The Spirit Who Claimed to Be a Pirate Governor

John King was the most widely claimed spirit control of nineteenth century physical mediumship, a role in which a spirit was said to organize and direct a medium's seance, calling forth raps, levitations and other physical phenomena on behalf of the sitters gathered around the table. He first manifested through the American mediums the Davenport Brothers in the 1850s, and over the following decades was claimed in turn by a long line of other mediums, among them Frank Herne, Charles Williams, Agnes Guppy-Volckman, William Eglinton, Cecil Husk, the husband and wife team Mr. and Mrs. Nelson Holmes, and, briefly and early in her career before she moved on to found Theosophy, Helena Blavatsky. The spirit identified himself in life as Henry Owen Morgan, the real historical Welsh privateer later knighted and appointed governor of Jamaica, though nothing in the historical record of Morgan's actual life supports the identification and no medium ever offered documentary evidence connecting the two figures beyond the shared name. In the seance room he took a self-described protective and organizing role, presenting himself less as a message bearer for individual sitters than as a kind of gatekeeper managing which phenomena and which other spirits were permitted through.