Currently I'm reading Immortal Longings, by Trevor Hamilton, a biography of pioneering psychical researcher and psychological theorist F.W.H. Myers. Early in the book, the author discloses a fact about Myers that may be relevant to the famous "cross correspondences."
The cross correspondences were a long series of messages received by mediums after Myers' death. These messages were broken up into fragments that appeared in the communications of different mediums, widely scattered around the world. When someone thought of piecing these fragments together, coherent messages emerged.
Of course, people have debated the significance of this for years. Some regard the cross correspondences as among the best evidence for life after death; others think the connections between the fragments are coincidental or the product of "data mining."
What I learned from Immortal Longings is that this method of disguising a message by breaking it into fragments was actually used by Myers when he was alive. As Hamilton reports, some of Myers' diary entries took exactly this form.
Take Myers' cautious approach to recording his love for Annie Marshall, a married woman. Hamilton writes,
Entered in his diary on the next page, broken up into several pieces as was sometimes his way with material that required discretion, was 'Adgnosco Veteris Vestigia Flammae: I recognise traces of the former passion', the anguished cry of Dido in book IV of the Aeneid.
Note that the majority of cross correspondences attributed to the discarnate Myers also involved classical allusions. Myers, a classical scholar, often expressed his ideas in terms of quotations from classical sources.
Later, Myers visited Scarborough with Annie and her husband. Hamilton tells us:
At the foot of the page recording the Scarborough excursion, and of the next three pages, were placed single-line quotes from a poem by William Morris. When these were combined they clearly indicated the way love had been creeping up on him: 'Love is enough;/ while ye deemed he was sleeping/ There were signs of his coming/ and sounds of his feet'."
Referring specfically to this series of entries, Hamilton adds:
For those interested in the puzzle of apparent post-mortem communications from Myers, it may be worth noting that the same device appeared in one of 'his' [postmortem] scripts.
The close similarity between the cross correspondence and Myers' habit, when alive, of concealing his messages by breaking them up is, at the very least, suggestive that Myers' consciousness lay behind some of the messages received after his death.
=====
(Quotations are from pp. 40-41 of Immortal Longings. The citation given in the last quote is an article by Alice Johnson, "On the automatic writing of Mrs Holland," in Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 21:178. As far as I can determine, this article is not freely available online, though apparently members of the Society can access it.)