Mediums Rare

by Richard Matheson

Then she turned, handed the piece of paper to an elderly man seated in the circle and took her chair again.

  A few moments later, she started, re-focusing her eyes. Looking at her husband, she murmured, curiously, “What’s happening?”

  Everyone in the circle, except for the elderly man, stared at her in silence.

  He was reading the piece of paper she had handed to him.

  After a while, he looked up, an expression of awe on his face.

  Rising, he moved to her and took both her hands in his.

  “Young woman, I have been a Spiritualist for over thirty years,” he told her, “but the message you have just given me is the most remarkable I have ever received. It gives me fresh courage to go on, for I know that my boy lives.”

  The man was Judge Frost of Cambridge, a noted jurist who had, for years, been seeking comfort for the loss of his only son.

  The message Mrs. Piper had dashed off, unaware that she was doing so, was so filled with details only the Judge knew about that he was convinced of its authenticity.

  In this manner, Mrs. Piper’s psychic power was discovered.

  When Gladys Osborne was twenty-four, she married Frederick Leonard, an actor.

  One winter, during a poor engagement with a theatrical company that was visiting suburban theatres, she shared a dressing room with two sisters interested in Spiritualism.

  The three of them had sat around a small table twenty-six times now, an hour every day between the matinee and evening performance.

  Nothing whatsoever had happened.

  One of the sisters, Nellie, became disheartened during their twenty-seventh sitting and decided to give it up. “Nothing’s going to happen,” she said. “There’s nothing to it. Tables don’t move unless somebody moves them.”

  Leaving the table, she sat at the other end of the room with a book and started to read.

  Florence and Gladys remained at the table.

  Two minutes later, it began to tilt up and down.

  “Oh, my,” said Nellie, returning quickly. She did not attempt to seat herself at the table, believing that her negative influence had prevented it from moving.

  Instead, she picked up a pad and pencil and waited while Florence addressed whatever force she assumed was moving the table, asking it to tilt once for the letter A, two of the letter B and so on.

  “My name is Feda.” Nellie spoke aloud the first message after it had come through. “I am an ancestress of Gladys. I have been watching over her since she was born, waiting for her to develop her psychic power so I can put her into a trance and give messages through her.”

  Gladys and the two sisters stared at each other in wordless amazement.

  It was the beginning of Mrs. Leonard’s six decades of mediumship.

  A typical sitting (one of hundreds) by Mrs. Piper went as follows: Sitting on an armchair in front of a table on which three pillows are placed, she carries on a casual conversation with the sitters.

  More or less consciously, she slows her breathing and begins to look sleepy, her eyes becoming fixed and staring.

  Soon the eyes become rigid, the breathing slows even more and, within five or six minutes, her head falls forward on a pillow, her pulse rate and breathing dropped well below normal.

  Soon she sits up and her spirit control—at one point a so-called French physician named Dr. Phiniut—takes over the sitting.

  “I get the name Sarah,” Dr. Phiniut says.

  The sitter does not recall the name.

  “Is there something wrong with your mother’s foot?” asks Phiniut.

  The sitter recalls some dropsical trouble her mother has with her foot.

  Later, she remembers an aunt named Sarah.

  Dr. Phiniut tells another sitter that “Agnes” will be ill that year. The month is March.

  In the fall, Agnes becomes ill for the first time since childhood, spending a week in bed.

  Phiniut also predicts the death of the sitter’s uncle who is, at that time, in good health as far as the sitter knows.

  Two weeks later, the uncle dies.

  A Mrs. Pitman is told by Dr. Phiniut that she will have stomach trouble in Paris and it will be taken care of by a “sandy-complexioned” gentleman.

  A short time later, Mrs. Pitman, traveling in Paris, is taken ill with stomach trouble and attended by a sandy-haired doctor.

  “You will leave your home soon and settle in the city in a corner house,” Dr. Phiniut tells a Mrs. M.E.C.

  This presently comes true.

  Phiniut addresses one of the sitters with a nickname unknown to anyone present.

