Fanny Higginson Medium

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1889 to 1978

Known as the person who trained Gordon Higginson, Gordon's mother. Born in Stoke on Trent.

Fanny Higginson first put her foot across the threshold of Longton Church as a 14 year old teenager at first only coming as a curious visitor but after receiving a message while she was there that her mother was here with her and her auntie who she had accompanied to the demonstration of the Medium Annie Brittain, she got upset and said her mother was at home and did not accept the message but Mrs Brittain insisted that Fanny's Mother was in Spirit and had passed away while Fanny and her auntie where at the church service and she was told that her, Fanny, would be working at this Longton church for the rest of her years, and it will all begin a little later on, then you will become as I am, a Medium, working on the very platform I am working from. Fanny went home and found that the Medium Annie Brittain was accurate in what she said so Fanny started attending the church and was instructed in the gift of Mediumship as was her auntie. They both became good Mediums. Fanny was told early on by another Medium before she was married she would have a son who would follow her into Mediumship and travel the world as a famous Medium.

Fanny sitting in the church Circles in her teenage years was doing well in her development, by the time she was twenty her Mediumistic powers had developed. She got married had three boys and a girl, Gordon being the last. Fanny stayed at Longton Church from the time she stepped foot in the church then continued in Longton throughout her life as a working Medium until she got very frail. She developed the gifts of physical mediumship and very powerful, accurate clairvoyance.

Fanny could have become very famous in her own right if she had used her great talent but instead she chose to remain by the side of her son, who she was going make sure he was not going to stray away from his chosen pathway. I was told by Sally Hardings [president of Burslem Spiritualist Church Stoke on Trent UK] that when she was little and playing with Gordon she use to get chased away by Fanny, then Gordon was taken into the seances to sit in them [sometimes Sally the little girl would also be taken into the seance when her mother was attending]. Sally said Gordon was locked in the church by Fanny and told to stay there and talk to Spirit; then two hours later his mother would pick him up and take him home, that is how dedicated to the Spirit World she was.

After a lecture in the Liverpool Spiritualist church in Daulby Street, Gordon himself told me and our group, that his mother Fanny made him stand facing the wall for over an hour linking with Spirit and give messages to her from the information he was getting from the Spirit World. This discipline was also taught in development classes by Sally Harding of Stoke on Trent UK, who also made me and others in our development group, do the same thing in her workshops. The idea is that the trainee Medium does not get any hints from the audience or the recipients of the messages.

Fanny Higginson served Longton Spiritualist Church for seventy years as a gifted trance medium, giving over one thousand private sittings. Recipients described the evidence given as "life changing". In fact a famous mining company would not dig test bores without consulting her, so accurate was her advice.

Longton Spiritualist church is a little homely place in the Potteries [Stoke on Trent UK], now newly rebuilt in a slightly different place because of the new A50 road going through Longton.