Hello, and welcome to Psychic Teachers. I'm your host, Deb Bowen,
and I'm Samantha Fay and Deb, it's so nice to have you back with
us. Thank you, Samantha, it's nice to be here. I'm happy
to be back with everybody. I got a great week last week, writing
in a beautiful place. But I'm ready to rock and roll and talk about
a lot of other Psychic Teachers kind of stuff this week. So well,
you were missed, all right. Today we are discussing one of the world's
most renowned, studied and verified mediums to have ever lived, Leonora Piper.
Did you know a lot about her before this, dub, I did not
vague stuff, you know, but no what the details that you have given
us in this episode. So I'm excited. Yeah, me too. I
mean she's often mentioned if you read books about studying psychics and mediums, or
if you listen to cash, you know her name will be dropped here and
there. But I didn't know that she was the most studied medium ever,
and I didn't know really anything about the intricacies of her work. In her
life, she had to battle skeptics, test critics, and scrutiny spanning three
decades and two continents. But before we get further into her fascinating life's work,
let's start with some basics about her background and how she got started as
a medium. She was born in eighteen fifty nine, the fourth of six
children to a family in New Hampshire, and something I want to stress repeatedly
is she was very normal, very ordinary, very average, Like she wasn't
below average or above average in anything, and she was just a normal,
you know, wife and mother trying to get through her day of laundry and
cooking, and also had this enormous, amazing world of spirit around her.
As a child, she did have a few notable psychic experiences. She knew
her aunt would die two days before she passed. She was eight years old
and playing outside when she felt kind of like a pain and heard like a
tiny ringing noise on the right side of her head, followed by hearing a
long s sound, and then she heard this sound evolve into the name Sarah
and heard the message Aunt Sarah, I am not dead. I live in
another place still. She ran inside and told her mother, who made a
note of the day and time, and they were shocked to learn that Aunt
Sarah had died. At the precise moment, Leonora received the message that she
was alive and well in another dimension, and she often spoke of seeing bright
lights and faces in her bedroom when she was a little kid trying to fall
asleep. Her parents worried about Christians, so Leonora was raised a Congregationalist and
was applauded by her father for having read the Bible cover to cover before she
was nine years old. As a teen, she was into sports and needlework.
She went on to marry a Bostonian named William Piper when she was twenty
two, and they had two daughters. Now I've read that he managed a
grocery store, and I've read that he was a salesman, So either he
did both or sold groceries. I don't know, but again, very average
middle class family. After she had her first daughter, Leonora tripped and fell,
hitting her head, and she often speculated if this accident is what led
to her intuitive abilities, which I found really interesting because we've seen this before.
Like, deb do you remember hearing about Peter Hurkoys. He was a
kind of a big deal in the seventies. I do, okay, So
he was a Dutch painter who feld four stories from a ladder while painting a
house one day. And he too was an average ordinary guy until he hit
his head. When he regained consciousness four days later, he suddenly possessed psychic
powers. His music and artistic talents were also greatly enhanced, and he was
often used by police to locate missing people, which he would do through psychometry,
and he worked with law enforcement on many high profile care like the Boston
strangler and the Manson murders. John Holland, you guys know my Johnny who
I love on a door. He says a car accident jump started his abilities,
and I came across I was trying to research, like, you know,
do head injuries go hand in hand with psychic abilities? And I found
this interesting article about an intuitive named Sean Laurel. He says that he experienced
a head trauma from a car accident and afterwards he could see people's thoughts like
just hovering above their head, you know, like in the Electric company or
something, and that he could see the words kind of like an a nebula
star formation. Can you imagine that? Deb No, yeah, it freaked
his wife out. I was like, yeah, it would me too,
so he left his job as a rehabilitation therapist to work full time as a
reader. So then I found this other study that the School for Psychic Studies
in England did. They looked at psychics versus non psychics, very very comprehensive
and study, and they found that sixty percent of the psychics had experienced head
trauma and exhibited some damage to their frontal lobes. Now, not all of
them, but that's a big percentage. It is a big percentage. Samantha,
have you had a head energy. No, not that I know of,
but oh well, I mean I did follow a lot as a kid.
Like Remember I told that story of how I thought because my name was
Samantha, and I saw weird stuff when I was trying to fall asleep as
a kid that I had like magic powers. So I jumped off my parents'
station wagon, oops, and I hit my head. My sisters tell this
story all the time. We lived on a pond that would freeze over in
the winter, and they would put me in a stroller and put their ice
skates on and they would just go zooming around the pond. And apparently I
was a little toddler and I would scream faster faster, and one time they
hit a rock and I went flying and fell on the ice and cracked my
head and they just like patched me up and never told my mother. And
look at you today, how about you. Do you have a head injury?
I don't think so, Which is one of the reasons I think you're
far more psychic than me, is because you know your mama station wagon and
let's get back to Leonora. Okay, it's just the thing you think about.
So Leonora falls and hits her head, which led to headaches and other
health issues, so her father in law encouraged her to see a healer.
The healer was a blind man who was also a medium, and when he
placed his hands on her head, she describes feeling faint and then losing consciousness.
Leonora said she was aware of a flood of light and saw strange faces
and a hand moving before her and what she says was an unconscious state.
