By

WILLIAM, DUDLEY PELLEY

Third Edition

1954 SOULCRAFT CHAPELS

NOBLESVILLE, INDIANA

Copyright 1942
by
William Dudley Pelley

5
 Second Edition
Printed in U. S. A.

Published by
SOULCRAFT CHAPELS
NOBLESVILLE, INDIANA

6
 To
AGNES MARION HENDERSON
“A.M.H."

In Affectionate Appreciation of
Her Twenty-Two Years Devotion
to the Business of Soulcraft

7
Why I Believe

The Dead Are Alive

Chapter I

THE CHILDISHNESS OF HORROR

OOKS on the conscious survival of the

human soul after death are as old as
Pythagoras. Pathagoras, just in case you
have never heard of the gentleman, was
a celebrated Greek philosopher. He was
born on the island of Samos some six hundred years before
Christ. When I say that books on the conscious survival of the
soul after death are as old as Pythagoras, I by no means write
conventionally. Probably no man who ever lived, unless it be the
Great Authority of Galilee himself, made a greater name as an
expert in matters of physical life and death, and the capabilities
of the soul for functioning above mortality, than this celebrated
Greek who traveled down into Egypt in his 'teens, put himself
under the tutelage of Nilotic mystics and emerged in middle life
to found in the memorable colony of Crotona, in southern Italy.

8
Among the extraordinary doctrines that Pythagoras gave to the
centuries were: Numerology----that numbers are the principles of
all things----that the universe is a harmonious whole, that the
heavenly bodies by their movements cause sounds, which
produce the Music of the Spheres, that the soul is immortal and
passes successively into many bodies and that the highest aim
and blessedness of man is likeness to the Deity. Of course, little
brainstrapped theologians of his day couldn't see him for
snakebite and had his colony raided in the most approved
modern fashion. His buildings were burnt and his colony
scattered. What actually became of Pythagoras himself was
never found out. Some say he dematerialized. Some say he
ascended, not unlike Christ. Some even go so far as to declare
that he knew so much about the secrets of life and death that he
has been able to keep himself alive since the fifth century before
Christ and is going up and down the world as an apparently
normal human being in garb of the present. Anyhow, Pythagoras
applied himself systematically and scientifically to the great
business of finding out precisely what the human soul is capable
of doing under any and all conditions----even the conditions of
vacating the mortal body and losing it----and compiling a great
library of lore for exceptional students who were by no means
reluctant to explore those avenues of research. So when
I remarked that books on the survival of the soul after death
are as old as Pythagoras, I am really harking back to a reliable
authority. Also I am implying that books on the survival of the
soul after death have been published with a fair degree of
steadiness and consistence ever since----and doubtless they
will go on being published till types and eggshell papers are
no more.

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 The reason for this lies in the fact that when a given
person has actually started exploring for himself in valid
mystical research, and begun to acquire the first cognitions
that “dead” people have apparently conversed with him, his
immediate reaction is to stumble wildly from the psychical
laboratory and make for a typewriter with maximum speed.
He wants to shout his discoveries to the universe, on the
somewhat naive notion that he is the first man----or woman----
in Cosmos to make them. Frankly, I set down in these opening
pages of this personal testimony that I have been no exception
to the impulse.

HAVING, up to the year 1928, lived nearly four decades

of entirely normal existence, raised as a lad in a Methodist
parsonage----as I shall doubtless have cause to refer to again----
and embracing the calling of nondescript newspaperman until
I graduated into the more affluent vocation of magazine
writer and novelist, I looked upon all attempts to prove
communication with the so-called dead as the screwball
futilities of manifest maniacs.
My father's orthodoxy had taught me ever since I left
kilts----kilts being the substitute for rompers when I was very
young----that “there is no voice or knowledge in the grave where
thou goest." In another place the Hebrew authorities said,
“The dead know not anything." That settled the matter. Who
was I, or my father, or any of my father's relations or
colleagues in orthodoxy, to challenge the pronouncements of
experts in Theology? As a matter of fact, I was far too
busy being an ordinary young American with my own way
to make, to give the slightest time or thought to

