How Lottie Fowler spooked Darlington exactly 150 years ago

According to the adverts placed almost daily on The Northern Echo’s front page in November and December 1873, she was “the celebrated American somnambulist and unconscious trance test medium”.

And, bizarrely, she had taken up residence in a humble terrace house in the Eastbourne area of town from where she was putting the living in touch with the dead.

The advert from The Northern Echo

She was born in Boston in the US in 1846 and scraped a living as a fortune teller until, in 1870, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, she predicted that an explosion at the Union Metallic Cartridge factory – which made gunpowder cartridges for rifles – would kill one worker.

A week later, the factory exploded, and one worker was killed.

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Initially, Lottie was hailed a hero as her prediction stopped many people from going to work so they avoided the explosion, but then she was arrested for allegedly causing the explosion with her witchcraft.

No evidence against her was found, but she was drummed out of town. But the successful prediction made her name, and she began touring the US and then the world, going into trances in front of audiences, summoning up her spirit guide Annie and then giving those who had paid to see her remarkably specific messages from the other side.

Lottie stayed with George Hinde in 3, Bright Street, which we think was in this first terrace built in the street. Picture: Google StreetView

In late 1873, her tour brought her to 3, Bright Street, Darlington, where the adverts say she was staying with a Mr GR Hinde.

This must be George Ridsdale Hinde who, after a spell in the New Zealand army fighting the Maoris, had started a brewery in 1871 in Ridsdale Street, which is adjacent to Bright Street. After four years brewing, George went wine-growing in California, returning in 1885 to buy his brewery back (it is now a dance studio).

Hinde's stoneware bottles are still fairly common in Darlington - have you got one?

Anyway, in 1873, to drum up business for Lottie, Mr Hinde invited local journalists to his home to see her in action. The Echo’s reporter seems to have chickened out at the last moment, but the Darlington & Stockton Times’ scribe wrote a long article about his experiences.

Mr Hinde and Lottie were Spiritualists, members of what in the 1870s was a fashionable and heady new religion. It not only gave people comfort by bringing them messages from beyond the grave, but its talk of science and electrical energies captured the zeitgeist of the moment.

Lottie’s performance won the unnamed D&S Times’ reporter over.

“Still more conclusive evidence is afforded of the genuiness of the proceedings by the fact that in nearly every case some of the most striking information given could by no possibility have been known to Miss Fowler,” he wrote.

He said he had “heard of many equally reliable and successful instances of Miss Fowler’s power since her arrival in Darlington”.

Just before Christmas 1873, Lottie moved on from Darlington, and continued her tour around Europe. She remarkably predicted the Tay Bridge Disaster of 1879, when 75 rail passengers died at Dundee, and somehow located the body of a Scottish laird which had been stolen from his family mausoleum. In 1881, amazingly, she was levitated off an omnibus in Oxford Street in London and, in the same year in Russia, she predicted the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in St Petersburg.

However, those predictions were remarkable because they came true; many, many others did not. By the start of the 1880s, sceptics were accusing Lottie of manipulating her questions to dupe the credulous and, with her reputation fading, she left Europe.

In New York, she began to hear voices, not from the other side but in her own head. She was declared “insane” and spent the last years of her life in the Bellevue asylum, dying there in 1899.

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