She got up and walked to a table where she found pen and paper and
began to furiously right. She had written a message for another patient waiting in
the room from his deceased son. The man was a judge, which I
think is important because you know, we tend to trust the opinions and intellect
of a judge. He was so blown away by the event and the accurate
message from his son that he soon told everyone about Leonora, and before she
knew what hit her, she had a waiting list of clients. Wow.
Okay, so wait a minute, all right. So, so her dad
took her to see her father in law. Her father in law took her
to see a healer to try to figure out something to do about her pain
from her head injury. And the healer turned out to also be a medium,
and then when he touched her, she had this strange experience of seeing
a hand and lights and faces. And then she, in an unconscious state,
sat down at the healer's desk and wrote a message to the next person
waiting in lane to see the hero. Yes, I got that right,
Yes, from his deceased son. Wow. I know it's a lot.
That's a I mean, I you know, I feel for her because you
know, she's just this stay at home mom with two kids trying to you
know, get through this these headaches, and Tata spirit wants to talk to
you. Okay, wait a minute. And she was born in eighteen fifty
nine, right, Yes, so seventy nine eighties, So this is the
late eighteen hundreds when this is happening, Yes, in the United States.
Yes, during the height of the spirituals movement. That's exactly where I was
going. Okay, good, It's good that you mentioned that, because I
did think about that, and I wondered maybe that helped her, maybe seeing
news stories about the Fox Sisters and you know, all the other mediums,
most I think who didn't proved were fraudulent, but at least she had some
information and knowledge of what was going on. Right. She describes this trans
state by saying, I feel as if something were passing over my brain,
making it numb, a sensation similar to that I experienced when I was etherized,
only the unpleasant odor of the ether is absent. I feel a little
cold, too, not very, just a little, as if a cold
breeze passed over me, and people and objects become smaller until they finally disappear.
Then I know nothing more until I wake up, when the first thing
I am conscious of is a bright, very very bright light, and then
darkness. Such darkness my hands and my arms begin to tingle, just as
one's foot tingles after it has been asleep, and I see, as if
from a great distance, objects and people in the room, but they are
very small and very black. Okay, So here's what I make of that.
Okay, when she had this accident, did she do something to her
occipital lobe to her eyesight? Yeah? You know, it made me think
about I was reading some other scholarly book for show research a couple of months
ago, and they were comparing the brains of devout meditators like Buddhist monks and
nuns, for example, to people who were intuitive and psychic, and the
same areas of their brain lit up. I'm not surprised to get that.
Yeah, and so I wonder if you do kind of have to go into
that hazy, daisy blank state of mind to get to where she was.
Yeah. I don't know, but it seems like she did. Now.
What's interesting is so the blind medium healer who kind of awakened this in her,
he had a spirit guide who was a Frenchman named Jean Finwi Sclavel,
and he preferred to be called by his middle name Finwei. Finwee left the
blind Medium and decided to become Leonora's control or spirit guide. Now, back
in this day and age, when a lot of mediums did channeling and direct
voice mediumship, they would call their guides a control and it did. It
does not mean that the guide is controlling them. It just means that often
the guide is kind of like a gatekeeper for the medium. And at this
time of spiritual development anyway, it appears as though these controls would speak through
the body of the medium. You don't see that as much today. I
feel like that died out with this new age of spiritualism around the Victorian times.
Do you agree with that? I do. I so remember being just
fascinated by Arthur Ford and his work and what he called his spirit guide or
his control was Fletcher. And in Ruth Montgomery's book Search for the Truth,
she writes extensively about Arthur Ford and his control Fletcher. And that's when I
first heard of it. But again it was those late eighteen hundreds early nineteen
hundreds era. And you know, I wonder when we talk about something like
this, are we looking at different trends in different ways in which the way
which we conceptualize our relationship to the spiritual world is a result of a shift
in our language as it's moved differently from where this was one hundred years ago.
I think it is. And you know, I listened to a luxury
with Tony Stockwell where he was saying that as our collective consciousness awakens and evolves
and matures and grows, we don't need the obvious displays of ectoplasm and you
know, booming voices coming through a petite woman. You know, we don't
need all of that because as a collective consciousness, we're understanding and accepting inch
by inch that this is real. And so he thinks that's why it's evolved
that way. I don't know. Fascinating, Yeah, it really is.
We should do a show on Arthur Ford. His book Nothing So Strange really
touched my heart because he was one of the best mediums out there. But
I don't know if you know, he also eventually was in a and he
writes so much about what a struggle it was to be a spiritual person,
to be a medium, and to struggle with alcoholism, and how this really
did take a lot from him energetically, and how he had to kind of
numb himself from dealing with the grief of connecting with you know, people dealing
with so much loss. It's a very honest memoir, and I also think
that there was some controversy towards the end of his life. But you're right
for folks who are interested, and I hope many of our listeners are,
because I love this stuff as do you. Looking back at the history and
the evolution of how psychic work and mediumship work has evolved is fascinating and that
somehow I thought we'd done an Arthur Ford's story. But if we have it,
yeah, let's do. I'm happy to work on that. I think
we definitely mentioned him, but I think he was part of I think he
was part of like several other mediums, So I think we glossed over him.