10
exploring into what some call the Eternal Verities and settling
the matter one way or another.
Thirty-eight years, to be exact, I was complacently
oblivious to these vast fundamentals. True, a lot of things had
occurred from time to time in my life for which I had no
explanation, and some had fecundities to make my flesh crawl.
But I had never awakened in the moonlight of early morning and
seen a spook trying to stand on its head in my bedchamber.
I had never been present at a single funeral where the deceased
had suddenly sat up in his casket and cried with blinking eyes,
“Hey, what goes on?" In fact, I had been inclined to think that
ghost-layers and spiritualists of all breeds were the acme of
fakers who should be disposed of upon demise in the
conventional manner of drowning cats in bags. Put 'em in a sack,
tie the top stoutly, drop 'em well weighted with stones in the
nearest mill-pond, and then taunt' em with the invitation to come
back and haunt one.
Only once in my life had I been adequately terrified by
supernatural phenomena----or what at first I took to be such----
and that was a June night up behind the campus of Syracuse
University, when I elected to stroll with a sweet young co-ed
through a moonlit cemetery. Believe it or not, while lisping fond
nothings into her ear, mine eye caught sight of one of the
gravestones moving. I stopped lisping my fond nothings and
stared glassy-eyed. The gravestone was moving, and there was
no mistake about it. It was moving towards the pair of us, and
when Cassie beheld it likewise she emitted a shriek and looped
my neck crazily.
I aver that the gravestone levitated down towards us in
the moonglade, and when it got within ten feet of us, it emitted
a most relieving and bovine “Moo!" It was an old white

11
cow that had been cropping the cemetery's sweet grass with
its head down. All the same, I might add that I got the' ell out of
that cemetery by leaping all the gravestones that were
stationary----with Cassie clutched behind me in a smear.
Real supernatural phenomena, I repeat, had left me
alone. It wasn't until thirty-eight summers of my wasted young
career had fled, that I actually came to grips in California----and
later New York----with Facts of Life that brought me up short and
bashed me in the forehead.
But when they DID happen, it seemed that I couldn't
bawl about them loudly enough. I was like the usual human
infant who makes the stupendous discovery that each foot on
each ankle totals five toes per foot. I not only regarded this
discovery as something never stumbled upon by the human race
before, but I wanted to publish it in Gath and tell it raucously in
the thoroughfares of Ascalon.
I did publish it in Gath and tell it raucously in the
thoroughfares of Ascalon. And after a time, as I continued to go
from experience to experience and from experiment to
experiment in various types of psychical research, I fear me
that I acquired quite a bit of a notoriety about it. None of which is
saying that all people believed it. Back in 1941, when I was
engaged in the bitterest kind of a political battle with predatory
Marxists, I constantly met people who said: "We follow you in all
your political and economic theories, and think you've done the
country a splendid service by your publishings. But why have
you ever let yourself become messed up in all this spiritualistic
and psychical research tommyrot? Delving into such alchemistic
nonsense, discounts and depreciates all the fighting you've done
to save the Republic from the Communists."

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 Well, it would take a long time to enlighten such
critics as to why I may have done so, and ten chances to one
they wouldn't accredit me anyhow. But here's the thing I'm
getting at . . . .

I FANCY that I'm growing a bit mellower and more

rational, as the years rock along, about all this psychic and
mystic lore----and I can write about most of what I've
experienced, now, in a relieving retrospect.
As a matter of fact, I've reached the point in the
compilation of my philosophy where there actually aren't any
“dead" to me, at all.
Death simply isn't much of a factor in my psychology.
True, some of my most intimate friends frequently decide to
embark upon Sabbath afternoon motor rides, approach grade
crossings without noting signal lights, and spatter generous
consignments of their personalities over the pilots of
locomotives. They are brought home in sections, even with
sundry portions missing, and three days later I am summoned to
follow my gift of flowers to some mortuary where a parson
laments that Joe or Fred or Mabel has been “cut down" or “cut
off" in his or her prime and that the ways of Providence are too
abstruse to follow. There is not the slightest chance of arguing
successfully that they are not “dead," because one look in the
box is all that is necessary to prove that they will never
climb out of it and order another cheeseburger in a neighborhood
Toddle House. Physically, of course, I must concede that
what was mortal of Joe or Fred or Mabel is more or less
an exhibit of mundane debris. In that sense there is “death."
But spiritually speaking, I am finding myself no more
impressed about all of it than I am impressed by the

13
fact that the elm trees this autumn shed their summer leaves
and will wave gaunt boughs to the American skies 'til about
next April 10th.
If so be it I am in a psychical laboratory some night in the
weeks succeeding, and Joe or Fred or Mabel “comes through"
and cries through the lips of the Sensitive, “How'ya, Chief?"
I'll not be upset in the slightest. Ten to one I will respond:
"How'ya, Joe"----or Fred or Mabel as the case may be, "----how's
the blooming temperature where you're working from now?"
I don't mean to be callous. I'm asking you, skeptic
though you may be by reason of never having had my
experiences with the “dead," to accept for the moment that
whether a person has got a body or hasn't got a body, doesn't
alter my attitude toward him in the slightest. Why all this pother
over physical bodies?
A body to me is an instrument, a mechanism, an
overcoat, that the human spirit put on by birth and occupies and
functions in, for a handful of years, in order to get results of a
material nature in a world of concrete substances. Otherwise it is
an annoying "hunk o' lard."
It takes a long time to get this viewpoint----to arrive at the
subconscious acceptance that the physical body is merely
something of material convenience and utility, and that it has no
more to do with the motivating spirit than the President of the
United States has to do with the price at which the corner grocer
sells cheese in Madison, Wisconsin.
Of course, having pursued such "studies" to some
length, I've likewise accepted as a Fact of Life that such mortal
spirits, previously known to me in flesh, have the option of
coming back into new and unspoiled mechanisms and start-

