbert and Sullivan. Trad burlesque could be Blackadder-type historical satire. Napoleon was a favourite subject. P.G. Woodhouse’s Jeeves and Wooster are in the tradition of burlesque, which also mocked the class system as well as history, and told a funny story whilst it satirized taboos. The humour also included what Kittie calls ‘body satire.’

How, then, did the association with American strippers come in? The British burlesque performer and former pub landlady Lydia Thompson, after reaching the pinnacle of the British burlesque world, took her successful act to the US in 1868, with her troupe, the British Blondes – ‘none of whom were actually blondes.’ They may in fact have been among the world’s first peroxide blondes. They were dressed as boys, which meant they could show their ankles.

A variety of complex factors led to American burlesque dropping satire. The Depression, and Prohibition complicated US theatre licensing somewhat, and ‘there was no-class system’ to satirize in America, or at least none that Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes could easily discern. Striptease took over the American burlesque genre, but it was still called ‘burlesque’ because the strip acts alternated with stand-up comics.

Kittie, like Lydia Thompson, came to the performing arts early. Kittie was a professional child ballerina until the age of 12, and some of her burlesque dance routines are en point – right up on tiptoes, ballet-style. But from an early age Kittie showed strong academic achievement, which her school keenly cultivated her science talents. ‘As a girl, if you were one of the few who happened to excel in science, you were automatically pushed to have a career in science.’

A four-year Honours degree in Psychology at Glasgow University followed, with a thesis on ‘remote staring detection,’ in which Kittie felt she got ‘little or no support’ from her department. Glasgow University had just bid unsuccessfully for the Koessler Chair in Parapsychology, (see (See Fortean Times 201: pages 32-39), losing to traditional rivals Edinburgh. While an undergraduate, Kittie was active with the Scottish Society for Psychical Research (SSPR), along with astrophysicist Archie Roy. Kittie took part in investigations of a few a cases of hauntings and related phenomena, but never found anything that was convincing beyond someone’s ‘emotional needs.’

Kittie graduated from Glasgow in 2003 with a good mark in ‘straight’ Psychology and was taken on as a student under the personal supervision of Professor Bob Morris, who headed Edinburgh University’s Koessler Unit, to study for an MsC/PHd in Parapsychology.

Her only year at Edinburgh University was ‘the most difficult year of my life.’ The ‘exorbitant’ fees meant she held down a part-time job alongside her full-time research position, and had to scratch around for bits of funding here and there. She set up the Ministry of Burlesque agency at the turn of the 21st century, but the re-emerging burlesque ‘scene’ was still only in London, and she was travelling to and from London from Edinburgh twice a week to perform. She toured student unions and Scottish venues as one of the dancing girls for local cult band Hugh Reed and the Velvet Underpants. As one of the band’s dancing girls she often dressed in a makeshift burkha, which she would rip off for some appropriately costumed comedic belly dancing in the style of Carry On Up the Khyber. Her other dance routine was ‘naughty Nazis, satirical comedy rich in ironic slap-dancing and wrestling, very tongue in cheek.’

Meanwhile, Bob Morris was very supportive, and Kittie has fond memories of ‘many an eccentric chat, end of term parties at his house, (Bob) in his inimitable style, extremely charismatic.’ But Kittie’s research project was dogged by strange mishaps and coincidences.

The experimental part of Kittie’s Masters/PhD research followed from ‘remote staring detection,’ in the area of Direct Mental Interaction with Living Systems (DMILS, pronounced ‘dee mills’). ‘You don’t want to say “ESP,” it’s a wee bit “woolly”. It’s a loaded phrase, full of implications… The DMILS research is the examination of a communicative phenomenon which could easily be completely normal but not yet understood. Perhaps even evolutionary.’

At the Koessler Unit, Kittie looked into ‘anomalous transfer of information between creative individuals.’ She found acrobat twins and lifelong double act jugglers from the Edinburgh festival. There were reasonable questions raised by Koessler Unit staff about the definition of ‘creative,’ but Kittie says ‘nobody bothered to point out that the computer system was suspected of being broken at the time. Only after I reported it, did anyone offer the knowledge that it had been acting up for some time, unbeknown to myself or Professor Morris.’ The research seemed to be going OK. It involved one person in a ‘creative’ team meditating on impressions seen by the other in a different room, when they were being shown a random sequence of scenes on video. Kittie became convinced that the sequences weren’t showing in a random order, that they were in an organised pattern.

The department had to take apart the ‘broken’ computer system, to eliminate the possibility it was a computer fault leading to this apparent non-random pattern in video sequences. Instead, Kittie and Bob had to use slides from the 1970s, which were difficult to run, and the subjects they’d brought in for the original experiment with the video begun to move on as the festival left town.

Then ‘the rest of the equipment started to fail.’ Monitors and light bulbs started to go wrong, a computer cable melted. There were so many electrical faults that it became a running departmental joke that Kittie was jinxed. Bob showed her books on people whose very presence messes up experiments. Kittie was ‘trying to be cheerful’ about all this bizarre equipment failure. She called Bob, joking, after the third projector/hardrive/general systems failure: ‘One of us isn’t going to make it to the end of this,’ she told him. And then Bob died suddenly in August 2004 (see obituary in (See Fortean Times 192: pages 26-27) In the time leading up to his death, Kittie had prophetic dreams of attending Bob’s funeral. She took his death as sign that ‘I’m not meant to be doing this.’ Her performing work was taking off by then, and she decided parapsychology was something she could always come back to…

But the paranormal had come into Kittie’s life long before she chose a career in parapsychology. She had a near death experience aged 10, as a result of an allergic reaction. Another childhood experience she describes was a ‘bizarrely accurate vision of the death of Princess Diana a year before she died… A black shadow from the North West coming over Paris, the sensation of being trapped in a tunnel at high speed,’ the feeling that she should ‘watch her back.’ Kittie has also had shared dreams with people, or witnessed other peoples’ dreams as they dream them.