Well let's go back and take another look at it. Okay. So
FINNWII, the spirit guide, control, whatever you want to call him for
the blind medium healer moves over to Leonora. One sitter comes to see her.
His name was Richard rich He described how when Finn Wei would come into
the energy of Leonora, she would change, he writes, with little trouble,
she went into the trance, a state which was entirely new to my
experience, and after a moment's silence which followed her rather violent movements. I
was startled by the remarkable change in her voice, an exclamation, a sort
of grunt of satisfaction, as if the person had reached his destination and gave
vent to his pleasure. Thereat, by this sound uttered an unmistakably male voice,
rather husky. I was at once addressed in French with bonjour, monsieur
come, and vous porte vous, to which I gave answer in the same
language with which I happened to be perfectly familiar. My answer was responded to
with an inquiry grunt, and then the conversation continued in English. So that's
how he would kind of enter the room. As she continued to develop her
abilities, Finnwee left her years later, and a new spirit guy nicknamed GP,
came in. I'll talk more about him in a little bit. Leonora
always preferred automatic writing to communicating this way, though, before going into the
trance state, she would rest her head on a pillow placed on the table
in front of her, with her face towards the left, and writing material
was arranged on the right side, usually one hundred blank sheets and several pencils,
and once entranced, an assistant would place a sheet of paper in front
of her and put a pencil in her hand, quickly removing each sheet once
it was filled and replacing it with a fresh one. There's that stuff that
we're really always cautioning folks. Writing Automatic writing is a whole other thing,
and it's kind of tricky. Well so is this letting this frenchman come in
your body? And I mean it's all tricky and I say no to all
of it personally, me too. But there you go. Thank you for
that, me too. Yeah. Where giving a history lesson here, folks?
Yeah, it's instructional, okay. Now. Before she became world renowned,
a Unitarian minister named doctor Minut Savage wrote a book in nineteen oh two
called Canned Telepathy Explain It, in which he described several sittings he had with
Leonora Piper. He writes about how his father came through and identified Savage by
the childhood nickname that only his dad used for him. Then he writes how
Leonora said to him, there is somebody else here beside your father. It's
your brother, no, your half brother, And he says his name is
John. And she went on to describe to doctor Savage how the brother died
before passing on messages. On another occasion, doctor Savage sent a friend to
see Leonora with three locks of hair. Each were belonging to different people,
and he had no way of knowing who the locks of hair belonged to,
nor whether they belonged to living or dead people. But as she held each
lock of hair in her hand one at a time, she was able to
identify the name of the hair's owner and correctly state whether they were alive or
dead. That's pretty amazing. WHOA, there's some psychometry, is it not.
Yeah. On another visit to see her, doctor Savage was told that
his son, who had died three years earlier, was present. He said,
Papa, I want you to go at once to my room. Look
in my drawer, and you will find a lot of loose papers. Among
them are some which I would like you to take and destroy at once.
Doctor Savage never identified what was in those papers, other than that they were
exactly where Leonora said they would be, and did indeed hold very private information.
He wrote in his book there were things there which he had jotted down
and trusted to the privacy of his drawer. Which he would not have made
public for the world. Don't you want to know what was in those papers?
Now? Well? I do. I mean, you know, my
mind went all over the place with that. But you know, Samantha,
as you're talking about Leonora and her abilities and the folks who are basically testing
her and trying to see what she's all about, what a time that must
have been. And you and I both know that there had to have been
times when she was off her gate, that she was not always right,
and I wonder what that was like for her. I'm really glad you mentioned
that it's actually very very well verified. Oh good, And I'll talk about
that in a little bit. But she had a lot of misses, she
had a lot of hits, she had a lot of criticism, and I
think that kind of goes hand in hand with this whole world. And I
think that's why you and I are so passionate about teaching and fostering community,
because that is the hard part of being psychic medium intuitive is there are going
to be some misses. And Finn Wei, her guide control whatever you want
to call them, he got stuff wrong and he would say things like,
there's a j name around you a jewel. Julia is Julia like and so
a lot of skeptics would say that she was fishing, right, her guide
was fishing. Now, by this time, she was gaining a popularity and
earning about twenty dollars per sitting, which would be about five hundred dollars today.
Wow. Yeah, so there's nothing even though so much was recorded about
her. I want to know, like what is her husband saying. Is
he like, is he coming home from his day at the grocery store?
Like, Leonora, do you have twenty people sitting around our dining room table?
Again, I'm hungry? Did you make the meatballs? And then if
she's saying, well, honey, every person there is paying me five hundred
dollars, is he like, well, rock on, keep talking to spirit.
I want to know, like what was going on in their family,
her kids, her two daughters were pretty young right now, where are they
doing their homework? I don't know the answers to these questions. I want
to know these personal things. I want to know did she feel weird about
a lot of money to charge? I could never charge that. No,
I mean, I'm not passing any judgment. That's my own issue. But
I want to know it. Did she feel weird about charging that much money?
I don't know. She was in Connecticut, is that am I remember?
Boston? Boston? Okay, so probably she had access to clientelese who
could afford that kind of money. Yeah, that's true. I don't know.