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15
ing the mortal tenancy all over. They have the option of doing it
as many times as they have the courage and reasons for doing
it. After all, it's their business.
All of which is saying indirectly that I've likewise gotten
the business of so-caIled Reincarnation somewhat securely
established in my mind.
Surely I accept that mortals come back onto this earth-
plane more than once. Not to be ribald, some of them whom
I meet in the day's experience, never could learn to be so dumb
in one lifetime, anyhow. And the same thing goes for sagacity.
I don't fight these great fundamentals of life any more.
I just call a truce with the dominies and take the findings of the
seance room---and my own psychical fecundities---as I receive
them. After all, fighting them isn't going to get me anywhere, and
if Truth is Truth, what I'd better be about is a recognition of it,
and a patterning of my daily career after it, and let the Almighty
deal with the stupid.

SO WHAT I'm going to write for you now is merely a catalogue

or chronology of “how I got that way," and what peculiar---and at
times hair-raising---experiences came to me after the year 1928,
convincing me that there is actually no such thing as “death" and
that the loss of one's enhousing mortal overcoat is by no means
the gravest misfortune which one's family or the world may
lament.
Right now the United States poises on the brink of a
devastating war with certain nations of Asia. If the plans of the
predatory and designing Marxists carry out successfully,
millions of fine young Americans will be impressed into
military service shortly and before the brawl is over, have their

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brains bashed out by a lot of Chinese pig-iron. Presently they will
be back here in America, and demonstrating all over the place
that they are no more dead than the people in mortal bodies are
dead. The pedants will give it out that “a great wave of spiritist
demonstration" is visiting afresh upon humanity. They will say it,
of course, out of the depths of their abysmal ignorance.
What I simply wish to do is put down in black and white
some of the outstanding adventures I have had---or contacted---
or heard about----contributing to my psychology that “death" is a
sophistry. I've got to predicate much of what I say upon the
Reincarnational Hypothesis, of course, and for the moment,
likewise, I'm asking that you ride along with me and try to get my
angle. Now then, hear how the whole business started with me---
bewildered, struggling, aspiring, purblind mortal exactly like
yourself---suddenly plunged into all sorts of evidence that from
the time I first arrived in my father's Methodist parsonage
somebody had been spoofing me about losing my identity simply
because I might take a motor ride some Sabbath afternoon and
engage in an argument with a Baldwin locomotive.
But before we get down to tacks, I propose to talk a few
pages about Pythagorean metaphysics.

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 Chapter II

FIRST, MOHAWK TRAIL ENIGMA

T IS my opinion after much observation, that

no rational human being becomes a
devotee of metaphysics unless he has first
undergone some remarkable experience
concerning natural phenomena, or has a
queer welling-up of Cosmic Knowledge comes
from the depths of his subconscious.
The last is more vital than most persons suspect. And it
has but one origin: a definite memory of the past history of the
soul, as, life on life, it experienced physical visitations!
I contend there is a substantial reason why over a million
persons right here in America are disciples of faiths that make a
tenet of recurrent birth. This subject of Continuity would never
arise to perplex the human race if man did not carry in his
subconscious mind vague recognitions of this life fundamental.
His perplexity is really a form of conflict---between his own
subconscious knowledge and the fiats of superstition.
For instance, we know that the human body doesn't
survive, but is buried in the ground and subsequently
disintegrates---and no one sheds a tear over such disintegration.
Why not?

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Because it isn't a cosmic verity. But the survival of the soul is a
truth of the Cosmos and therefore it persists as a challenging
equation. True, we don't know all the factors and rules of its
solution. But the fact that there is a solution is expressed in the
impulse toward determination of the process---the why and
wherefore of the mystery as a mystery.

