Tyler Books into Traighmor, the windswept guest house of young widow, Ruth Blacklock, and her illusive young son Duncan. Mrs MacRae said she hadn’t raised the alarm immediately, which (as I’ve said before) is understandable, considering Netta was prone to disappearing for hours on her own). However, later that day, her room was found empty, her bed unslept in, and her possessions neatly in place.

Born in Cairo, Egypt in 1897, Netta Fornario was born to an English mother and an Italian father, and spent her first years in Italy before moving to London after the death of her mother in 1898, being put in the care of her maternal grandfather, a tea dealer by the name of Thomas Pratt Ling.How she came to be there and the curious circumstances surrounding her death are a matter so strange and haunting that her story continues to resonate in retellings nearly a hundred years later. Another sensationalist element was the mysterious cloaked figure, but again there is no evidence such a person ever existed, and he would certainly have stood out on a remote Scottish island at low season. The play is full of memorable lines (‘If I’m ill I want to be healed, not cured’; ‘Love is possession, but it’s also surrender’) and peppered with marvellously-written spiritualist nonsense.

She was trying to channel the ‘green ray elementals’, the faeries or spirits that protect nature’s life force causing things to grow and heal. Netta became interested in the island of Iona after reading a story by her favorite author, William Sharp, describing the area around Loch Staonaig where the fairies roam free.Netta used to roam the beaches and moorland of the island each day, and attempt to contact the ‘spirits’ of the island each night through trances. Please ensure you have given Find a Grave permission to access your location in your browser settings. There's a lot more info in the video but in short, ever since an exiled monk landed there and built a monestary, it has been hailed as the defacto birthplace of Christianity for those regions. There seems to have been some delay in reporting her missing, but I guess everybody was used to Netta disappearing for several hours at a stretch, and would not have found it unduly alarming. Given the manner in which Netta was found it is probably safe to assume she was attempting some kind of ritual, possibly a kind of astral projection as hypothesised by Dion Fortune.

It was later found that Netta had packed a ton (not literally) of luggage, so was seemingly planning to stay for quite a while. The family warned Netta that no ferries could take her back to the Scottish mainland because it was a Sunday.She studied in private girl’s schools until early adulthood, then studied abroad in Italy, taking advantage of her dual citizenship.

The revelation of that secret is done with technical wizardry, a marriage of film and theatre, which is a feature of the performance in this joint production between Moray-based Wildbird and Mull Theatre. A further examination of the body did not provide any more answers and the coroner was not able to ascertain just how or when she had died, finally settling on the explanation that she must have died of a combination of exhaustion, heart failure, and hypothermia considering the frigid temperatures and the fact that she had not been dressed for the cold. Also, the picture usually associated with her ( Picture associated with Netta) in almost all the online articles I came across, doesn't seem to actually be here.Dion actually went further and accused Moina Mathers, leader of the Alpha et Omega Temple (following her husbands death) of the murder of Miss Fonario through psychic attack. Not surprisingly, many of the more lurid aspects of this case, such as the scratch-marks on Netta’s naked body, were the invention of sensationalist press. Netta was not a member of the original Golden Dawn, joining its remnants long after its collapse following the Battle of Blythe Road. After Netta’s death the housekeeper was quoted in the press as saying that several times Netta had said “she had been to the far beyond, and had come back to life after spending some time in another world”. Born to an Italian father who loved to travel to ancient places like egypt, Netta developed a keen interest in the occult, supernatural and spiritual at a young age.