All right, I want to talk about her introduction to Professor William James
of Harvard, who really is the one who credits at least himself with discovering
Leonora. But let's take a quick break and we will be right back.
If you're enjoying this look at the psychic life of Leonora Piper, check out
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That's Samantha Fay dot com. Thanks so much, So let's talk about this.
William James. He was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research
and helped found the American version called the ASPR. But before he met missus
Leonora Piper, doctor James was a true skeptic. At the time, he
was considered one of the world's greatest psychologists. He taught physiology and philosophy and
is known as the father of pragmatism. In the fall of eighteen eighty five,
his mother in law and sister in law visited Leonora Piper and were blown
away by her accuracy. They insisted he go see her for himself, so
eventually he and his wife made an appointment and attended a sitting doctor. James
was so impressed with what he saw that he committed several years of his life
to working exclusively with Leonora, and what is now considered the longest, best
research and most evidential chapter in the study of survival after death. Together,
along with doctor Richard Hodgen and Professor James Hislop, they investigated and tested Leonora
for thirty years. Wow, thirty years thirty years yeah, and wait to
hear how they tested her because it was not fun. They took control of
almost every aspect of her life. They had her followed by private detectives.
They examined and set up the seance room before every sitting. They monitored her
mail and sent people to her under assumed names. They also took her to
England, where she met Sir Oliver Lodge, who was a professor of physics
and mathematics and a fellow of the Royal Society. He was also a devout
skeptic until he met Leonora Piper, but he became such a believer that he
wrote books on it, including the well known Raymond Life and Death, about
communications with his deceased son and the immortality of the soul. Sir Oliver Lodge
was such a skeptic that he even outlined several ways Leonora could be cheating.
He thought she could be using private detectives to gather information on sitters, or
questioning servants or children of the people. Who came to see her. He
wondered if she was researching family diaries and looking through photograph albums, or if
she was consulting directories and biographies. Possibly when she went to the homes of
these people, was she searching their house at night and picking locks to gain
access to information, or could she be bribing servants to identify a deb Let's
discuss this for a minute, because you and I have worked as psychics and
mediums, and I just want to say, there is no eff and time
in anyone's day to do all of this. Uh, Samantha, you know
no, I just know. I guess what I have to say about that
is you're right, there's not enough time to do it, and who would
want to? Why why would you spend your time doing that? Rather than
if you're legitimate, then you do trust what comes and if you're if you're
interpreting it the information correctly, great, If you're missing it, that's the
way it goes too. That's all I know to say about my take on
that. Well, she's a mother in the Victorian era, so you're telling
me that she's going to cook three meals a day, She's going to do
the laundry. She's going to schedule their dental visits and you know, take
them to their I don't know, singing and dance lessons and I don't understand.
And then at night she's going to put on what a black Victorian dress
and like a cat burglar, sneak into the homes of the sitters coming to
her house the next day and hold a what do they have? Flashlights back
them and her tea that she flips through the family bible and albums right exactly,
and then slip back into her house just in time to stir up the
bacon and eggs for the family breakfast. Come on us, Sir Oliver,
I don't think so. So to make sure this wasn't happening, he and
his American group of researchers did the following. They read through all her mail.
They forbade any servants from talking to her. In fact, when she
came to England, several of the people's homes that she visited would temporarily fire
their servants and hire all new servants just to prevent her from asking servants information
about them. Wow. They would search through her luggage for Directori's biographies and
notes, none where ever found. They used fake names and sometimes even had
sitters disguised themselves, like by adding beards or things so they wouldn't look at
all like they normally did. And they also made sure they watched their conversations
carefully around her so she couldn't accidentally pick up information. Before she came to
visit him for the first time. At his home in England, he made
sure to remove all photos, family albums, even the family bible. Lodge
later wrote mister Hodgen also had mister and Missus Piper watched or shadowed by private
detectives for some weeks, with the view of discovering whether mister Piper, who
was employed in a large store in Boston, went about inquiring into the affairs
of possible sitters, or whether Missus Piper received letters from friends or agents conveying
information. This inquiry was pushed pretty closely, but absolutely nothing was discovered which
could throw suspicion on Missus Piper, who was now aware of the procedure,
but has the good sense to recognize the legitimacy, I may say, the
scientific necessity of this kind of probation. It was thus shown that Missus Piper
made no discoverable attempt to acquire knowledge, even about persons whose coming she had
reason to expect. Still less could she have been aware of the private concerns
of persons brought anonymously to her home. At mister Hodgen's choice, he summarized
by saying her behavior appeared utterly beyond and above suspicion. Well, that's some
research for you, isn't it. I know the poor mister Piper's even followed
as he's walked in the aisles of his grocery store. On one occasion,
when Leonora was doing readings at her home back in the US, she conveyed
a message for Sir Oliver Lodge, who was in England at the time.
The message was from Frederick Myers, and we've talked about him on the show,
but it's been a while. He was the founder for the Society for
Psychical Research. The message said Myers said, as you take the part of
the poet, and he will act as fawness. Leonora had no clue what
the message meant, but since she knew Meyers had been a dear friend of
Sir Lodge's, she had the message mailed to him. When he received it
in England, He too was baffled. He knew Meyers had been a Greek
and Roman scholar, so he asked some friends who were familiar with the classics
if they could interpret the message. A friend told Lodge that the message was
a reference to a passage by Horace and that it apparently suggested Sir Oliver Lodge
was about to receive some incredibly bad news, and that Meyer's message was saying
he was going to try and help soften the blow for his old friend.
