Haunted History
& Psychical Research

In my early twenties, I was studying a BA in Law and History in Madrid, Spain, alongside anthropology and archaeology. I undertook additional out-of-hours work with one of my Criminal Justice professors, who also served as a judge. Through that work I accompanied her in circumstances involving natural and unnatural death, including deaths she was required to certify. It brought me into direct contact with the practical realities surrounding death and with the documentary processes through which a death enters the official record.

It was during that period that I became conscious of something else: impressions that I understood as connected with people who had died. Sometimes this involved intuition; at other times I experienced information as coming from the deceased themselves. These experiences remained private, and for many years this part of my life was conducted behind closed doors.

A friend I met at university during this period was a police inspector who later worked with the FBI and Interpol. On occasions, when he asked me, I collaborated with him privately and unofficially in relation to investigations, sharing intuitive and mediumistic impressions that I believed might assist his enquiries. Those experiences became part of the working method I later brought into historical research: following a clue, recording what emerged, and then pursuing the documentary trail.

I have come to think that one does not always decide to become interested in these questions. Sometimes the experiences arrive first. The people who carry them arrive next. Eventually you realise that this is another strand of a much longer historical enquiry into people, places, memory and what survives.

Meeting photographer and researcher Steve Myler became one of those turning points. The fuller story belongs to Loftus: The Hall of Dreams, but the sequence began in an ordinary moment: I was on my way to collect my son from summer camp when I felt drawn towards a particular grave. The surname on the stone meant nothing to me then. A few days later an email arrived from someone bearing that same surname — Steve. What followed became part of the chain of events that led us into years of shared investigation, fieldwork and archival research around Loftus Hall and the Hook Peninsula. In the book, that meeting sits within a much larger story of signs, encounters and the strange ways in which a research path can announce itself before its meaning is understood.

My development did not begin or end with Loftus. I trained for more than a decade at the College of Psychic Studies in London across mediumship, psychical and spiritual development and related disciplines, alongside further training at Arthur Findlay College and elsewhere. Teachers and practitioners within that longer formation have included Tony Stockwell and spiritualist medium and teacher Ann Théato, among others.

The observation about the paranormal finding you grew, in part, from a conversation in Tony Stockwell's class: however ordinary the setting — a shop, a journey, simply going about the day — people and experiences have a way of arriving. That resonated because it described something I had already lived. Formal mediumistic training gave me disciplines for approaching those experiences; historical research provided another discipline concerned with provenance, corroboration, context and evidence. Neither was asked to do the work of the other.

Until I came to Ireland, this side of my work remained private. In 2016, after meeting Steve and as the work around Loftus Hall began to unfold, I made the decision to speak publicly about experiences and abilities I had previously kept behind closed doors. There is a longer story behind that decision, one I will tell elsewhere in time.

Something I notice, even now: I can be having an entirely ordinary conversation with a stranger — in a café, on a train, at an event — and the conversation will suddenly turn. They will begin to speak about a death, a bereavement, something they saw or felt that they have never told anyone. I have long since stopped being surprised by this. I simply try to be worthy of the confidence.

Loftus Hall: An Anatomy of a Haunting

Loftus Hall is a three-storey, nine-bay mansion on the Hook Peninsula, rebuilt in 1871 on the site of an older medieval residence — itself built during the time of the Black Death — and the later seventeenth-century house of the Loftus family. A fine example of Irish Palladianism, it commands a wind-swept headland at the very tip of Wexford's coastline, where the estuary meets the open sea.

Most people know it as "Ireland's most haunted house." That epithet is not wrong, exactly, but it is incomplete — and it obscures the more interesting historical questions the building raises. Loftus Hall is architecture. Family history. Landscape. Layers of occupation and loss. A Gothic story of genuine complexity, set within a documented human world.

My investigation began with historical method: genealogical research, architectural analysis, landscape archaeology, archival fieldwork and the study of local folklore and oral tradition surrounding the site. That work later extended into the digitised National Folklore Collection, including Dúchas.ie materials recording buried-treasure traditions associated with the area. Such accounts preserve another layer of the site's history: the stories through which a place has been remembered and transmitted across generations.

Alongside the historical work, I had psychical experiences during fieldwork in the house and while living on the Hook Peninsula. In many cases, I later realised that details arising through those experiences corresponded with information the documentary and historical record eventually confirmed. That convergence between place, experience and archival discovery became one of the most compelling strands of the Loftus research.

