Category: Mental mediumship
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The Supreme Adventure: Analyses of Psychic Communications, by Robert Crookall, was published in 1961. It consists of reports describing the dying process, culled by Crookall from various books about mediumship. There are two points of particular interest about this material. First, even though it was collected from a variety of sources spanning many decades, it…
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Lately I've been reading a very interesting book, Guided By Spirit: A Journey into the Mind of the Medium, which was self-published by two authors: Charles F. Emmons, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Gettysburg College, and his wife Penelope Emmons, a psychotherapist with a master's degree in social work who also works as…
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Today I happened to look at an essay about medium John Edward that I posted on my Web site back in 2003. I found it interesting on two levels. First, I seem to have been a lot snarkier back then! Second, I was much less convinced of the reality of mediumship than I am now.…
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Two items of possible interest. Recently I had a telephone reading with medium Georgia O'Connor. This was only the third time I've sat with a medium. While I prefer to keep the details private, I found the reading strongly evidential and emotionally meaningful. I personally feel much more convinced of life after death than I…
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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…
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In his 1909 book The Survival of Man, Oliver Lodge recounts some séances in which the deceased F.W.H. Myers apparently communicated. In one of the most intriguing and puzzling communications, "Myers" spoke of some earlier sessions and complained: I could not say it, but they were translating like a schoolboy does his first lines of Virgil –…
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Here's an interesting excerpt from Claude's Book, by L. Kelway-Bamber, which can be read online in PDF form. The book, published in 1919, purports to be the channeled communications of a young man who died in the First World War. The communications were received by Gladys Osborne Leonard, one of the most famous and most…
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I've been reading Geraldine Cummins' 1935 book Beyond Human Personality, which bears on some of the issues discussed on this blog recently. Cummins was a medium who produced several purportedly channeled books. The most famous and most evidential of these is Swan on a Black Sea, often cited as one of the best examples of channeling.…
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In comments, Vitor provided a link to a report published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (Oct 1997, Vol 62, No 849) which casts doubt on Richard Hodgson's well-known work with the Boston medium Leonora Piper. The article can be found in this Word document. The file contains many issues of the Journal; the…
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John DeSalvo's worthwhile albeit regrettably brief book Andrew Jackson Davis: The First American Prophet and Clairvoyant contains some interesting material on the 19th century medium. One chapter recounts Davis's experience in a hospital when he observed two dying men. Davis reported that he saw, clairvoyantly, the entire dying process. His description matches up pretty well with accounts…