Mediums Rare (7 page)

Palladino, herself, admitted that, upon occasion, she committed fraud.

“And always for the same reason,” she stated. “You see, it is like this. Some people are at the table who expect tricks. In fact, they want them.

“I am in a trance. Nothing happens. They get impatient. They think of the tricks, nothing but tricks. They put their mind on the tricks and I respond.

“But it is not often.”

The worst sitting Palladino ever gave was at Cambridge in 1895.

Psychic researcher Hereward Carrington claimed that this sitting was foredoomed because of the hostile presence of Dr. Richard Hodgson.

He stated that Palladino was actually encouraged to commit fraud.

That she was given every possible opportunity to do anything she pleased.

Hodgson even allowed her left hand to be free.

That Palladino availed herself of this opportunity was no surprise to Carrington.

Palladino was a simple woman, Carrington believed. Her ego compelled her to provide successful sittings.

Failure was unthinkable to her.

This streak of vanity was her undoing at Cambridge.

Still, to attribute all she did for more than eighteen years to a few simple, clumsy tricks is an insult to the intelligence and good sense of her many investigators.

To discount her phenomena, it must be stated categorically that every witness to it was either a fool or a liar.

Clearly, this was not the case.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the emphasis on socalled “physical” mediums like Home and Palladino began to diminish to be replaced by a study of what came to be known as “mental” mediums.

Psychic investigators turned, with some relief, to this less taxing study of mediumship.

Now, the psychic, rather than performing feats of sound and movement—which were difficult to monitor, provided little in the way of genuine enlightenment and were sometimes dangerous to their investigators—offered information which often could not be verified and/or compared with established facts.

Two of the greatest of this new variety of psychic were Mrs. Leonore Evalina Simonds Piper (customarily referred to, simply, as “Mrs. Piper”) of Boston and Mrs. Gladys Osborne Leonard (known as “the British Mrs. Piper”) whose unusual careers were, in a number of ways, parallel to each other from children on.

1867-1915
America and England

R
eturning home from school that day, Leonore went out into the garden to play.

It was a warm Spring afternoon in New Hampshire and the eight-year-old girl did not care to remain in the house.

For a while, she gathered acorns, crawling around busily to pick them up and place them in a small pail.

Then she sat on her favorite bench and methodically pushed them, one by one, through a hole in the wood which she had created by pressing down hard on a loose knot until it fell from the bench and landed on the ground.

She was so completely absorbed in her game that the blow caught her by surprise.

It was as though some invisible hand had struck her sharply on the right side of the head, over her ear.

She jerked erect with a gasp of startled pain, clutching at her head.

Inside the ear, she heard a hissing sound.

As she sat rooted to the bench, eyes wide with dread, the sibilant noise became a letter S being spoken by a woman’s voice.

Then the voice said, “
Aunt Sara, not dead, but with you still.”

Leonore cried out, horror-stricken, and, bolting from the bench, ran into the house to her mother.

For several minutes, she was unable to speak a word, she was crying so hard and helplessly.

Then, between racking sobs, she managed to stammer, “Something hit me on the ear and Aunt Sara said she wasn’t dead but with me still!”

Several days later, word was received from a distant part of the country that, at the very moment of Leonore’s experience, her Aunt Sara had expired suddenly and unexpectedly.

Gladys Osborne showed equal evidence of being psychic at an early age.

It is not reported whether Leonore Simonds got in trouble for saying what she had but Gladys Osborne certainly did.

Because her father was leaving for Scotland that morning, eight-year-old Gladys was taken from her bed, clad in a dressing gown and brought downstairs to the dining room to have breakfast with him.

Scarcely awake, she sat in dutiful silence while he lectured her, telling her how he expected her to behave in his absence.

Too sleepy to concentrate on his words, Gladys stared at the wall across from her, enjoying the vision she had seen for several years now.

Before her lay a green valley bordered by verdant hills. The sky above was a sparkling blue, the light a vivid golden hue although there was no sunshine and no shadows.

Walking on the velvet-like grass, past banks of multi-colored flowers, were couples and groups of people dressed in graceful, flowing robes of varying hues. They all looked happy and contented.

As they always did.

“
Gladys
,” said her father firmly.

She blinked and turned her head to look at him.

He was gazing at her with a frown of disapproval.

“What the devil are you looking at?” he asked.

She stared at him, not knowing what to say.

“You haven’t heard a word I’ve spoken,” he told her. “You’ve been staring at that wall the entire time.
Why?”

She swallowed. “I….”

“
What
?” he interrupted. “What were you looking at? That pair of mounted pistols?”

“
Oh, no
,” she said, concerned that he would think that.

“What then?”

She felt a sense of confusion. Dada didn’t
see
it?

“My …place,” she said. “My Happy Valley.”

He gaped at her. “Happy—?” he began, then did not complete the phrase.

After several moments of dark appraisal, he did complete it.
“Happy Valley
?” he enunciated slowly.

“Yes, Dada.”

William Jocelyn Osborne put down his cup of coffee and leaned across the table to peer suspiciously at his daughter.

“
What in the name of God are you talking about
?” he demanded.

At first, her father, then her family, thought that Gladys was making it up.

But when she persisted, describing, in such minute detail, what she saw, they became alarmed, then punitive.

Their orthodox beliefs did not include probing into “things which were not meant to be understood.”

Gladys was forbidden to ever see this “Happy Valley” again.

In time, the visions—doubtless weakened by the collective negativism of her family, her doctors and friends—disappeared, leaving Gladys with a sense of deprivation.

When Leonore Simonds was twenty-two, she married William Piper of Boston.

At the urging of her father-in-law—because she was suffering from the effects of an accident experienced some years earlier—Leonore was persuaded to consult a blind clairvoyant named J.R. Cocke who was attracting considerable attention by his uncanny medical diagnosis and subsequent cures.

Those who attended the meeting that Sunday night were seated in a circle around which the clairvoyant slowly moved, placing his hands on the head of each person in turn.

While he was standing opposite Mrs. Piper, diagnosing the afflictions of the woman seated across from her—on whose head Dr. Cocke’s hands were resting—the face of the clairvoyant seemed to get smaller and smaller to her eyes as though it were receding into the distance.

Mrs. Piper began to lose all consciousness of her surroundings.

It did not return until the blind clairvoyant stopped behind her and placed his hands on her head.

Abruptly, she shuddered as a chill ran through her body.

She saw, in front of her, a flood of light in which a number of odd faces were hovering.

Then a hand passed to and fro before her eyes.

Dr. Cocke jerked his hands from her head as Mrs. Piper stood and walked around him to a table in the center of the room on which writing materials had been placed earlier.

Picking up a pencil, she leaned over and, for almost a minute, wrote rapidly on a piece of paper.

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.