It’s considered one of skepticism’s great moments. To discredit the medium Leonora Piper, the investigator Stanley Hall asked her about his dead niece, Bessie Beals. The entranced Piper’s spirit control, "Hodgson," dutifully produced information about Bessie … only to be informed that there was no Bessie, after all! The niece had never existed; she was a fictional invention.
From Hall’s notes:
Hall: Well, what do you say to this, Hodgson. I asked you to call Bessie Beals, and there is no such person. How do you explain that?
Hodgson-persona: Bessie Beals is here, and not the –
(At this point we laughed and I made some remark to the effect that that was just what we had said Hodgson would do, and the hand continued thus,)
Hodgson-persona: I know a Bessie Beals. Her mother asked about her before. Mother asked about her before.
Hall: I don’t know about that, Hodgson. Bessie Beals is a pure fiction.*
Game, set, and match!
But now Greg Taylor of The Daily Grail has learned that Bessie Beals was a real person after all. True, she was not Hall’s niece, but a friend of one of his relatives, and she was not dead. Nevertheless, she was not "pure fiction," as Hall made her out to be.
Presented as an afterthought in Amy Tanner’s book Studies in Spiritualism is Hall’s admission:
To complete the confusion, a relative within three days mentioned to me incidentally one Bessie Beals, still living, as a friend, whom I may have heard her speak of before.
It would be interesting to know if the information Piper provided about this allegedly fictional character matched up with the real-life Bessie Beals. Naturally, Hall appears to have made no effort to find out.
Let’s suppose the information was accurate. There would be a couple of possibilities. One is that Piper was obtaining the info through some form of ESP. The other is that she was reading the spirit body of the living Bessie. In his book The Supreme Adventure, a compendium of channeled material, Robert Crookall notes that mediums can have trouble distinguishing between a discarnate personality and one that is still embodied, but asleep.
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*It should be noted that immediately after this, the Hodgson-persona tried to rescue itself by the desperate expedient of saying, "Yes, I am mistaken in her. I am mistaken. Her name was not Bessie, but Jessie Beals." This seems like reaching, but then, as Greg Taylor notes, the control personality had been known to exercise "creativity" of this sort from time to time.