I KNOW that in my own life, up to nearly my fortieth year I had

alternate periods, oscillating back and forth between doubt of
continuity and conviction of it. I recall a bitter day in adolescence
after I had read a pamphlet by an avowed atheist who had made
out an excellent case for the termination of life with the cessation
of the heart-beat. So clever was his logic that for twenty-four
hours I existed in despair. I wasn't old enough to cross-question
myself as to why I should feel that awful despair. What difference
could it possibly have made to me that losing my identity was
something to worry over? Whence came my worry? Why should
it have occurred to me to want to survive at all? Such fears must
have a sounder basis than mere self-awareness and the desire-
wish to keep that self-awareness functioning. And after all just
what was self-awareness?
Then in practical day-to-day newspaper work came
flashes of vague revelation of a Reality higher and beyond this
earthly endurance,that puzzled as they terrified me. I had
uncanny presentiments of having lived in a certain place before,
knowing features of terrain, feeling a familiarity with certain
types of people that I tried to explain as hereditary instincts.
Oh, more than all else, in my police reporting I would be
called to see souls go out of the flesh by accident or
tragedy. And I would behold on their faces a peace that

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surely betokened a knowledge not of earth---an acquiescence to
destiny that carried neither fright nor personal concernment.
At another time in my early thirties, I cranked a small
cheap automobile in gear, at the top of a hill. It leaped into
motion, bearing me down and dragging me 300 feet with my
body beneath its chassis. Grimly clutching the refractory crank
that had done the mischief, I was confident throughout every
inch of those 300 feet that the termination of my life had certainly
arrived. Yet, in that supremely tragic moment, all fear deserted
me. I found myself saying, ”Well, I've reached it. Now I'll see
what this 'dying' is like."
And yet, on the other hand, these words were not
positive proofs of psychic survival. I did much reading in
biography, to see how others had solved the problem. But
strangely enough, of Spiritualism and Theosophy I had little
acquaintance. Looking back, it seems surpassing strange that
when I lay down to sleep on an epochal night in California, and
had the experience which has now been read by twenty millions
of people, Spiritualism and Theosophy were even the least bit
repulsive---the former because of the charlatanry practiced too
often beneath its cloak, the latter because the newspapers
reported the Theosophists as believing that the Master Christ
would return to earth in the body of a youthful Hindu. Which was
doubly repulsive. . . although again I did not pause to ask why.

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 MY FIRST introduction to the possible validity of natural
phenomena came after World War I.
A few weeks before America joined the Allies, I was
taken out of my Vermont newspaper office and sent on a war
correspondent's job in the Orient. I left behind me in America,
among other relatives, a brother-in-law 22 years old, with whom I
had worked in a publishing business. We had been bosom pals,
and had often lain together in bed at night discussing between
ourselves this same question of survival. Just before I left for the
Far East, however, this thing happened:
Knowing that I would probably be gone many months, on
a Sunday afternoon in 1917 a group of friends and relatives
made up a motor picnic on the Mohawk Trail outside of North
Adams, Mass., as a little farewell outing. Among this group was
this brother-in-law and a nurse from Brooklyn City Hospital,
whom my brother-in-law had not met until this specific afternoon.
I shall call her Nurse Agnes.
This picnic party was be notable, though it passed at the
time similar to many other outings, and the next week found me
on my way to the Orient. While in Japan, the Siberian
Intervention was determined upon and I enlisted in the only
available position---that of Red Triangle secretary with the
Japanese troops. I went to Siberia and became an impromptu
consular courier, traveling 7,000 miles in that unhappy country
during the early days of the Bolshevik regime. Coming
down into Japan again, I found mail awaiting me that
brought the first intelligence from home in many months.
In that mail was a newspaper clipping containing an
account of my brother-in-law's enlistment and subsequent

21
death of the “flu" at Camp Devens. This demise so affected my
domestic affairs, that I cut short my trip and took the next
eastward steamer.
Now my brother-in-law---whom I introduce as Ernest---
had married just before starting for Camp Devens, and his
premature death left his bride so distraught that she turned
to experiments in Spiritualism. The Spiritualists were holding
their annual summer encampment at Lake Pleasant, Mass., near
by, and she attended several of their sessions and contrived
many sittings with trustworthy mediums. On my return to
Vermont, she sought me out in quandary.
"I've heard from Ernest!" she announced. “But I don't
know what to make of it. He ‘came through' to a medium---
apparently---tried to convince me of his existence, and gave me
explicit directions for solving financial problems left by his
passing. But that wasn't all! Ernest kept saying over and over,
‘Please thank the nurse of the Mohawk Trail for what she did for
me!' What nurse could he have meant?"
Now Ernest's wife had not been with us on that motor
picnic and had never met Nurse Agnes. Had Ernest mentioned
her, I submit that his widow, Pauline, would have identified her.
Still that isn't the point. Puzzled as to what the connection should
have been between a soldier in Camp Devens and a graduate
nurse in a Brooklyn hospital, I at once tried to get into
communication with our nurse of the picnic. She had vanished!
My family dismissed the matter for a time. In fact, a year passed.
Then one day in Vermont we got a letter from our missing nurse.
She was coming home from the Far East, where she had been in
army service, and would presently visit us. The letter was mailed
from Vladivostok.

