Cemeteries are our outdoor archives. Tangible time capsules. Accessible fragments of our collective heritage and individual tales of love and loss. Join Samantha Perrin, as she pays homage to some of the famous spiritualists on the 19th century interred in Abney Park cemetery – pioneers who held dark seances in mysterious corners of the city.

These include Georgiana Eagle who with the help of some mind reading tricks learned from her magician father promoted herself as a clairvoyant medium even before the Spiritualism movement began.

Abney Park has its performers and humanitarians too, including one of the first female cross-dressing music hall superstars who took aim at the swells of the day in song to the Mother of the Salvation Army was as much a tour de force in creating the organisation as her husband was.

Speaker Bio
Samantha Perrin is a cemetery and death historian with an MA in Victorian Studies. She is one half of Doyennes of Death: a two-woman team of storytellers who share their love of history and the remarkable lives of the interred from a feminine perspective. A mix of tragic figures and fearless avengers, Doyennes of Death tours celebrate the lives of London’s forgotten heroines amongst the crumbling stones and grey ladies. It’s Victoriana with brass knuckles.