1771 Frizell survey map of the Loftus Hall demesne and townlands · later Redmond family annotation dated 13 April 1900: “Redmond Hall it was and Redmond Hall it is. The Loftus family obtained it by plunder and disloyalty.” · National Library of Ireland archives · photographed by Steve Myler during field research with Helena B. Scott

Helena B. Scott — Loftus Hall · Watch on YouTube ↗

Publication · Helena B. Scott

When the Archive Answers Back

Research Method

From Impression to Evidence

Jung, Spirits, and the Limits of Explanation

C. G. Jung's engagement with mediumistic phenomena, séances and questions concerning the spirits did not begin with his theoretical work — it began in his family home, in his early life, and in the experiences he later documented in his memoir. His doctoral dissertation was written on his cousin Helly Preiswerk, who showed remarkable mediumistic abilities, and the question of whether psychological or genuinely external explanations best accounted for such phenomena remained with him throughout his career.

Jung's position evolved, and in his later work he became increasingly cautious about whether a purely psychological account could do justice to all such experiences. His Seven Sermons to the Dead — produced in 1916 in circumstances he described as involving an oppressive, uncanny atmosphere in his home — and the broader imaginal and spiritual world documented in The Red Book are evidence of someone who took these questions seriously at a profound personal level, not merely theoretically.

The well-known rupture between Freud and Jung unfolded across theoretical, personal and professional disagreements. Their different responses to anomalous and spiritual experience form one strand within that much larger intellectual history, and remain a revealing point of comparison in the development of depth psychology.

What I take from this lineage is something modest: that serious, rigorous, unsentimental thinkers have found it necessary to sit with these questions rather than resolve them prematurely. That is exactly the position I try to maintain in my own work.

The Haunted Archive · Intellectual History · Psychical Culture

From Séance to Psychical Research

Spiritualism and the Investigation of Survival

Emerging as an international movement in the nineteenth century, modern Spiritualism placed communication with the dead, mediumship and the possibility of survival after bodily death into an increasingly public arena. Séances entered drawing rooms and lecture halls, while the phenomena associated with them also attracted scientists, psychologists, writers and organised investigators. Out of this contested culture emerged institutions devoted to systematic psychical enquiry, including the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 and the London Spiritualist Alliance in 1884 — now the College of Psychic Studies. Mediumship and psychical research repeatedly intersected: experience generated questions, investigators developed methods for examining them, and debates around consciousness and survival moved between séance room, laboratory, archive and psychology.

History & Context

Institutional Lineage · College of Psychic Studies

The College's history places Helena's teaching within an unusually rich lineage of literary, psychical, esoteric and philosophical inquiry. Founded in 1884 as the London Spiritualist Alliance, its history connects mediumship and psychical research with writers, scientists, investigators and esoteric practitioners across more than a century. Helena trained at the College for over a decade before returning as a tutor and lecturer.

London · United Kingdom

The College of Psychic Studies

16 Queensberry Place · South Kensington
Exploring consciousness since 1884

Visit the College ↗

Student Feedback · College of Psychic Studies

Alongside her work as a tutor and lecturer at the College, Helena contributes to its Enlighten journal, writing on history, symbolism, esoteric traditions and the living relationship between psyche, spirit and the natural world.

Helena's College Profile ↗Templar Symbolism ↗Sea Magic ↗

The Unexplained, in Conversation

I was one of the speakers at Ireland's paranormal convention — Day of the Unexplained — sharing a programme with investigators, researchers and academics from across Ireland and beyond. The event brought together people who take anomalous experience seriously and who are willing to discuss it in public, in front of an audience, with rigour and honesty.

My work was featured in the December 2023 international issue of American Paranormal Magazine, where I appeared among the issue's featured guests as a writer, historian and medium. I have also written on haunted places and their histories for Spooky Isles, bringing archival research, folklore and landscape into public-facing work.

My friendship and collaboration with Anthony Kerrigan of GhostÉire has also crossed into museum work. During my MA internship with Waterford Medieval Museum, I contributed to a psychical-research study requested by the museum and led by Anthony. I compiled my own impressions and compared them with historical records and names connected with the site, and Anthony invited me to join an evening investigation. That encounter brought heritage practice, museum space, historical research and psychical enquiry into unusually direct conversation.

The Irish Wake Museum

Press · Film · Podcast · Archive

Haunted Landscapes

Study · Research · Private Practice