What is an apport?
I write a lot in my book about apports happening during seances. Indeed, Mrs Wood is considered the greatest apporter of her time.
But what is an apport?
Apports are objects that appear, seemingly from the Other Side – they can be as small as an acorn or as complicated as a complete tea set to as large as a full-grown woman such as Agnes Guppy.
Georgiana Houghton recorded in detail the seances she attended or hosted, including the apports that were delivered. On 14th August 1872, at Agnes Guppy’s home, Georgiana was witness to the arrival (in the dark amidst plenty of rubbing feet) of ‘six cups and saucers, tea-spoons, a small plate, and a table napkin […]; a jug of milk, an empty jug, one of [Agnes’s] flower jars filled with sugar, a plate full of black grapes, a loaf, two tea-cakes, a large tea-pot […] and there really was the kettle of boiling water.’ 1
Often the apports delivered were in response to glib comments from the other sitters. During another Guppy seance in October 1872, goldfish were delivered to a Sergeant Cox who grumbled that ‘eels would have been more serviceable, ‘… at the same time Mrs Guppy shrieked most fearfully, desiring that a light be struck at once, when there was seen one live eel around her neck, and another on the table between Sergeant Cox and myself, and likewise a live lobster in the middle of the table.’2
The subject of Kate Summerscale’s brilliant book the Haunting of Alma Fielding, Alma was the Thornton Heath victim of poltergeist activity who became the subject (and the ruin) of Nandor Fodor, ghost hunter for the International Institute for Psychical Research in the late 1930s. Her apports were mainly small objects delivered during seances, or household goods smashed or thrown around her. While Alma, it transpired, seemed to store her apports in the nooks and crannies of her body, it’s unlikely Agnes kept a whole tea about her, and so I suspect that her apports seem to have been delivered simply through the art of distraction.
Regardless, though, however these apports were achieved or how small or inconsequential some of them were, objects arriving from the Other Side were validation for those who believed: it gave them hope that their loved ones were safe and saved.
- Georgiana Houghton – Evenings at Home in Spiritual Seance, 1882
- Kate Summerscale – The Haunting of Alma Fielding – a true ghost story, Bloomsbury, 2020