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 Now I had been in Vladivostok several months before,
and it seemed incredible that Nurse Agnes should have been
stationed there without my knowing it. All the same, she had
done so. Shortly after I had left for the Orient, she had resigned
her position with the Brooklyn City Hospital and gone into army
service.
Eventually she had been assigned to the contingent of
American troops participating in the Intervention. She had arrived
there with the American soldiers while I had been “in-country",
and taken up her duties at the military base hospital in Golden
Horn Bay.
I had come out when the war closed, gone through to
Japan without seeing her, and eventually sailed home. Unique
though the situation was, Nurse Agnes had been on that last
picnic party on the Mohawk Trail in Massachusetts before I left
the United States, and she had been back in Vladivostok when I
left the Far East for my return trip home.
It was this peculiarity of leaving her behind me at each
end of the trip that caused comment in my family for a period.
Finally the day came when Nurse Agnes stepped off the train in
Vermont, came to the house, and sat down with us for the
evening meal---meal at which the conversation naturally was
concerned with our Siberian experiences.
We talked about the Czechoslovakians, the Bolshevists
and the Japanese. Finally we got around to a discussion of the
part played by the American soldiers in the war. That brought up
a reference to the cruel inroads of influenza among the troops in
the draft camps throughout the closing months of 1918. My wife
was deeply affected.

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 “You know, of course," she remarked to Nurse Agnes,
“that the flu got Ernest at Camp Devens. He was among the first
of the soldiers to die from it. He never got over to France."
Nurse Agnes had a queer expression on her face.
“I ought to know," she said. “Your brother Ernest died in my
arms!"
For an instant an electric suspense held about our table.
My wife found voice enough to ask, “Were you at Camp
Devens?"
Nurse Agnes nodded. “It was my first assignment after
leaving Brooklyn Hospital for the army service. I began nursing
the boys at Camp Devens and stayed until orders came for my
transfer to the Orient."
“And Ernest died in your arms!"
“He was one of my first patients. I remembered him at
once. We were all of us on a picnic together, you recall, on the
Mohawk Trail the Sunday before you left for the Coast to take
ship to Japan."
Silence came then and lasted so long that Agnes
demanded to be told what made it.
“Emest came to his widowed bride, Pauline,"
I answered, “through a trance medium at Lake Pleasant, and told
her to thank you for making his last hours comfortable."
It was then Nurse Agnes's turn to be jolted. .

CONSIDER as a scientific psychical fact, this thing that

had happened. Ernest had gone to Camp Devens and died of
the flu long after we had quitted the United States. His body had
been shipped home to his widow and he had been buried.
Pauline had not given a thought to any special nurse,
or nurses, at the base hospital who might have cared
for her husband, until the medium had conveyed that

24
revealing message at Lake Pleasant. She had been too much
immersed in her grief to think of much besides her loss. “The
Nurse of the Mohawk Trail" meant nothing to her, either, I say
again, for had she been present on the picnic, or had Ernest
mentioned her before he departed for his fatal rendezvous at
camp, Pauline would have had no difficulty in placing the nurse
mentioned in the medium's communication. The whole episode
had been sealed, however, till Nurse Agnes came home, sat at
our table, and unlocked it by her statement. The medium herself
had known nothing about Pauline's visit, in order to prepare
herself for giving such a message in advance, for Pauline had
gone to Lake Pleasant alone and capriciously on the spur of the
moment. Here, evidently, was a bona fide and unchallengeable
instance of the conscious soul of our soldier-boy getting a
message through to his folks after physical demise, about a
person whose own testimony was required months later to make
it intelligible.
I remember going to bed that night, and for many nights
thereafter, trying to figure out how the medium could have
rooked Pauline. There had been no connection between the
medium and Nurse Agnes, for the latter had departed for
Vladivostok soon after, and besides, Nurse Agnes had no use for
mediums and never consulted them. Certainly she would not
consult one in regard to my brother-in-law, who had simply been
a deceased soldier whom she had happened to meet once, on a
Sunday afternoon picnic.
When I had exhausted all explanations having to do
with intentional fraud and trickery---my practical mind
seeking some solution that had to be strictly material---I finally
accepted the more rational causation for the incident: that
Ernest must be alive, and existing in a thinking state---a state

25
that contained functioning memory---for him to have mentioned
Nurse Agnes at all.
Ernest, as a matter of fact, was protagonist of my
psychical discoveries, on and off, for the ensuing ten years. He
was to bob up again and again in my experiments and
experiences as I shall presently relate.
The war nurse who had closed his eyes in Camp
Devens, had come back to the United States and reported her
part in the little drama, in 1920.
Five or six years were to pass before I next got proof of
another sort confirming his “survival" . . . .