Unfortunately, a few weeks later, Sir Oliver Lodge learned that his youngest son,
Raymond, who was a second Lieutenant in the third South Lancashire, had
been killed during an assault in Flanders. Lodge's devastated wife went to see another
medium in England. Just a few weeks after her son's death. He came
through this other medium and told her to tell his dad that he was with
a friend of his named Myers. So this was really really big for Lodge.
And I know it's a kind of a complicated message to share orly,
you know, over the internet. This way we're not in person or in
video, so you can't like see the message. But it's a very complicated
message, Meyers says, you take the part of the poet, he will
act as fondest. I think this is such a perfect example of how spirit
works, because this was so Myers. He was, you know, such
a scholar and would say something like that. But Lodge was such an over
analytical thinker that to be given a complicated message that he would have to,
you know, go see friends about and interpret and really meditate on is really
important because one of the things that always lodged a seed of doubt in his
head was telepathy. You know, is she just reading my mind or the
mind of the sitter? Clearly you could rule telepithy out here because Leonora has
no idea what the message means. Sir Oliver Lodge has no idea what the
message means. None of them knew. You know, he had several children,
many of whom were fighting in the war, So how could she know
it would be his youngest son, you know, no way, no way.
It was during this time of grieving that Sir Oliver Lodge met Leonora in
person for the first time. Raymond came through once again, saying he was
with Frederick Myers, adding I feel that I have two fathers now again,
this is how Myers was going to soften the blow for him by welcoming his
son and being a father figure to him on the other side. Still grieving,
Lady Lodge went to see yet another medium in England, a man named
Alfred Valt Peters, who also brought through their son Raymond. This time he
mentioned a photograph they would soon receive of him that was taken with his fellow
soldiers and in the sitting. Raymond told his mom that in the photo he
was sitting on the ground and a fellow soldier was behind him leaning on his
shoulder. Two months later, the exact photo Raymond had described from the other
side arrived. Wow, I know, it's just beautiful. And all of
that is in Sir Oliver Lodge's book Raymond, all those examples and stories and
messages he had from his son. It's really a phenomenal book if you can
get through the lofty, intelligent language. They definitely wrote and spoke differently then
it was much much more purty than we speak now. Tell me about it.
I've been reading this past week while I was on that writer's in residency
program. What I read for light reading in the evening was Mary Shelley S.
Frankenstein. Oh yeah, see, and she was eighteen when she wrote
that. Yeah, and it was written in the early I mean early eighteen
hundreds. Yeah, you know. Yeah, So anyway, I diagretic.
Go ahead. So information like this greatly impressed Professor Hodgen, who taught legal
studies at Cambridge University. He too began as a skeptic and traveled to America
just to prove to the world that Leonora Piper was a fraud, which she
had done with many other self described mediums. He spent sixteen years studying,
examining, and researching Leonora Piper's work and could not disprove her work, not
once. He wrote, I cannot profess to have any doubt but that the
chief communicators are veritably the personalities they claim to be, that they have survived
what we call death, and that they directly communicated with us whom we call
the living, through missus Piper's entranced organism. So that's quite a statement.
This guy was kind of like the scholarly intellectual version of Harry Houdini. He
was on a mission to disprove all these mediums, and she was the one
that he could never ever disprove. One of the things all these men wanted
to prove was that no telepathy was involved. Many debunkers would say, all
right, maybe she's psychic, but this doesn't prove survival of death. She's
just reading their minds. However, several of the research done with Leonora disproved
the possibility, lending further credibility to the belief that, yes, we do
survive death. One story that's often mentioned in conjunction with Leonora Piper is called
the case of Uncle Jerry's Watch. Miles Allen writes about this, saying that
in eighteen eighty nine, Sir Oliver Lodge devised an experiment involving one of his
uncles. Allan writes Lodge had several uncles, at least two of whom were
still living, although very elderly, at the time of this test. One
of these uncles, whose name was Robert, had been very close to his
twin brother Jerry, who had died some twenty years earlier. Oliver wrote to
Robert asking for some object that had belonged to his twin, and Robert responded
by sending a gold watch that Jerry had been fond of. Lodge told no
one of the watch, and within a few hours of its receipt he handed
it to the entranced Piper. Lodge later wrote about the event, I was
told almost immediately that it had belonged to one of my uncles, one that
had been very fond of my uncle Robert, and that the watch was now
in possession of this same uncle, Robert, with whom its late owner was
anxious to communicate. After some difficulty and many wrong attempts, finn wee,
remember that's Piper's guide caught the name Jerry short for Jeremiah, who said,
this is my watch, and Robert is my brother, and I am here,
Uncle Jerry my watch. So then Oliver Lodge asks his uncle to give
some details from his childhood. Through Leonora Piper, Lodge writes that his uncle
recounted almost drowning in a creek, killing a cat in Smith's field, owning
a small rifle and a snake skin. Lodge said he didn't know anything about
these childhood memories of his uncles, so he spoke with his uncle Robert,
who said, okay, yep. Uncle Robert recollected something about swimming in the
creek, but not a whole lot. He had a distinct recollection of having
had the snake skin and still remembered the box in which it was kept,
But he altogether denied killing the cat and could not even recall Smith's Field.
