Gordon Higginson (medium)

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Gordon Mons Higginson (17 November 1918 – 18 January 1993) was a British spiritualist medium. He was born in Longton, Staffordshire, and as a child joined Longton Lyceum and attended Longton Spiritualist Church. He said he had medium abilities from an early age. He served in World War II and after the war worked as a medium in Belgium, Britain and France. He led the Spiritualists' National Union (SNU) for 23 years and was Principal of the Arthur Findlay College from 1979 to 1993.

Higginson faced fraud accusations during his career, including from other spiritualists. In 1974, parapsychologists Barrie Colvin and Frank Spedding attended a séance and claimed the ectoplasmic figures were Higginson himself covered in cloth; Colvin also reported finding muslin under a seat. In 1978, he was accused of hot reading after a Bristol séance in which he provided names and addresses, with the suggestion that he had studied information beforehand.

Higginson wrote about these allegations in his life story. He promoted psychic surgery and supported Australian practitioners David and Helen Elizalde. A video of their sessions was later dismissed as fraudulent by magician James Randi, who suggested the trick involved a condom filled with pig’s blood. During a visit to the SNU, a blood clot the Elizalde claimed to remove was secretly tested and found to be pig blood. Higginson was shaken by the discovery, but he continued to believe in psychic surgery, and the Elizalde tour was canceled.