The Effect
In the late 1980s, an ordinary Florida housewife comes forward claiming she has a raft of psychic abilities at her disposal. She can receive messages from a succession of disembodied voices; see the unquiet spirits of the dead. And, furthermore, nobody else can hear these voices or see these ghostly forms. She has, she says, a unique and quite extraordinary gift.
The woman, who becomes known as ‘Miss Katie’, is described by her psychiatrist, Dr Berthold Schwarz, as, and I quote: ‘a great classical, physical medium’. Moreover, he states that, in his professional opinion, the things that happen to her and the unique preternatural skills she possesses, both mental and physical, are completely unexplainable.
And there are many more, very respectable individuals, who agree. Former Police Investigator Jeremy Burr, who identifies as a total sceptic, also believes Katie’s powers are real, having asked for Katie’s help to solve a number of police cases. In these instances, he says, he has seen things that are ‘quite astounding’, things he couldn’t possibly begin to explain.
Across one investigation during his time in the police force, Jeremy Burr sought Katie’s talents of psychic deduction to help solve a burglary. Not having worked with Katie for long at the time, he decided to test her so-called clairvoyance by concealing key details of the crime from her, including where it had taken place. Incredibly, Katie somehow managed to lead Jeremy Burr directly to the very house at which the crime had been committed. And that wasn’t all. She also told him the house contained artworks that were ‘Asian in style’. And that the objects that were stolen had been taken from a wooden box kept stored inside a ‘blue room’.
And Katie’s extraordinary predictions were indeed correct. Jeremy Burr was astonished to find that the hallway of the house in question had walls that were covered in, what he later described, as ‘oriental art’. The bedroom from which the items had been taken, was indeed blue, just as Katie had told him. And sure enough, the jewellery that had disappeared during the burglary had also been stolen from a wooden box. Jeremy is so amazed by these exceptionally-accurate predictions that, at first, he first singles out Katie as the burglary’s prime suspect. As he said later: ‘I just didn’t realise she was that good’.
Even more remarkable than Katie’s gift for psychic detective work is her ability to make items manifest themselves from a number of her orifices. As she says, solid objects just keep on ‘popping out’ from her eyes, ears and nose… materialising as if by magic. A video tape recorded by her psychiatrist Berthold Schwarz shows her in the grip of one of these episodes, apparently seized by panic, desperately attempting to shake something free of her ear. A flash of gold is caught on camera, dropping directly out of her ear and falling to the ground. It is a small golden charm.
A still more remarkable tape, also shot by Schwarz, captures Miss Katie squeezing a gemstone out of one of her eyes. She presses her hand in front of her eye and, sure enough, a tiny cut jewel shoots out of it, again, as if by magic. As if Katie had conjured the precious stone from beneath the very eye itself.
Bethold Schwarz also asserts that he has, on several occasions, seen Katie looking like she is about to be sick, but instead of vomiting, she has produced a sparkling jewel from between her lips. He is certain there is no natural way this could have happened, since her mouth had been totally empty during an examination performed just moments before. He also states that Katie had been sipping water, too, before the gemstone appeared, which would have been impossible if she’d been concealing anything in her mouth. ‘You have to ask the question,’ says Schwarz, with a sense of wonder, ‘where did this thing come from?’
And as if psychic police investigations and the production of solid objects from bodily orifices weren’t impressive enough, Miss Katie’s exceptional talents were about to level up even further, as she began exhibiting the phenomena she was to become most famous for: oozing a golden substance from the very pores of her skin, as if her sweat was made from the purest, most shimmering gold.
This was another phenomenon captured by Berthold Schwarz on video camera, appearing to prove that Katie did indeed possess the bewildering talent of sweating gold. ‘It comes out all over my body,’ she said. ‘Face, eyes, ears, mouth, arms, thighs, tummy, back… wherever there are pores is where it comes out of.’
