Twice the figure was seized. In December 1873 a sitter named Volckman grabbed it during a séance; there was a struggle, the figure got back behind the curtain, and the medium was afterwards found in the cabinet with her clothing and the tapes reported as intact, which supporters treated as vindication and critics as evidence that the check had been arranged. In 1880, at a different sitting under a different spirit name, Sir George Sitwell held on to the figure and it proved to be the medium in her underclothes. That second episode is not seriously disputed.
Around the same case a further argument runs about Crookes himself. Some historians have argued that his conduct was shaped by a personal relationship with the young medium and that his published testimony cannot be treated as disinterested; others have held that the charge rests on late and second hand claims and that his scientific reputation was otherwise unimpeachable. Trevor Hall's 1962 study is the fullest statement of the first position, and it has been contested since it appeared.
What can be said without taking a side is that nothing survives from the sittings that would satisfy any modern standard of control. There was no continuous illumination, no independent observer inside the cabinet, no protocol drafted in advance by a party without a stake, and no chain of custody for the photographic plates.
The case has therefore stayed exactly where it was: the most fully documented materialisation of the Victorian period, documented by a participant, in conditions designed by the people whose claim was being tested.