She grew up in East Kilbride, south of Glasgow, although she didn’t know at the time it was a UFO hotspot. The sky round her house would be full of the searchlights of helicopters chasing escapees from the mental hospital over the moors. She remembers one night watching a searchlight moving around in the sky above the woods for ten minutes, ‘then I realised there was no sound beyond the rustling of trees, I couldn’t see a craft, just the light – not a source.’

Kittie’s interest in Ufology extends to a friendship with Ufologist Nick Pope, who got in touch with her after reading her interview in a UFO magazine. Says Kittie of Nick Pope, ‘he’s a lovely gent.’

Fortunately, Kittie saw the funny side of Ufology, as evidenced by the three-minute alien abduction burlesque routine, written by Kittie but still awaiting a debut. This skit ‘burlesques’ (sends up) The X-Files with a chorus line of aliens. It’s got ‘a medical Carry On style sequence, complete with alien surgical clichés referencing what people actually report. Although, as it is a burlesque, we don’t show any of the more “intimate” horrors.’

On a more serious note, Kittie says ‘I still have a problem with electricity… I once famously crashed the whole library network at Glasgow University.’ Bob Morris saw her apparent allergic reaction to electricity, which Kittie’s business partner and fiancé James, an IT expert and world-class programmer, can confirm. Says Kitty, ‘I go through laptops at an alarming rate, I have been known to interfere with TV signals, I get headaches and rashes when vacuum cleaners and computers power up. Light bulbs rarely last around me, cameras often don’t work and I have allergic reactions to the London Underground (seriously!) – I’ve often wondered if it’s the electricity… I get dizzy, over-hot and develop that peculiar rash.’

Then there was the time she participated in an experiment in Glasgow in which electrodes were attached to her head, and they didn’t pick up any data from her at all. This is supposed to happen ‘only if you’re dead.’

BBC Scotland once engaged Kittie as a ‘psychic detective’ as part of a programme that followed young paranormal investigators working in the reputedly haunted Britannia Panopticon Music Hall at Glasgow’s Trongate. At 150 years old, the Panopticon is Britain’s oldest surviving intact music hall. It’s said that it didn’t burn down -– like all the other Glasgow music halls – as there was so much urine soaked into in the wood. Stanley Laurel debuted at the Panopticon aged 16 in 1906, and Kittie has done fundraising gigs for the venue.

The ‘proper investigators’ of Kitty’s SSPR team started with some serious archive research and then set up equipment in various parts of the Panopticon – ‘TV cameras, infra-red cameras, mini-disc digital recorders to record EVP, absolutely nothing happened.’ The BBC team suggested focusing on a mediumship demonstration from a circle of people who believed themselves to be psychic. The result was ‘wordy, incongruous to facts and rather dull actually. It wasn’t data that we could use.’

While Kittie’s team was setting up, there were – understandably given the age of the venue – ‘knocking noises from the pipes (which the BBC got excited about and filmed three times). The suggestion that it was in fact plumbing was vetoed.’ The whole investigation was a ‘non-conclusive event. Those who went in believing came out believing, those who didn’t were unchanged.’

Kittie stressed that the SSPR have many mediums among their members and on its council. SSPR mediums attended the Panopticon vigil as part of the SSPR investigation. For this investigation, ‘myself and a few colleagues were approaching from a scientific viewpoint and had designed the vigil as such. Were at loggerheads with the (other) mediums who showed little regard for the importance of protocol and ignored our requests for structure.’

After the death of Bob Morris, strange stuff continued to happen. During a photo shoot for a fetish magazine at the Erotic Museum of Hamburg, Kittie was posing with straw and porcelain Victorian theatre dummy, when a soft, masculine voice came to her in German, and the dummy’s eyes appeared to look at her. ‘No way! I’ve not enough sleep,’ Kittie told herself. She ‘didn’t tell anyone for a few hours, (thinking) it could be lack of sleep.’ Then she found that the incident coincided with the failure of the photographer’s camera, and her boyfriend said that at the same time he’d chased a light up the museum’s stairs, the same stairs which fellow fetish glamour model Morrigan Hell fell down on a shoot shortly before. ‘So many people had experiences’ of the space, Kittie found out. Photography equipment seizing up on Kittie Klaw modelling shoots is, she says, something that happens often.

For the moment, being a global burlesque glamour phenomenon pretty much precludes a return to professional parapsychology any time soon. Kittie says she remains a sceptic in the academic sense, ‘I haven’t yet formed a firm belief’ one way or another. How does Kittie’s grounding in the science of parapsychology inform how she feels about the strange things that keep happening to her? ‘Studying parapsychology keeps me rational about it. To say that I’m only going to consider certain possibilities, that’s ridiculous… I’ve always maintained my interest in the paranormal… I’m a sceptical enquirer in the academic sense, but a fascinated enquirer with a desire to be convinced.’

‘Sceptic,’ according to Kittie, is a word that has come into disrepute over the years, like ‘burlesque’.

See also www.kittieklaw.com

© Matt Salusbury 2007