But Katie’s ability to make gold literally seep from the pores of her skin apparently wasn’t as glamorous as it seemed. As can be seen in the video recordings, when this was happening to Katie she would pant and pace, in visible discomfort. The patches of gold would appear completely spontaneously, she claimed, in layers and at random intervals. So they could materialise at the most inconvenient moments, when she was out shopping, or meeting up with friends, causing her terrible embarrassment. This, coupled with resulting itching and burning rashes left behind by the golden patches, led Katie to view the capacity to sweat gold as an affliction rather than a gift.
In part of Berthold Schwarz’s video footage, there is a close up of Katie’s inner forearm, on which can clearly be seen a tiny, shining golden dot. ‘It’s getting bigger, it seems to me’, Schwarz confirms, and declares her to be a ‘medical marvel’. Others agreed.
Eye-witnesses reported seeing the same gold substance appear on her tongue, which they then watched Berthold Schwarz peel off with ‘a tweezer-like instrument’, as though it was stuck there, as though it was indeed a part of Katie’s body. ‘I was holding her hand,’ one eye-witness claimed. ‘And there was nothing on her arm at all, and then I looked down again and there were these long strips of gold. If you saw it, you too would be a believer.’
During his time working with Katie, police officer Jeremy Burr was another witness to her sweating gold. He stated that he would be sitting in a room with her having an ordinary conversation, when she would suddenly appear to be in discomfort, and pull up the lower front of her shirt to reveal gold spreading across her stomach. ‘After it was brushed off,’ he said, ‘with her shirt still in the same position, more gold flakes appeared’.
The many people who claimed to have witnessed these extraordinary occurrences surrounding Miss Katie were all adamant: none of the happenings were faked. How could they be, they had seen them with their own eyes. Even Katie admitted that if someone had approached her claiming they possessed the ability to sweat gold she would think it was a trick herself.
So just what was the cause of the slew of spectacular paranormal abilities Miss Katie possessed? Surely those psychic predictions, the charms and gemstones and gold leaf couldn’t really have appeared by magic… or could they?
The Method
An ordinary Floridian housewife possessing an extraordinary array of paranormal talents, from psychic predictions to making gemstones appear from her eyes to sweating gold… it seemed just too fantastical to be true. But many believed that Katie’s talents singled her out as exceptional, a medical marvel. Many had seen it for themselves.
How to explain that robbery Katie assisted the police with, during which she apparently predicted the house would contain Asian art, the crime scene would be a blue room, and the missing items had been stolen from a wooden box? Surely these statements were too ‘on-the-nose’ to be anything other than a display of genuine psychic abilities?
Or could Katie somehow have known that a crime had taken place in that house through a news report, an acquaintance, or word of mouth? Could she have unwittingly absorbed information about the house, before relating pieces of it - the fact that the bedroom was blue, for example - back to the police without even being fully aware of it? Could she have led the police to the wider vicinity of where the crime had been committed, and then merely followed some sort of commotion, or the flashing lights of police cars, to the house itself?
Perhaps there is a more conclusive explanation to be found for how her body was seemingly able to produce those objects - those gemstones and jewels and golden charms that fell from her ears and eyes.
During an investigation by sceptics of these incredible happenings, the footage of Katie freeing a gemstone from her eye socket was slowed down. In doing so, the stone could clearly be seen emerging from above Katie’s ring finger. A magician, Bruce Adams, was asked to take a look at the footage. In his opinion, Katie had palmed the gemstone between the middle and ring fingers of her hand. At the moment the gemstone appeared, Katie had simply released her grip on the stone, causing it to fall to the ground. It is even possible to detect the exact moment Katie spreads apart her fingers to allow this to happen. As the gemstone was not only very small but also clear, she wouldn’t have needed to be a particularly skilled sleight-of-hand artist, and could still have used her hands relatively normally in the moments before producing the stone, without raising any suspicion that she was holding anything at all.
The eye-witness who had described seeing ‘long strips of gold’ materialise before her eyes on Katie’s forearm, said, in the same statement, that they ‘resembled candy kiss wrapping’. Despite being convinced of Katie’s special powers, could she have inadvertently hit the nail on the head here?
