Twickenham is the setting of Olivia Judge’s Yew Tree Lodge, a house near the river where the Vestal Lights meet for spiritualist inquiry. Its importance lies in bringing together a community of women pursuing spiritual knowledge and the séance attended by Randolph Ash, an episode later investigated by Mortimer Cropper and James Blackadder.

Yew Tree Lodge and the Vestal Lights

Olivia Judge’s house in Twickenham hosted a group of female seekers after enlightenment called the Vestal Lights. Cropper understood the name as an affectionate term among the women rather than a formal organizational title. Their activities took place alongside Judge’s involvement in causes including spiritual healing, Fourierist doctrine, women’s emancipation, and the campaign against strong drink.

In Mrs Lees’s account, Yew Tree Lodge is a beautiful house near the river, associated with gatherings of the living and the departed. She describes the Vestal Lights as marvellously sensitive women engaged in sustained enquiry into spiritual truth, and recalls sounds and utterances attributed to spirits as well as elemental beings said to play on the lawns and laugh at the window at twilight. The house’s ordinary domestic setting thus becomes the site of claims about contact with an unseen world.

The séance and Randolph Ash

Mrs Lees recounts that Ash wished to attend a séance at the house after experiencing a recent loss and needing consolation. She initially hesitated to admit him, fearing that a newcomer might disrupt a circle already working well, but agreed after the request was forcefully urged. Ash required that the other participants not know his identity or purpose beforehand, saying that advance knowledge might interfere with the circle’s naturalness; Mrs Lees accepted the condition.

The séance’s privacy shaped the later difficulty of identifying who had been present. Mrs Lees protected the names of her clients and the private messages they received. Her published account described twelve attendees, three of whom went into an inner room to receive particular communications at the direction of the spirit guides. The concealed identities left later researchers to piece together the gathering from separate records.

Later investigation and significance

Cropper considers whether Christabel LaMotte might have attended the séance as well as being associated with Olivia Judge’s household. Priscilla Cropper’s correspondence establishes her regular contact with Judge and reports on Mrs Lees’s demonstrations and the group’s reform activities. Cropper, who lacks access to the Lincoln papers and does not know the circumstances of Blanche Glover’s death or LaMotte’s lost year, seeks Mrs Lees’s account, but the London Library copy is already in use and the British Library copy has been destroyed by enemy action. He requests a microfilm from Harmony City and waits.

James Blackadder independently reads Mrs Lees’s account at the London Library while reconsidering Ash’s life and writing around 1859. Unlike Cropper, he does not begin with a definite connection between LaMotte and Hella Lees in 1861; his inquiry develops from an earlier reference in a letter from Sir George and a rereading of Ash’s known work. Twickenham therefore stands at the junction of competing investigations: a private séance, recorded through an account that withholds names, becomes a problem of archival inference and uncertain identification.