A candlelit séance for your dinner partyAn 1850s village decided a quiet girl was the reason for its bad luck. Tonight we're going to ask her about it.
Gurnsey Hollow was the kind of place where a bad year needed a reason. In the 1850s it found one: a girl at the edge of town who kept to herself, didn't marry, didn't explain herself, and was therefore obviously responsible for the crops, the fever, and the child who didn't come home.
What the town did about her depends entirely on which version you hear. There are four of them and they don't agree — which, in a story like this, is usually the first sign that something really happened.
The legend never left. And that's the story we're going to sit down with.
It's a séance, so your guests sit around one table. Candles, a few objects, and me. For the first stretch it's storytelling — what the records say, what the town said instead, and where those two things come apart. Your guests will form opinions. They'll say them out loud.
Then the room starts participating, and that's when it turns.
Questions get asked that are far too specific for a stranger to know. Objects don't stay where they were put. Somebody's private answer ends up out loud, and nobody can account for how.
It builds slowly. No jump scares. By the end, most people aren't sure where the show stops.
This séance comes in parts, so it can run as long as your schedule allows. The full ninety‑minute version is the deepest, but I've run it as a tight twenty when it needed to sit between other things — including four separate twenty-minute séances across one night in New York, so every guest at a large party got their own.
I'm a performer, not a medium. Nothing here is presented as contact with the dead, and I won't tell your guests otherwise.
What I will tell them is that the Victorians did exactly this in their parlors, as entertainment, with this equipment — took it completely seriously for an hour, and argued about it on the carriage ride home.
We're doing the same thing, for the same reason, and it works just as well as it did then.
"Each small group was thoroughly entertained and amazed. The looks on some of their faces included shock, awe, and melting doubt. We already booked Cris for next year's trip!"
Guests said: "I was not a believer in the supernatural at all, but I might be a little convinced that something is out there now." — "I don't know what just happened, but I want to see more."Ellen Greenberg, Social Studies Teacher — Longwood High School senior class trip
The details
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