Now. His uncle said his memory was failing him in his old age,
so he promised to reach out to yet another uncle, a man named Frank.
Uncle Frank replied saying that yeah, they had all played at Smith's Field,
which was near their home in Barking, Essex, and that another of
their brothers had killed a cat there, and he remembered what he called a
fool hearty episode where Jerry had almost drowned while swimming in the creek. They
agreed this was not telepathy because none of the people involved knew what poor Uncle
Robert was trying to convey. Hotchin also agreed that she wasn't using telepathy because
she knew things that would happen to him that he either wasn't thinking about or
didn't know what happened. For example, she told him that his sister in
Australia would soon give birth to a fourth child and it would be a boy.
This proved true, and Hotchins didn't even know his sister was pregnant at
the time. I think that's interesting deb because for the longest time I used
to wonder, when I was doing mediumship, am I talking to the dead
or am I using telepathy? Do you remember that little debate you and I
used to have. I do, And I used to say, well,
I don't know, like how you know, because sometimes the deceased no things
that are happening that the sitter can't possibly know. But then when I researched
the collective unconscious, I was like, oh my gosh, like it could
be coming from there. I don't know. And I remember people saying to
me, well, okay, Smitha, if you are doing telepathy, that's
pretty still damn amazing, so calm down. And I was like, yeah,
you're right, I should just come down. But I didn't think about
it this way that these men were trying so hard not to prove that Leonora
Piper was legit. They were trying to utilize her to prove that we do
survive death. And that's why negating the option of telepathy was so important to
them, right, And that's really the primary focus of all those psychical research
organizations that popped up in England and France. And the United States and so
forth at the end of the eighteen hundreds, was that was the real question?
Remember, that's one of the reasons that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was so
connected with that movement was because he had lost a son. Yes, able
to stay in touch with him. Yes, exactly now. Hodgen then persuaded
another skeptical friend to see Leonora Piper. He was an artist named Jay Rogers
Rich, and he wrote an account of his sittings with Leonora and said,
of his first meeting with her, my profession of painting was described, and
my particular talents and mannerisms and design were mentioned, and my mother was clearly
described. She was beside me, dressed as in her portrait I painted a
year or two before her death, and wearing a certain cameo pin. The
portrait of my father. Two living aunts who are very dear to me,
my brother and his wife Nellie, were well described, and in such a
way as to have made it impossible for missus Piper to have so minutely informed
herself about them. And another sitting, Rich was told that he would soon
hear from an old friend, Frank Lennox. When Rich asked if Frank was
still in California. Her guide Finwy, who was talking through her, struggled
with the answer, saying he had gone across the water to al all Allah.
How you say that? How you call that? Rich suggested Australia,
to which finnwe paused and then said, yes, Australia. Rich later learned
that Frank had gone to Alaska. So that's an example of how skeptics would
say she was fishing right because she would get the al the Allah, but
you know, and then someone would say, do you mean Australia. Yes,
and I get that that. I mean that happens to me too,
Like you'll get a ja and you don't know if it's Julia, Jamelia.
It's it can be really tricky to get those names. I don't know why
that is, but it's I think one of the reasons that it happens is
because you want to do a really good job and you're trying to figure out
if you're picking up the information correctly with the little information you're giving right.
But other times she would get first and last nings without any prompting or product.
You know, mediums are people too, that's right. Good days three
week days weibreak, and when we come back, we're going to talk about
how she switched to a new spirit guide and what the end of her life
looked like. Folks, let me just remind you that it's not too late
to join my new self paced to Row course called The Fool's Journey. This
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upcoming events. And again that's Deb Bowen dot com. Welcome back. Now
we're discussing Leonora Piper, who had been working with this kind of gruff Frenchman
guide named Finnwee, but halfway through her work as a medium, her main
guide or control switched to a man named George Pellew. Now this is really
interesting because he was known to all the men researching Leonora before his death.