  Later, the widow of the deceased man (who supposedly spoke through Phiniut) reveals that the nickname was used by her husband’s mother and sisters.

  Phiniut tells a Mr. Perkins that his father believes he has heart trouble though he really hasn’t.

  Later, the father admits this, telling his son that he had not revealed this fear, even to his doctor.

  The Thaws (in whose house the sitting is taking place) are told that W. was coming to them soon and that his kidneys are out of order.

  This condition is not suspected at the time but is discovered two months later after W. shows up at their house.

  “Your mother tells you again to put the thing you have on your lap around your neck,” Dr. Phiniut instructs Miss Heffern.

  Miss Heffern has always supposed the object—which is wrapped in paper—to be a lock of her mother’s hair.

  It turns out to be a religious necklace.

  Mrs. Leonard’s most dramatic sitting came on December 3, 1915, in the house of Sir Oliver Lodge.

  Approximately a week earlier Sir Oliver had received a letter from a B. P. Cheves mentioning a photograph taken of his son and a group of officers.

  Lodge’s son had been killed in France on September 14th.

  At the séance, Lodge asked his son (through Mrs. Leonard’s spirit contact Feda) if he recollected the photograph.

  “Yes, there are several others taken with me,” Raymond (through Feda) replied.

  “Friends of yours?” asked Lodge.

  “Some of them,” Raymond answered. “They were not all friends.”

  “Are you standing in the photograph?” asks Lodge.

  “No, sitting down. Some are standing and some are sitting.”

  “Were they soldiers?” asked Lodge.

  “Yes, a mixed lot.”

  “Is it outdoors?”

  “Yes, practically,” Raymond answers.

  Lodge is perplexed. “It must have been out of doors or not of doors. Do you mean yes?”

  Mrs. Leonard (via Raymond and Feda) says it looks like a black background with lines going down.

  She keeps drawing vertical lines in the air.

  The photograph had been taken twenty-one days before Raymond’s death.

  He never mentioned it in his letters.

  Raymond, in the sitting, is explicit about the following points:

  1. His walking stick is visible.

  2. There are considerable number of men in the photograph, the front row sitting.

  3. A B. is prominent in the photograph. Also a C.

  4. He is sitting down, the man behind him with his arm on Raymond’s shoulder.

  5. The background is dark with vertical lines.

  When the photograph arrived, the following items were on it:

  1. Raymond’s walking stick is visible.

  2. There are twenty-one men, the front row sitting on the ground. They are a “mixed lot” in that they are members of different companies.

  3. Captain S. T. Boast is prominent. Also several officers whose last names begin with C.

  4. Raymond is sitting, the officer behind him resting his hand on Raymond’s shoulder.

  5. The background is dark—with six, conspicuous vertical lines on the roof of the shed in front of which the officers are gathered. Sir Oliver Lodge summed up the incident as follows:

  The amount of coincidence between
the description and the actual photograph surely is quite beyond chance or guesswork. Not only are many things right but practically nothing is wrong.

  AFTERWARD

  Of the two mediums, Mrs. Piper was probably the more outstanding.

  Surely, she suffered more with her mediumship.

  To begin with, her childhood was a dreadful one what with hearing voices, seeing faces and suffering with her bed rocking back and forth.

  Although Mrs. Leonard was quoted as saying, “My childhood to me was a time of pain and torture,” it seems evident that Mrs. Piper’s childhood—and life—were more traumatic.

  Certainly no medium in the history of Spiritualism was ever—willingly—so harshly treated by investigators.

  Her nostrils tickled by a feather while she was in trance.

  Her entire body pinched.

  Lighted matches held to her arms.

  Needles plunged into her hands while she in trance.

  Pain pressure applied to her palms to a weight of twenty-five pounds.

  A harsh price to pay for William James’ opprobrium that Mrs. Piper was the one “white crow” disproving the “law” that all crows (mediums) are black.

