At the end of 2025, Stewart Alexander held his final guest circle. With it ends one of the best-documented careers in physical mediumship – and it ends in a manner that suits it: quietly, by his own choice, and with a written explanation. Reason enough to retrace his path.
A book changes everything
Alexander was born in the north of England in 1946 and still lives in Kingston upon Hull. Until he was 21 he knew nothing about Spiritualism – he imagined, as he writes himself, people sitting around a table in dim light asking: "Is there anybody there?"
Then his brother bought a book: "On the Edge of the Etheric" by Arthur Findlay, first published in 1931 and still one of Spiritualism's best-selling titles. In it Findlay describes his sittings with the Scottish physical medium John Campbell Sloan. His brother passed it on, and with that, as Alexander puts it, their journey began. About two years later, after a church service, the brothers were invited into an established home circle.
His own circle began in 1967. It took fifteen years before physical phenomena appeared – his physical mediumship emerged only in 1982. His siblings sat with him throughout.
Why the home circle is everything to him
Those fifteen years explain his central conviction. Alexander regards the home circle, not the course, as the real workshop of mediumship. On the decline of physical mediumship in the twentieth century he writes that it vanished because the circles vanished. Knowledgeable tutors can advise, support and encourage, he says, but no more than that.
The gradual development of mediumship of any kind cannot be rushed.
The stated purpose of his own website is therefore not self-promotion but encouragement to form home circles again, out of which new mediums may emerge.
The Noah's Ark Society
In 1990 an advertisement appeared in Psychic News: a new society for physical mediumship had been founded, the Noah's Ark Society, created by Robin Foy – the same Robin Foy who a few years later would take part in the Scole Experiment. Alexander wrote to him the same day, mentioning his years of research into the physical mediums of the past – and saying nothing at all about his own, still young, mediumship. Foy made him the society's archives officer.
Its success was extraordinary. Within months the society had over a hundred affiliated circles and members around the world, monthly newsletters and weekend seminars that sold out within a day. In 1993 Alexander became its president.
His most lasting work dates from this period, and it is archival. He noticed that elderly Spiritualists who had sat with the great physical mediums were taking their memories to the grave. He appealed to them in a newsletter to record those memories on tape. Several did. From these came the compilation "Physical Séance Room Recollections" – recordings by people who had witnessed sittings we can now only read about.
The collapse
Then it turned. Robin Foy, the founder, resigned along with his wife. A year later two couples on the committee fell out; Alexander's attempts to mediate failed and one couple left. He finally gave up both the presidency and his membership – by his own account one of the hardest decisions of his life.
He wanted to explain it to the members. Over several weeks he drafted an article for the newsletter in which he accused no one and simply stated that the society was no longer on the same path as he was. The article was never printed. For him, that was confirmation that he had decided rightly. In 2004 the society collapsed.
When the messenger becomes more important than the message and when we stop listening to the Spirit World then the way will always be lost.
What is remarkable about his account is what it leaves out: names. He blames no one. What began as a breath of fresh air, he writes, failed in the end because of basic human nature – and no more than that. The society's newsletters do survive; a former member has made them available in an online archive.
What he never did
For a directory such as ours Alexander is a special case, and he says why himself. His contact page states plainly that he gives no private readings, no online readings and no consultations. His mediumship, he writes, functions only within the séance room.
Consistent with that, in 2021 he declined to take part in the Netflix series "Surviving Death" – the audience was too large for him, and he has reservations about the way media report on mediumship. He appears in Leslie Kean's book research, but not in the series.
What remains
Alexander set down his experiences in "An Extraordinary Journey: The Memoirs of a Physical Medium". Independently of that, Katie Halliwell documented over twenty years what she witnessed in the Alexander circle, most recently in "Touching the Next Horizon". Then there is his collection: out-of-print books, tape recordings, objects from the séance room, among them Maud Gunning's celluloid trumpet and a trumpet said to have belonged to Helen Duncan.
On the present state of Spiritualism his verdict is harsh. It has become "a mere shadow of its former self", he writes, asking where the public champions of old have gone – Conan Doyle, Oliver Lodge, William Crookes, Arthur Findlay. One need not share that verdict: look around and the work is plainly continuing, for instance with Kai Mügge or in the sober approach of Eckhard Kruse. But it is the verdict of a man who knows the terms of comparison at first hand and sat in that room himself for sixty years.
His guest circles are ending. His talks are not: he continues to offer his roughly two-hour talk on his own path and the history of physical mediumship to any interested group. Anyone with the opportunity should take it. There is no longer anyone alive who sat with Daniel Dunglas Home – but there are still people who spoke with those who were there.
Sources: Stewart Alexander's own website stewartalexandermedium.com – in particular the pages "About Stewart" and "Contact" as well as his essays "The Noah's Ark Society" (July 2025), "Spiritualism – The Past, The Present and The Future?" (March 2025) and his announcement concerning the guest circles (August 2025). In addition his memoirs "An Extraordinary Journey" and Katie Halliwell's documentation of the circle. The Noah's Ark Society newsletter archive can be consulted at noahsarksocietyarchive.org.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection and our introduction to British Spiritualism.