“I don’t think anything in his life absorbed, enthralled him as did the witches of Florence.” -Elizabeth Robins Pennell Charles Godfrey Leland had never been a stranger to the odd and the out-of-the-way, but when he settled in Florence in the late 1880s, his life took on a distinctly magical bent. Like any newcomer he…
“The power of an invocation comes from the force of the soul who invokes it.” – Roma Lister Roma Lister was no stranger to séances. Over the course of her life, she attended dozens of sittings and had multiple occasions to converse with and study other psychics, such as the famed — but controversial —…
“You will remember that Albertus Magnus…adds emphatically, that the process will instruct and avail only to the few— that a man must be born a magician!” -from The Haunters and the Haunted by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1859). In 1870, Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton hosted a quirky American man of letters named Charles Godfrey Leland at his manor house in Knebworth, Hertfordshire. The two thinkers were…