The Seance Spoon

A spoon, by any other name, is just a piece of cutlery, unless that is, the spoon has been handled by spirit, in which case it becomes a whole other object.

August Bank Holiday 1986 was warm and balmy I seem to remember. Some friends and I decided one evening to conduct a séance in my friends flat.

Let me set the scene for you. The flat is located at the top of a building that is over 200 years old. It once formed part of an old prison. The bottom two floors of the building were used as shops and housed an eclectic mixture of skills and talents ranging from fashion design, book binding to antiques.

The main room of the flat was long, open plan and ran the entire width of the roof area. At one end was a place you could sit with a couch and television and at the other was the kitchen. In the middle was the dining table and from there you could see the room in it’s entirety.

As I first said, on the August Bank Holiday my friends and I decided to have a séance. Pieces of paper were cut up and on each piece the letters A to Z were written. The word Yes was on one piece of paper and the word No was on another. We were all set to go. There were four of us altogether and we sat around the dining table.

With a glass placed in the centre of the table we began to ask the usual questions “Is there anybody there?” “Do you have any messages for us?” That kind of thing.

Nothing much happened for a while until a “spirit” calling himself Simeon Cutler came through. He was evasive and ambiguous to begin with. He calmed down and started to make some kind of sense after a while and issued an order that we all go to “Where ye scrub the tatties” (the kitchen sink where you clean the potatoes) As one man, we all got up and went to investigate the sink area. We looked through everything and could find nothing out of the ordinary.

We all went back to the table to ask Simeon what he meant. He then issued another order, telling one of us to write a word down on a piece of paper and hide it. The other female member of this group did just that, she wrote a word down and then withdrew from the proceedings. We carried on asking about the sink area and also asking what my friend had written on the piece of paper (she had not told us anything about the word that she had written) Yet another instruction was given by Simeon and he told me to go to the red box.

A little perplexed, I found that the only red box was one that was a cutlery drainer and was perched on the draining board. I walked over to it, bearing in mind that we were all in full view of each other and that no one had moved from the table, I went and pulled out knives, forks and then I grasped something, pulled it out of the drainer and it was a spoon and it was twisted like a cork screw. It was burning hot and I threw it to the floor. We all stared at it in amazement. I picked it up and returned to the table. We examined it and then asked Simeon how it became so contorted, and he answered “Wid heat from hell” My friend who had written down the word and had withdrawn from the séance produced the piece of paper and on it she had written the word SPOON.

I have had the spoon looked at by some metallurgists and they were of the opinion that they could not explain how the spoon had become that twisted.

There are no markings to indicate that it had been in a vice and forced into shape. There were no indications that it had been heated in the conventional way because the metal had not been stretched. The actual metal of the spoon has not been compromised at all. So I will leave any opinions to the reader.

Make of it what you will.