With the Katie King manifestations Florence Cook had become the first British medium to allegedly materialize a spirit form in good light. However, on the night of 9 December, 1873, her reputation as a physical medium received a blow from which it never fully recovered. One of the sitters at this particular Hackney session was a Spiritualist and investigator named William Volckman.
According to Volckman, after he had carefully observed the spirit of Katie King, dressed completely in ghostly white as she paraded around the room, he noted the startling resemblance between the medium and the so-called spirit. Hoping to prove his theory correct in dramatic fashion Volckman sprang up from his chair and 'grasped the spirit'. In the confusion which followed three of the other sitters took hold of Volckman, who received a scratched nose and lost part of his beard in the struggle, while the 'spirit' escaped back into the cabinet. When everything had calmed down, apparently after a period of about five minutes, the curtain was pulled back. There the sitters found Florence in a considerably agitated condition, but still clad in the black dress and boots which she had been wearing at the beginning of the séance, and bound to the chair with the same tape which had been used to confine her. The knot in the tape, which had been sealed with the signet ring of the Earl of Caithness, one of the sitters, was still intact. A subsequent search of Florence Cook revealed no trace of the white robes Katie King had been seen wearing.