  Two of the more noteworthy aspects of the mediumship of Mrs. Leonard and Mrs. Piper were Mrs. Leonard’s “book tests” and Mrs. Piper’s “cross-correspondence.”

  One of Mrs. Leonard’s “tests” came about after the Reverend C. Drayton Thomas heard knocking sounds in his bedroom which he took to be spirit knocks.

  At his next sitting with Mrs. Leonard he asked Feda if this was true.

  Mrs. Leonard had never been in the Reverend’s house but Feda’s reply came as follows:

  “You will be amused by the following test. There is a book behind your study door, the second shelf from the floor and fifth book from the left end.

  “Near the top of page 17 you will see words which serve to indicate what Feda was attempting to do when knocking in your room.”

  Thomas located the book, a volume of Shakespeare. Near the top of page 17 was a line from King Henry VI, Act I, Scene 3.

  “I will not answer thee with words but blows.”

  Between November 10, 1906, and June 2, 1907, Mrs. Piper gave 94 sittings during which 120 experiments in cross-correspondence were made.

  These ran to allusions from classical literature and were like parts of a jig-saw puzzle being fitted together at a distance from each other.

  A typical one follows:

  The sitters—all educated men of great social respect—drew up a message in Latin so that Mrs. Piper could not possibly understand it. The message was directed to a similar group of deceased investigators.

  We are aware of the scheme of cross-correspondence which you are transmitting through various mediums and we hope that you will go on with them.

  Try to give to A and B two different messages between which no connection is discernible.

  Then, as soon as possible, give to C a third message which will reveal the hidden connection.

  Mrs. Piper was A.

  This experiment extended from December 17, 1906, to June 2, 1907.

  The dictation of the first sentence of the message (in Latin) took place over four meetings.

  The second part of the message—sent to a different medium—came through by the middle of February, again in Latin.

  By June 2, the entire message had been transmitted through Mrs. Piper and to the other two mediums, all in Latin which none of them understood.

  The message turned out to be an elaborate poem by Robert Browning.

  Both Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Leonard retired from mediumship at relatively early ages.

  Ironically both lived far beyond the period of their greatest achievements.

  Mrs. Piper died in 1950.

  Mrs. Leonard in 1967.

  FRAUDS

  It is appropriate, at this point, to bring up the subject of fraud in mediumship.

  While the accounts of genuine psychics have their interest, it would be unbalanced to not take into consideration the opposite aspects of parapsychology’s beginning; that they were marked by—if not riddled by—dishonesty and outright swindling.

  Of the Fox sisters, Houdini had the following to say. “They used Spiritualism as a means to ‘get while the getting was good.’

  Fortunately for the general public, Spiritualism received a severe jolt in the confession of Margaret Fox.”

  Of D. D. Home, Houdini said, “His active career, his various escapades and the direct cause of his death indicate that he lived the life of a hypocrite of the deepest dye.”

  Of Palladino, he said, “In her crafty prime, she may have possessed the agility and abundant skill in misdirection, together with sufficient energy and nerve, to bamboozle her scientific and otherwise astute observers.”

  Of the Davenport brothers, Houdini claimed to be an intimate friend of Ira Davenport who, he said, revealed to him that the brothers had practiced fraud and trickery throughout their careers.

  And even told Houdini how their rope trick worked.

  Describing Mrs. Piper’s so-called spirit guide Dr. Phiniut, C.E.M. Hansel wrote: “He was adept at fishing for information and often contradicted himself. Also, he often displayed signs of temporary deafness when posed with a difficult question. Much of his ‘communication’ was garbled, incomplete or merely gibberish.”

  Describing Mrs. Leonard, Hansel wrote: “Her pronouncements were seldom impressive to anyone without a belief in Spiritualism,” and that “When asked why she had remained so long with the Society for Psychical Research, she replied, ‘Because of my desire to learn if I were possessed or obsessed.’”

  The field of psychic mediumship is crowded with examples of fraudulent behavior in the séance room.

