The Immortal Hour

A mysterious death on Iona in 1929, and a century-long search for the truth.
The true story and mystery of Netta Fornario, a writer and occultist who died on the Scottish island of Iona in the early Winter of 1929. A proponent of the early 20th Century occult renaissance, half-English, half-Italian Netta found herself consumed with the search for God and the answers of what lay beyond the so-called thin place.

Consumed with grief, having lost her mother and grandparents before the age of twelve, Netta associated herself with some of the most infamous occultists and groups of the time. Her belief in the faerie kingdom that lay beyond our world, led her to Iona, an island she believed was one of the world's thin places, where the Green Ray Kingdom was closest to our reality.

It was there, under cover of night and a biting frost where she would meet her demise. Two days after disappearing from her lodgings, Netta's nude body was discovered among the hills by two crofters. What followed was a century of rumours, embellishments, and bizarre tales of how exactly Netta had come to meet her fate.

Some wild theories stretch from a wicker-man-style island where the residents covered up a murder of an unusual outsider, psychic attack from beyond the grave, murder by the very faerie creatures she was seeking, to tales that Aleister Crowley himself had travelled to Iona to kill a fellow occultist.

Despite the fantastical tales of occult rituals and demons in the night, Netta's death was perhaps not so extravagant. Maybe she was an emotionally damaged woman, who escaped a childhood of grief, to find solace in the occult, and it was those beliefs that exacerbated her mental collapse, resulting in her death.

In The Immortal Hour, we look at all the evidence - and lack of it - relating to Netta's life and death, the theories, the wild accusations, tales of the occult, falsehoods, and one woman's search for something greater than herself. The book dissects newspaper articles, archives, written theories, and lost papers that give us insight into the story of Netta Fornario.

Ultimately, this work has been produced to honour the memory of a young woman who lost herself between the thin place and the vast landscape of her own ghostly heart.

From the bestselling author of the Bizarre True Crime Series, Monstrous book of Serial Killers, the Harrison Lake Mysteries, and the Suicide Prevention Handbook.