He was a writer living in Boston who had befriended Hodgson. He studied at
Harvard before working as a lawyer and journalist. Pellew was an atheist who told
Hodgson that he could not and see of an afterlife, but that if he
died before Hodgson and found himself still existing, he would attempt to let Hodgson
know. Unfortunately, when he was just thirty two years old, he fell
down a flight of concrete stairs and died a month later. Hodgson brought one
of Pelly's friends, a man named John Hart, to sit anonymously before Leonora
Piper. Leonora was able to not only state John's correct first and last name,
but also identified him as George Pelhew's friend. She even said that the
cufflings he was wearing had belonged to George and were given to heart by George's
parents, which was all true. He even recounted through Leonora a full discussion
he'd had before his death about life, space, and eternity with their mutual
friend's daughter. It was at this point that Finwee left as her guide and
George stepped in. This also marked the moment that she began relying more on
automatic writing as her means of communicating, because which said it would allow more
spirits to come through her to the sitters now Michael tim in an article he
wrote for the PSI Encyclopedias's During the course of eighteen ninety five, the quality
of communications began to deteriorate, with a growing number of intrusions, apparently caused
by earth bound spirits. By this time, GP, George Pellew, and
Finwi had been giving way to Rector, a group of controls who purported to
be advanced spirits long departed from the earth plane. Rector told Hodgson that Piper's
organism was weakening and needed a rest. Finnwei made his last appearance in January
eighteen ninety six, but GP remained as an assistant to Rector until nineteen eight
oh four. So this group of guides calling themselves Rector kind of like Abraham
as a guide of guides who speaks through esther Hicks. So Rector was described
by William James as sounding like an aged and when he is speaking instead of
writing, like a somewhat hollow voiced clergyman, a little weary of his experience
of the world. Endlessly patient and sympathetic and desiring to put all his tenderness
and wisdom at your service while you were there. So from everything I've read
about this group that came through to speak through her, they were super religious
and kind of preachy, and no one was very impressed, and she did
have many non believers. Physiologist Ivor Lloyd Tuckett wrote that her mediumship could be
explained by muscle reading, fishing, guessing, hints obtained in the sitting,
knowledge surreptitiously obtained, knowledge acquired in the interval between sittings, and lastly,
facts already within missus Piper's knowledge. Psychologist G. Stanley Hall and Amy Tanner
believed that Piper was neither a fraud nor a medium, but rather a woman
with buried personalities whoa yeah. Even today, skeptics remained unconvinced about Leonora Piper's
work, stating the following laundry list as evidence of her fraudulents. Piper's physical
contact with sitters, such as holding their hands, enabled feedback by a process
used by stage performers called muscle reading. Suspicions about Finnwee, who claimed to
have lived as a doctor in the nineteenth century in Marseilles, when no records
could be found of him, and he also gave little evidence of knowing anything
about French or medicine, which I know we can kind of debate that because
we already have evidence of him speaking quite a bit in French. But whatever
blatant fishing for information by Finwe and his habit of passing off details given is
coming from him. Implausible claims by some communicators to be the spirits of famous
people like Walter Scott and Julius Caesar, and even characters in novels. Failed
seances in which names, dates, and incidents were given, of which almost
none were correct. Instances that might be blamed by Piper having deliberately gathered information
beforehand, or by cryptomnesia. A speculation by skeptical sitters that Piper's trance was
a pretense. The Dean Connor case, in which details given by Piper about
a young American missing in Mexico proved to be wrong. The skeptical Hall Tanner
investigation, in which among other things, a non existent relative was recognized by
Piper. That's an interesting one. We don't have time to go into it.
But a group of people investigated her kind of like with the ghost Philip
we talked about on the show a couple of years ago. They made up
somebody and asked her to connect with that person, and she did and got
all the details of the made up person. And I get why skeptics are
pointing that out, but it also makes me wonder, if you look again
at the collective unconscious, what was she tapping into well, you know exactly,
And I want to go back. I mean, I'm not necessarily defending
her, because again I think I think things change in people's lives, and
certainly they may have in hers. But when you were talking a minute ago
about characters and novels, well, those folks are as real to me as
you are. Sometimes. Well and there's that famous book written about five years
ago on Gregor's which really does help prove that, you know, you can
actually manifest some reality into these things if everybody collectively is thinking talking about them.
It's called the tulpa. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I just
would invite us to think about this relative. Well, he existed in somebody's
imagination. She existed in somebody's imagination, with the notion that there was a
reality concept around him. I don't know, you know, just something to
think about. Well, and I think, like you said too, mediums
have good days and bad days. And it sounds as though she was hounded
and scrutinized in that the pressure of that must have been overwhelming as she got
tired. Yeah, and life changed. Her supporters countered with the many documented
sightings when Piper gave names, both family names and surnames and nicknames, and
accurate details about people and incidents with no prompting or fishing. When her health
began failing again in nineteen eleven, her guides announced that they were suspending her
mediumship. She did a few more sessions of automatic writing, but was mostly
done with mediumship. Bill Lombardi writes this said epitaph about the end of her
life. It was in the mid nineteen twenties that Piper gave a series of
sittings and announced these would be her last. With her two daughters, she
left for parts unknown, out of the spotlight. She was soon forgotten by
the press. And this is where her trail ended. Wait, she left
with her husband. She left her husband. No, he had already died
at this point. Oh, okay, all right, men, Back then
they did not live long, Okay. I think the average age in nineteen
hundred for a man was forty two. Can you imagine anyway? He writes,
I discovered in my research that Leonora and her two daughters had moved into
an apartment house at fifty four Dwight Street and Brookline, mass This is where
she died in obscurity in nineteen fifty at the age of ninety one. She
was cremated at the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, and her ashes were buried
with her husband at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Arlington. At that time, there
were no obituaries in any of the national or local newspapers announcing her passing.
Leonora had finally achieved what she wanted. The world had forgotten her. I
mean, isn't that pretty sad? So she gave her last readings in the
nineteen twenties and didn't do any readings for the last thirty years of her life.
