This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Sinéad Sturgeon and David Murphy. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 7 September 1845, United Kingdom
Died: 27 May 1849
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Little Weesy
Louisa Coppin (1845–9), ‘Little Weesy ’, was born on 7 September 1845 at Ivy House, 34 Strand Road, Derry. Louisa died from gastric fever on 27 May 1849, but reputedly appeared to her family five months later as ‘a ball of bluish light’ and prophesied the as-yet-undiscovered location of Sir John Franklin’s 1845 polar expedition to chart the North-west Passage. Despite successive search parties from 1848 onwards, the expedition’s fate was unknown, and there was enormous public interest in the fate of Franklin and his crew. Coppin, who claimed to have experienced paranormal premonitions on other occasions, communicated Louisa’s advice to Lady Franklin in May 1850. While the authorities were highly sceptical, Lady Franklin seems to have been more impressed, and according to the Derry Journal (29 March 1889) some 430 Liverpool merchants and bankers petitioned the admiralty to search where Louisa had indicated. A subsequent search, the 1859 expedition in the Fox, discovered the remains of Franklin’s disastrous expedition on King William Island, as supposedly predicted by Louisa.
The story of Louisa’s apparition was later published in J. Henry Skewes’s sensational and embellished narrative, Sir John Franklin: the true secret of the discovery of his fate (1889), but Francis Leopold McClintock, captain of the Fox, and relatives of Lady Franklin (d. 1875), strenuously denied that paranormal advice had influenced their search. There is no known documentary evidence of Lady Franklin’s relationship with the Coppins, and it has been speculated that any such materials were destroyed by Lady Franklin’s relatives. The legend of ‘Little Weesy’ continues to fascinate, however, and is the subject of Liam Browne’s novel The emigrant’s farewell (2006).