MY NEXT concrete contact with the subject of

discarnate intelligence came in 1925 in Springfield, Mass.
I had gone to that city to spend a vacation with my
married sister, Edna. Among her recent acquisitions had been an
ouija board. She brought it out one evening and asked me if
I had ever seen one work. I pooh-poohed such nonsense till she
asked me to sit down opposite her and try my hands upon it.
Immediately with celerity the tripod started moving. We
went through the usual banter---or I did---accusing one another
of subconsciously shoving it. But soon the little table commenced
to spell out a message that I realized could only have come from
Ernest again. He---or at least the planchette---was spelling out a
reference to something that had happened up in Vermont
between Ernest and myself that Edna did not know about. I said
“across the board" to my sister, "Do you think you might be able
to work this gadget without my hands upon it?"
"Why?" asked Edna.

26
“Because if this is Ernest operating the planchette, I want to put
a question to him absolutely proving his identity with. out my
hands formulating the answer from my subconscious mind."
“Go ahead," said Edna, “I’ll try."
“Ernest," I addressed the blank atmosphere, “if you're
within sound of my voice and recall our business transactions in
Vermont, suppose you spell out the amount of money that you
and I paid Verne Adams at Lake Raponda one Sunday afternoon
as option money on lease of a building in Wilmington where we
were intending to start a daily news- paper."
Having delivered myself of this, I sat back in my chair
and shoved my hands to the small of my back.
With only Edna's hands on the gadget, the little wooden
pointer shot swiftly about the alphabet and offered this answer:
“Ask me a hard one, Dud! We paid him ten bucks!"

IT WAS exactly the sort of answer that Ernest would

have given had he been present in the flesh. Moreover, the sum
named was absolutely accurate. Only he and I and the Adams
party had known of the transaction. The Adams party was still up
in Vermont and Edna scarcely knew of him. Only in the depths
of my mind alone was the knowledge that Ernest and I had
paid down a ten-dollar bill that Sunday to close the deal on
the lease of that property. And as the planchette spelled
out the sum, I was sitting three to four feet back from
the table with my hands behind me. I know there is such
a thing as Cryptothesis, or the reading of the mind
by vigilant discarnates. But my sister Edna was by

27
no means one of these. She had simply touched her fingers
lightly upon the pointer and the pointer had traveled unerringly to
the figures.
What was I to think?
Edna took her hands from the board, leaned back in her
chair and remarked, "You know, when I'm going about my
housework during the day, I have the constant feeling that Ernest
is going to step out around the comer of a door, or be waiting for
me when I go upstairs."
She leaned forward and laid her fingers again upon the
planchette. At once it shot into action. We followed the words it
spelled---
“What's the matter with you, Edna? I'm not interested in
scaring you. Don't you know that I'm your friend?"
After delivery of this quasi-consolation, the planchette
wandered about the board's smooth surface for a time. Suddenly
it shot into action again.
“Your Uncle Samuel," it spelled out, “is tonight lying at
the point of death. We think he is about to make the Passing.
You will receive a telegram in the morning that he is dead and
the funeral set for Tuesday. Better get ready to attend it."
This was disconcerting. Uncle Samuel---my father's
younger brother and my favorite uncle---lying at the point of
death! And a funeral in prospect the first of the week! We looked
at each other aghast.
“Well," I finally remarked, arising, “no matter what
happens tomorrow, I'm due to get a disappointment. If the
telegram comes, I've lost a beloved relative. If it doesn't come,
I've lost faith in the evidence that the ‘dead' are alive and can tell
us what's about to happen in the future."

28
 I wanted no more of the ouija board that night, however,
and we went to troubled slumbers to await the morrow's
developments.
Morning came. It brought no telegram. My Uncle Samuel
was not dead.
We did not attend any funeral that Tuesday.
“Aha!" I said to Edna. “Your ouija board is a lot of
applesauce!"
“Yes," she agreed ruefully, “I suppose it is."
Dismissing the whole episode from my mind as some
freak of the subconscious, I went back to my literary labors in
New York.
But mark you what happened---
Three months later Edna was visiting in Lynn, Mass.,
and started telling about the incident of the Ouija message.
“What specific date was it?" my uncle's wife cried. Edna fixed the
date precisely.
“That was exactly the night," my aunt affirmed, “that Sam
was so afflicted with blood-poisoning from a carbuncle on his
neck, that we didn't expect him to live until morning."
Edna wrote me what she had learned.
“Well," I thought to myself, “it might easily be explained
by mental telepathy!"

