In 1988, a housewife from Florida made an astonishing and rather baffling claim. Among many other metallurgic psychic powers, she appeared to spontaneously grow large patches of gold leaf across her face and body.

The woman, known only as Katie, was the subject of a study by a handful of parapsychologists including local psychiatrist Berthold Schwarz and American parapsychologist Professor Stephen Braude. Both spent a protracted period of time testing and recording this strange phenomena and the potential means through which they occurred. While Schwarz appears to have written a handful of articles on Katie’s claims, Braude’s larger work ‘The Gold Leaf Lady’ offers the most thorough and exhaustive record of Katie’s time in the spotlight.

Katie, or ‘The Gold Leaf Lady’, was not a working psychic, fortune teller or similar, and had no direct links to any such fields. She also claimed to have no aspirations to monetise her purported abilities or to go ‘professional’ with her metal production. How someone who secretes bits of foil was going to make their fortune from such a skill beats me.

However, despite not monetising any powers, she was reported as being a powerful psychic, healer and had other strange abilities, such as being able to bend metal (much like our good pal Uri Geller) and even germinate seeds in her hands.

As well as peeling foil from her person, Katie was also engaged in several police cases as a consulting psychic. In one instance in Voro Beach, Florida, she was reportedly able to identify the location of a burglary, the missing contents and provided descriptions of the perpetrators. These clues led to the recovery of a substantial amount of valuable jewellery.

Katie did not have a full education and was removed from the school system after first grade, leaving her ‘functionally illiterate’. Despite this, she had moments of genius, writing quatrains ‘from’ Nostradamus in accurate medieval French . However, when there’s a foil-sweating woman in front of you, she would be speaking fluent Esperanto and it’d pale in comparison.

Katie grew up in incredibly unfortunate and underprivileged circumstances. The tenth of twelve children, she was forced to leave school just after first grade to become her mother’s carer and took over the role of nurse and cleaner for the household. She never returned to the school system and was given no rudimentary education at home, leaving her unable to read and write into adulthood. This deprivation ultimately led her into a career in housekeeping, with little chance of leaving that occupation.

Despite her unfortunate circumstances, by all accounts she was an intelligent and affable woman. In some reports of her investigation, she is described as ‘refreshingly modest and non-opportunistic’.

Understanding the exact nature of Katie and her supernatural powers are difficult to comprehend due to the inherent bias of investigators and writers. The legitimacy of her bizarre claims is enhanced by her refusal to officially monetise her abilities and work as a professional psychic. However, this does not mean that she did not receive renumeration in the form of ‘modest honorariums’, expenses, minor fame and respect from outsiders.

The materialisation of the ‘gold leaf’ is described in strange and uncertain terms, but can be distilled into simple points.

When the gold leaf or foil began to appear upon Katie’s person, it began on her face. Then, emerged on her arms, hands, torso and occasionally her legs, covering rather large areas. In images, these often look to be the size of an A5 piece of paper with similarly crisp edges.

These patches of gold could appear in layers and at random intervals, leaving Katie to regard this as an affliction rather than a gift. According to Katie, these patches would appear when she was outside, shopping or meeting with friends, causing terrible embarrassment.

The foil’s appearance would be accompanied with great discomfort, often described as burning or itching, and leaving behind a rashy patch. A little like a supernatural STI.

The gold wasn’t ever seen forming from her pores, but was described as being a kind of spiritual apport, materialising and dematerialising on her skin and environs. Some foil was retrieved by investigators, tested and kept in a jar where it was revealed to compromise of 80% copper and 20% zinc, being brass, rather than gold. If Katie had sweated this metal from her body, she would have died long before scientists got their chance to take samples. Blood tests similarly proved that there was nothing irregular in Katie’s system, and university studies (that were never completed) appear to have found no abnormalities.

Katie was inadvertently, psychically producing gold foil and that was that.

But could Katie have just been purchasing quantities of gold foil from craft supply shops and sticking it to herself? Well, yes. Following Braude’s initial published findings, analysis was completed on commercially available examples of gold leaf and found them to be virtually identical to the mysterious foil flakes of Katie. Before this, theories were proposed that Katie was fraudulently producing the foil by dissolving brass on her skin, but this would have produced results that looked drastically different to the flakes, as brass produced in this way would be crystalline in nature.

However, it was broadly accepted by investigators that, while Katie’s foil was structurally similar to shop-bought, she couldn’t have possibly travelled to buy it. Therefore, it was a spiritual apport, rather than a natural production from her body – this was an inadvertent psychic power, rather than a biological curiosity.

Try as they might, the moment of foil production was never captured on film by the many men who attempted to understand her abilities.

As with many female mediums who claimed to exude strange substances (think ectoplasm etc), she was subjected to ‘intimate’ examinations in order to ascertain whether the source of her gold was rather more terrestrial in origin. While attempting to capture the moment of production, Katie would be sat in a chair, wearing a short-sleeved shirt, which would be pulled up, just below her bra, so no foil could be secreted on her torso or shirt. But what about her bra? Either way, after engaging Katie in conversation for a while, she would be asked to raise her shirt. At this point, vast quantities of gold leaf were often revealed, without investigators ever seeing her place it there. On one occasion, she even manifested stigmata, in the shape of both a cross and a butterfly. But for all of this footage, it has never been seen in its entirety, without breaks or cuts and with her hands and legs in shot at all times.

In 1990, Braude visited Katie for the last time, while filming an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. Once more, the crew tried to capture evidence of Katie’s foil-apports in action, over a strenuous 6-hour test period… but with no luck.

Could Katie have reached over and dabbed some foil onto her face and body? Could she have been sticking gold leaf to her face to seem special and celebrated for once in her life? Katie’s second marriage was a reportedly abusive one, and trips to labs and testing centres may have offered some form of escape from her toxic home life. Or, could this heightened state of stress have made her psychically manifest the gold leaf? Much like teenage girls are said to influence poltergeist activity through heightened emotions and hormones, was this a shiny, psychic manifestation of her own trauma? No studies have ever been fully completed, and Katie disappeared into obscurity once more. To this day, many people believe that Katie was the real deal.

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