What did she do? I know, I don't know. Made me
sad. I tried to do a little bit more research as well, and
it just didn't look very good at the end. And you know, she
lived with her daughters. They never married or had kids, they stayed with
her, and then they lived alone until they died. Well, look,
for all I know, they lived in this lovely apartment and played Monopoly and
scrabble, and I don't know, watched old movies on TV and had a
grand all time. Maybe she was just exhausted from being examined and poked and
brought at all those years. I don't know. It makes you feel very
sad for her in many ways, doesn't it. Yeah, she's almost like
a zoo animal on display. It makes me sad for how the world has
always treated those of us on the fringe, those of us who are brave
enough to say, Hey, something kind of weird is happening to me,
and it doesn't fit in any paradigm or religious outline, but I'm going to
step into my light and truth and talk about it. I think we've always
been judged and critiqued and criticized and scorned. Yes, and part of that
comes from the fact that indeed there are Charlatan's and people who are not ethical
in all those things. I mean, unfortunately that's true in any perfection.
We just seem somehow to get more scrutiny about it, I think than others
sometimes well. And because it's such an unregulated field, there's no degree you
have to possess or earn, there's no exam you have to pass, there's
you can anyone can claim this. And so I think you are going to
have way more frauds in this in this field than the average field. But
you know that doesn't negate the amount of ethical people out there like us that
are doing the work. A one good thing is she's most associated with a
quote that William James, who we talked about before, said about her.
He said, if you wish to upset the law that all crows are black,
it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white. My
white crow is Missus Piper. Yeah, And that's if you google her,
it's almost always the first thing that will come up. And so you have
to look at the work her life did to take all these men who were
skeptical, and most of them were atheistic or agnostic at best, and she
made them believe. She made them believe that their loved ones still lived.
She helped them expand their viewpoint, their heart, their their paradigm, and
allow for greater questioning and possibility. So that I think when they died,
it was an easier transition because they knew what awaited them on the other side.
I look at what she did and how comforting and helpful much of her
work was to the people who came to see her, and I think sometimes
that's so much of what people need. They need that comfort and that assurance
that perhaps what they believe or hope for in the afterlife is in fact true.
I think it's, you know, to kind of flip that one Crow
quote on its head a little bit. I got a card in the mail
just last night. I was checking my mail from someone thanking me for a
reading that had changed her life. And you have those brief, beautiful moments
like that, and you think, gosh, if I just helped one person,
you know, that's really all that. If you just have one person
with this work, that's everything. But I still can't help feeling sad about
the end of her life. Deb me too. I had no idea that
she had lived in obscurity for more than thirty years after and I'm sure it's
what she wanted, because you know, by all accounts that's what she wanted,
was to be forgotten and left alone, which I get. I mean
if you've got private detectives following you and these hoity toity Harvard and Oxford grads
going through your mail, and you know, that would drive me insane.
But I also wonder if what her spirit guides were saying was true as well,
that she what her organism was exhausted. Oh, I think that's really
true. I believe she was not only exhausted in terms of her mediumship abilities,
but just physically exhausted and emotionally exhausted from the furmoil of having all those
people following you and doing all that stuff to you and put that aside for
a second. For me personally, doing mediumship readings was a drain on my
energy, mainly for the grief. Just watching and holding space for people with
physical, emotional, spiritual pain just pouring out of them. That was so
hard to witness, to bear witness to. It was an honor to bear
witness too, but it was It's the struggle, you know, And I
do think that that pulls on your energy. And I would I still carry
those people with me, you know. I think about every morning I wake
up and I lift all the blinds in my house, and I think about
this reading I did for this man and his daughter came through and one of
the messages she said was let the light in, Daddy, let the light
in. And I just thought she meant, you know, like, work
on your grief. And he told me that he is. He refuses to
lift a blind in his house. He does not feel that he deserves to
see another sunrise without his daughter. Oh dear, I think about him all
the time, and I say a little prayer for him. Anyway. I
hope blinds. I hope I do too. I do too. But to
just bear a witness to that pain, I think it does take a toll
on you. And it sounds as though they were carting her across two continents
in different states and just presenting her with all these all these people to read
for over and over and over. I'd love to know how many hours a
day she worked, TEU. I can't imagine, but I bet a lot.
I bet a lot too. Anyway, all of her recorded readings you
can find them on the internet. There are books written about her. It's
really a fascinating rabbit hole to go down if you like researching evidential mediumship.
And we hope you guys have enjoyed our little rabbit Hole Journey into the Life
of Leonora Piper. We will be back with you next week. We have
a fun, lighthearted show planned. We promise nothing sad about death or grief
for dying in obscurity uh oh. Every time Samantha says that, y'all,
I go, uh, We're going to be talking about one of those words
at work. Here we go. All right, everyone, take care,
have a great week, be the light for yourself and others. Thank you
for listening to Psychic Teachers, your podcast for seekers, light workers, mystics,
and magical thinkers. If you like the show, please tell a friend
or leave us a review wherever you listen to your podcast. For more information,
check out our Facebook page Psychic Teachers, or our websites Samantha Fay dot
com and Debbowen dot com. I have a new book out called The Awake
Dreamer Lucid Dreaming, Astral Travel and Mastering the Dreamscape. You can find it
wherever books are sold. Thanks for listening and have a great week.