STILL I had no real faith in the validity of Spiritism---

no satisfying proofs of discarnate consciousness. I tried to “wade
through" a book by Sir Oliver Lodge, and tossed it aside as
bizarre or banal. I even wrote a facetious---and happily,
unpublished---magazine story in which I made a great
dramatic wallop out of the possibility that Raymond was

29
alive somewhere in flesh, but couldn't communicate with
his family because it would blast his father's high prestige.
It was not until the early part of 1928, when I had
withdrawn to a little writing-bungalow near the foot of Mt. Lowe in
Altadena, California, that the mystic curtain suddenly rolled
backward and showed me something of the colossal, beautiful
machinery that operates---as I call it---behind physical life.
I have told elsewhere how I was writing a book on "The
Urge of Peoples" that should try to explain great racial migrations
throughout ages past. One day I came suddenly against the
question: "What were races?" Why should one group of human
beings be black-skinned, and another group yellow?
Before morning I would have many answers. I have told
how I went to bed pondering the question, to read until I was
drowsy and then drop off to sleep. I have stated that I was in
excellent health, not given to any mental depression or addicted
to drugs beyond the ordinary smoker's consumption of nicotine
which had been going on for twenty years with no untoward
results on my heart or my health. In “My Seven Minutes in
Eternity" I have narrated what happened that night. I went out of
the physical body-to all intents and purposes. I met Ernest face
to face. I met other relatives, I met friends whom I had known in
other life cycles and previous states of physical consciousness!
And I knew them as familiarly and intimately as I knew those
who, like Ernest, had been as close to me as Bill Pelley in
this life!
Ultimately I will print later on in this story what my
friends on the other side have had to say since about my visit
with them that epochal night. But it wasn't until I had returned

30
into my body, stunned by what I had seen and learned, that
I began to get proofs of continuity and individual survival that
should convince others beyond all assailment that earthly life is
but a visit in a room, visits in many rooms, life upon life.
If I bear a little bit heavily, and to some unpleasantly, on
the process of rebirth, life cycle on life cycle in physical bodies,
I ask indulgence. What I have seen, what I have been taught,
what I have received as bits of mosaic in the great splendorful
pattern of cosmic logic, is responsible for my position. Follow
through the whole extent of my delineations, however,
concerning cycles of rebirth, whatever your creed or personal
preferences, and perchance I may be able to alter some of your
antagonisms if you have them. And what I have to say may
possibly help awaken your own psychic faculties.
Of course, as I have often stated, the psychologists, the
psychiatrists and the students of psychosis have since gone to
great lengths to explain how I merely had a “dream" that
California night. But after all is said and done, there should be
more than one man's say-so to convince the skeptics that such
an experience was actual and not hallucination. Regardless of
how I feel toward the realism of the experience myself, the fact
remains that my personal mental or spiritual adventures cannot
be checked by others from the mere telling of the story alone.
So it is that I now propose to go further into my personal
proofs of survival from my own investigations and experiences
with others, to show how that California experience was only the
commencement of a realization of a vast cosmic fact.

31
 And that story begins with my arrival in New York City
during the summer of 1928 to consult with some members of the
New York Society for Psychical Research about the phenomena
I had undergone.
I had suddenly found myself plunged out of my depth
into a great sea of demonstrable mysticism. Scarcely knowing
“what it was all about,” I had found myself prime actor in a
stupendous drama of Aggressive Discarnation. Of course I know
now “what it was all about." It was, in a way, my role and brevet
to contribute to a vast tidal-wave of enlightenment on the
question of occupancy of flesh, and provide a prologue as I was
able by means of my prestige in literary craftsmanship to the vast
Aquarian Revelation that was slated to visit upon current
humanity, altering the concepts of orthodox religion and giving
man his correct cue as to what he might be doing in the three-
dimensional octave and what evolutions of spirit await him when
he has mastered the lessons of Mortality. For such had I
volunteered to enact my life-role in the first place.
The enigma of Ernest and Nurse Agnes, resulting from
that picnic on the Mohawk Trail, was the first indication that had
come to me in thirty-eight years, however, that perchance this
business of “the dead knowing not anything" had been the
pronouncement of pompous ignoramuses.
Maybe the “dead" were a whole lot more “alive" than we
mortals in flesh, down here on the sea-bottom of this ocean of
atmosphere. The year 1928 was my wholesale introduction to
the certainty of it. I closed my affairs in California and took an
apartment in New York.