  A male medium, holding a sealed envelope, rubs a palmed sponge—soaked in odorless wood alcohol—over it which makes the envelope temporarily transparent, revealing the question on the sheet inside: What about Uncle Shelby’s will?

  The psychic clears his throat, declaring in sepulchral tones, “Your Uncle Sheldon—no, Shelby—sends his love and says—yes, yes—seek out the Kingdom of the Lord, not gain from mortal legacy. Does that make sense to you?” “Oh, yes,” the sitter answers.

  A sitter hands a female medium a multi-folded slip of paper—one inch by two inches—which the female medium slips into an envelope. She seals the envelope and holds it up so the sitter can see the folded note inside the thin envelope. She then proceeds to burn it all to an ash; leans over; concentrating on the ashes.

  “This message comes from your …father, yes, your father. Believe, he says. Be thou a believer. Not like me. You understand this?”

  “Oh, yes,” the sitter answers.

  The explanation: the sitter hands the folded slip of paper to the medium. There is already a similar folded piece inside the envelope, glued in place opposite a two-inch slit in the envelope, then removed and palmed by the medium as she ‘shows’ the note to the sitter. Then she burns the envelope. The palmed note reads Am I a skeptic like my father?

  A darkened séance room. The male medium’s voice is heard declaring gravely, “I feel cold water, surges of cold water and the splash and roar of angry sea.” He sits beneath a large black hood, using a pen-size flashlight to read the message in a sealed envelope. Brother Harry, did you suffer much when you were washed overboard and drowned?

  “I see a storm raging on the ocean now,” the medium goes on. “I get the influence of a man—a blood relation—a father, no, a brother, a brother. He speaks his name. Ha …Ha …Harry. Do you understand?”

  “Oh, yes,” the sitter answers. Sobbing.

  Later, the medium replaces the hood and flashlight under his shirt and his associate turns on the lights. The medium is still “in trance.”

  “As you can see,” the associate says, returning the envelope. “It is still completely sealed.”

  “Oh, yes,” the sitter says.

  “Even if it weren’t,”
says the associate, “who could read it in the dark?”

  “Oh, yes,” the sitter says.

  A male sitter and a female medium sit across a table from each other, the sitter sponging off the surfaces of six slates. The medium’s associate, standing to the left of the sitter, takes each slate in his left hand as it is cleaned and stacks the slates on a corner of the table.

  There is a mantel behind the associate and sitter. As the fourth slate is being cleaned by the sitter, the associate retrieves another slate from a hiding place on the mantel. As he takes the cleaned slate from the sitter with his left hand, he instantaneously switches the slates and adds the prepared one to the pile on the table, placing the cleaned slates in the mantel hiding place.

  The medium then slips a rubber band around the pile of six slates. “You are certain, are you,” she rejoins, “that you have thoroughly cleaned each slate both back and front?”

  “Oh, yes,” the sitter answers.

  Later, the prepared slate is “come upon” and handed to the sitter. On it is the message: I greet you from the Life Beyond—send you my devotion, Mother.

  “Praise the Lord!” the associate cries.

  “Oh, yes!” the sitter answers.

  Overjoyed.

  The sitter stares at a cabinet in front of which is a blank canvas on an easel, a light shining through it from behind. The illumination in the room is low. Organ music plays mysteriously.

  Inside the cabinet, the male medium is using a tiny hole in the curtain to spray an atomizer on the back of the canvas.

  A face begins appearing on the canvas, that of a little girl.

  The sitter sobs.

  “Hallelujah!” cries the mediums associate.

  Sulphocyanide of potassium is used for red, ferranocyanide of potassium for blue and tannin for black, the chemicals remaining invisible until sprayed with a weak solution of tincture of iron.

  “You recognize the face?” the medium’s associate asks.

  “Oh, yes!” the sitter answers.

  Weeping.

  In the darkness, a female medium takes hold of the hand of the sitter to her left with her left hand. With her right, she removes a weighted artificial hand from beneath her robe and bends its flexible fingers over the arm of the sitter to her right.