Has Elvis Really Left the Building? A Short History of Celebrity Seances
Since the creation of the modern celebrity, séance and the supernatural have been unhappy bedfellows, allowing audiences to incite or imagine interactions with their idols. Mediums and psychics have built careers on the backs of dead celebrities, with many long-dead pop stars unknowingly spurring an entire subsection of psychic memoirs and after-death experiences. Neither Elvis, John Lennon or Princess Diana have had restful afterlives, but have experienced decades of public appearances and sightings, captured on film, vinyl and in countless paperback books.Para-social relationships are an inherent part of the celebrity/consumer cycle, but do not finish at the point of death,rather transform and elevate, where personal ideas, beliefs and senses of self can be projected onto a spectral blank slate. Looking at popular culture within the history of celebrity séance, we can learn more about ourselves and our societal needs than what Oscar Wilde and Michael Jackson had for breakfast. This light-hearted talk takes a sideways look at the weird world of celebrity seances in western history, from Elvis’ spectral adventures in Watford to Oscar Wilde’s post-mortem literature.
BIO: Dr Kate Cherrell is a writer, speaker and broadcaster specialising in Victorian Spiritualism and paranormal history. She is the author of Begotten (2025), Buried England (2026) and The Sensuality of Séance (TBC), and writes commercially about paranormal history for various media outlets. As a paranormal historian, she has co-hosted the television programmes Haunted Homecoming and Unexplained: Caught on Camera and has provided historical expertise for The Yorkshire Exorcist, Paranormal, and Weird Britain. She is co-founder of Not of this World festival, director of The Bats’ Ball and co-founder of the Lincolnshire Folklore Society. She lives for good wine, ghosts, and graves
Curated & Hosted by:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
This is a 5 part series of lectures