In much of the video footage and stills photos of Katie that appear to capture her sweating gold, the substance can be seen on her skin in a perfectly crisp and straight line, very like the edge of a sweet wrapper… or like the edge of sheet of the kind of gold leaf used in crafting. Quite why, if a human did possess the capability to sweat gold, the gold would appear in a perfectly straight line is uncertain, especially on a part of the skin like the face, where the so-called gold ‘sweat’ had no clothing to inhibit it.
Moreover, a laboratory analysis of the strange material supposedly spontaneously oozing from Katie’s pores bore some interesting results. Rather than being pure gold, it was actually proven to be a far less precious metal: brass. Results showed that the so-called gold was a mixture of copper and zinc in an 80/20 ratio. The same ratio, in fact, to be found in the kind of sheets of imitation gold leaf sold in crafting stores, where the zinc/copper mixture is specifically controlled to create tones that closely mimic genuine gold leaf.
Professor Paul Kurz, from the University of Buffalo in New York, was one of the sceptics who didn’t believe Miss Katie possessed any special powers. Under Kurz’s supervision, two of his students conducted an experiment to see whether it was possible for them to ‘sweat’ gold leaf like Katie, using only the products they could buy from their local crafting store. One of the students attached sheets of gold crafting foil to her skin using hairspray, and the results were strikingly similar. The gold stuck, quite successfully, for many hours, even down the length of her tongue.
But the parapsychologists who believed that Katie really could sweat gold weren’t convinced. They countered the experiments of Paul Kurz’s university students by asserting that, despite the substance taken from Katie’s skin being structurally similar to the sheets of gold leaf found in any crafting store, she couldn’t possibly have travelled to a crafting store to buy it. Therefore, the phenomenon was still paranormal. It was just a spiritual apport (an object produced by supposedly supernatural means), rather than a substance naturally secreted by her body. So, they maintained, this still meant that Katie possessed true psychic powers. It just meant that she wasn’t quite as much of a biological curiosity as they first expected.
The process of Miss Katie’s extraordinary ability to sweat gold was never filmed in its entirety. In 1990, the crew of the popular TV show Unsolved Mysteries visited Katie to try to capture evidence of her gold foil production in action, be it through her skin or as a spiritual apport. But, despite a strenuous, six-hour filming session, nothing paranormal was ever recorded.
Rather than being a true psychic with a multitude of incredible skills at her disposal, was Miss Katie really just a talented fraud with some rudimentary knowledge of stage magic and sleight-of-hand? Her supporters say not, since she apparently never tried to profit from her abilities. However, this does not mean that she did not receive some payment for what she claimed to be able to do, as well as expenses. But, if we dismiss the theory that Katie was just making her remarkable claims in order to ‘get rich quick’, might there have been another explanation, rooted instead in human psychology?
Katie’s upbringing was not a happy one, and she had an unfortunate and underprivileged childhood. The tenth of twelve children, she was forced to leave school just after first grade to become her mother’s carer, and subsequently took over the role of both nurse and cleaner for her household. Katie never returned to school and was given no education at home, leaving her unable to read and write into adulthood. Due to her illiteracy and lack of a formal education, her future prospects were slim.
Married twice, Katie’s second marriage was reportedly an abusive one. Might, therefore, her trips to laboratories and testing centres, while investigators and scientists alike recorded her as exceptional and unique, a medical marvel, have provided some form of escape? After all, there were little other options available at the time to a woman who had no other skills or education, and could not even read or write. Not only did her supposed talents allow her an escape from a mundane and traumatic everyday life, they also won her a level of minor fame, plus a respect from outsiders that would have been impossible to find elsewhere.
‘I do still have questions in my mind that are not answered yet,’ Katie said. ‘And I don’t know if they will be answered. I’ll keep trying until I find out.’ But was she talking about her remarkable skills, or the deep-seated psychological questions caused by an unstable childhood and adult trauma? As Katie herself implied, only she knows the answer.
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
