Yew Tree Lodge is Olivia Judge’s house in Twickenham, near the river, and the setting for a séance attended by Randolph Ash. In the account of the medium Mrs Lees, it is at once a hospitable private residence and a place where the living seek messages from the dead; Ash’s arrival unsettles the circle and turns the house into the scene of a conflict between spiritualist belief and skeptical scrutiny.

House and Circle

Mrs Lees describes Yew Tree Lodge as beautiful and recalls many gatherings there, with signs and comforting sounds and utterances attributed to the departed. She also speaks of elementals from the water playing on the lawns and laughing at the window in the twilight. These claims give the house an atmosphere of permeable boundaries: the ordinary domestic interior is presented as open to presences from beyond it.

The house hosted distinguished guests as well as the women who made up the Vestal Lights. Among those named in Mrs Lees’s account are Lord Lytton, Mr Trollope, Lord and Lady Cotterell, Christabel LaMotte, Dr Carpenter, Mrs de Morgan, and Mrs Nassau Senior. The Vestal Lights gathered under Olivia Judge’s roof for sustained inquiry into spiritual truth. Their work was not represented as isolated from public questions: accounts of the group also associate its activities with spiritual healing, Fourierist doctrine, women’s emancipation, and opposition to strong drink.

Ash’s Visit and the Séance

Ash’s attendance was arranged after Mrs Lees was told that he wished to come and had recently suffered a loss for which he needed consolation. She initially hesitated to admit him, fearing that a newcomer might disrupt a circle already working well. Ash also required that the company not be told beforehand who he was or why he had come, supposedly so that his presence would not compromise the naturalness of the gathering. Mrs Lees agreed, and Ash entered the drawing-room without his identity having been disclosed in advance.

Mrs Lees depicts his arrival as an immediate disturbance. She felt what she called a blast of skeptical cold and a choking fog in her throat; when Olivia Judge asked whether she was unwell, she said she thought a chill was coming on. Ash shook her hand nervously. Although Mrs Lees interpreted his skepticism as a cold force that could interfere with spiritual manifestations, she also sensed unusual spiritual sensitivity beneath it. The encounter therefore resists a simple opposition between believer and unbeliever: the man who disrupts the séance is also described as possessing a powerful, if differently expressed, responsiveness.

Ash’s first exchange with Mrs Lees sharpened the contrast between their accounts of spiritual agency. He joked about her calling spirits from the deep. She answered that she could not summon them and was only their instrument, speaking when spirits chose to speak. Ash replied that spirits spoke to him through language. In the room, he looked around nervously and did not address the assembled guests. The disagreement thus concerned not only whether communication with spirits was possible, but also what form that communication could take.

Narrative and Historical Significance

Yew Tree Lodge enters the story through more than one account of its spiritualist activity. Mortimer Cropper tries to connect LaMotte with the Vestal Lights and with an earlier séance at Olivia Judge’s house, using Mrs Lees’s autobiographical reminiscences alongside Priscilla Cropper’s correspondence with Judge. The possibility that LaMotte had joined the group remains a hypothesis, not an established fact. Cropper’s search is also constrained by inaccessible Lincoln papers and his difficulty interpreting the feminist scholarship he encounters, while the copy of Mrs Lees’s book he seeks is unavailable at the London Library and the British Library copy has been destroyed.

The house consequently carries both a reported history of occult encounter and the uncertainty of archival reconstruction. Mrs Lees presents it as a place where spirits make themselves known; Cropper approaches the same world through biographies, letters, and published reminiscence, trying to establish who was present and what happened. Yew Tree Lodge matters not simply as a séance venue but as the domestic setting where those competing ways of knowing meet, and where the possible association between LaMotte and the Vestal Lights remains unresolved.