I first wrote about this case in one of my earlier books in 2014.

It's a Gothic, Victorian tale of magic and mystery, murder and madness, and the yearning

for immortality, ripe for a chapter in a penny dreadful, like the stories of Dorian

Grey, Frankenstein and Dracula. It's a tale that grips as it horrifies, fascinates, yet simultaneously strikes at the fear inside of us all,

that if we unleash the primal forces of the supernatural in our quest for ancient and forbidden secrets and knowledge,

it may show us where its allegiances lie and destroy us entirely.

The location of this tale is the tiny island of Iona in 1929, where a missing young woman is found naked and dead,

lying on a cross, cut into the earth earth on the top of a fairy mound.

There is a knife in her hand and a look of terror etched across her face.

She has no wounds, she is barefoot, but the souls of her feet are clean.

This could be the start of a Sherlock Holmes novel, yet indeed this would have been

ideal for author and spiritualists Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for it strikes particularly close to

home, and it encompasses the most cryptic, unsolved disappearance and death of an eccentric student

of the esoteric arts, whose adventures into the nether worlds

would be her undoing. Iona is a mystical place rich in the law of dragons, angels and vengeful

fairies. Its victim are perhaps naive, adept of the occult, who believed she could step into

summerland and return unscathed, said one of her best friends, de unfortunate, I do not object

to reasonable risks, but it appeared to me that Mac, as we called her, was going into very deep waters,

and there was certain to be trouble.

In the early 1900s, Marie, Nora, Emily Edith, Vaughanourio, most commonly known as Neta,

spent much of her early life living in the affluent London suburb of Q.

From a young age, she'd shown a keen interest in the rising field of spiritualism

...