32
 Chapter III

AFTERMATH OF SEVEN MINUTES

HAD been in a strange state of stupefaction,

as it were, in the days immediately following
my nocturnal experience in my Altadena
bungalow.
I knew that I had “been somewhere" and met
and talked in a baffling way with entities whom the world would
consider as “dead." And yet, to go out in the street and proclaim
it would only get me branded as an idiot or liar. What had
happened to me, so long as I had no way of checking up on it
through others, or proving it to others in the developments of
circumstance, must always remain as a personal experience,
a personal illumination.
I had no mind to take anyone into my confidence about
it. In fact, I came out of seclusion with the idea of keeping it
forever to myself. I was too upset philosophically, from what
I had seen and heard, to do much more than ponder it and try to
assimilate its astounding significance.
True, something had happened to me physically as a
result of it, because I had a small office staff of employees in a
Pasadena business in which I was interested, who immediately
began exclaiming at some elusive alteration in my personal

33
appearance. But auto-suggestions arrived at in sleep, might
easily be responsible for such bodily enhancement, so I let them
exclaim and applied myself to business.
Finally I decided to get away from California and go to
New York. I wanted a perspective on myself and my
environment---not to mention the possibility of talking with
students of such phenomena and finding out whether or not
they could give me interpretation of some phases of Cosmology
I seemed to have had relayed to me from the Other Side which
I believed I had visited. If other people had undergone similar
visitations that checked up with mine in detail---as to procedure
and the environment visited---then I might begin to credit that my
cognizance of Reality had not been self-delusion. Once during
an attack of typhoid fever, I had known the seeming reality of
delusions and illusions, and was not minded to hoax myself
when my whole future career might depend on the validity of
the episode.

THE morning before starting for New York, however, a

strange thing happened, which I have already mentioned in
previous writings. I was standing in the livingroom of my
bungalow with briar in one hand and tobacco tin in the other. As
I started to fill my pipe, something struck the tobacco tin,
seemingly from beneath. The can spun an arc in the air just
above my hands and spilled broadcast along the rug. At the
moment of this uncanny happening, I heard my first clairaudient
voice. It said---“Bill, give up your smoking!" I looked at the spilled
can lying near my feet and felt a weird thrill of fright. Later in the
day, when I essayed to draw forth a package of cigarettes,
I heard a repetition of the first beseechment. But this thing

34
was notable: the following evening I commenced to have a
strange aversion to the taste of tobacco. By the next morning all
desire for it had gone and for the ensuing eight months I had not
the slightest hunger for it in any form. I might interpolate here
that one evening in Manhattan, eight months later, the same
Voice that had appealed to me to give up my smoking came to
me in the same manner in the course of a psychic message and
instructed me to send out to the corner drugstore for a packet of
cigarettes.
“We think you had better resume smoking," the
instruction came. “lt seems to open up your subconscious mind
by relaxing your nerves and thus you are a better receiving
organism. But don't dissipate in nicotine or we will kill the taste
for it in you again!"
Leaving Pasadena finally, en route for New York, I was
riding across New Mexico the second night out when my third
dramatic experience occurred in the club car.

I WAS alone in the club car about 10:30 at night. All the
other passengers had gone back to their berths. Only the Negro
porter was present in the buffet, getting his affairs closed up for
the day. I had put a copy of Emerson in my bag and happened at
the moment to be reading his “Over-Soul." I was not asleep, not
even drowsy. The car clicked monotonously eastward, eastward.
Suddenly as I turned a page, something happened!
I seemed to be bathed in a deluge of pure white light on that
moving Pullman. A great flood of Revelation came to me out of
which a Voice spoke to me such as I had never heard
before. What it said, I prefer to keep permanently to my-

35
self. But in that instant I knew that my bungalow experience had
not been a dream, or even hallucination. Particularly I knew of
the reality of that Entity whom the world now designates as
Jesus of Nazareth!
I knew that He was not a mystical religious ideal.
I knew His ministry and career had been a literal
actuality and that I had once seen Him when He was thus in His
flesh!

I MAKE this statement guardedly and in full realization of

its dramatic import. I knew in those moments in that empty club
car that all the emotional reactions I had known during my life up
till then about Him had not been delusions of grandeur, nor
superiority complexes. Jesus of Nazareth was not afar on some
distant golden throne. He was here in a modem world of
Pullmans and Negro porters, radio and tabloids, chain shirt
shops and talking movies.
I remained inert in that club car till long after the Negro
porter was snoring in his berth toward the front of the coach.
When I got to my feet and went back to my own berth, I had an
entirely new concept of my future.

THIS sounds, I know, like a Messianic complex. Perhaps

many a character since the Palestinian incarnation of the Master
who has been able to give humanity a new interpretation of that
splendorful Personality, has also been dismissed into the
Messianic complex classification. No matter! I knew what I knew!
And I was calmly content from that night onward to let events
take their course, for I had a strange feeling that all would be well
if I but kept my pact.

36
 This, I might say, has come out literally in fact!
All that had happened, however, had happened to me
privately. Still there was nothing that I could present to scientific-
minded persons in proof of these two phenomenal episodes.
Not that it was necessary to convince others. But all the same,
having been a practical newspaperman with a practical
newspaperman's outlook on strange fads and ”isms," I had no
mind to go skewed in my thinking and develop a crack in an
otherwise serviceable intellect.
I rode the rest of the way to New York not doing any
reading, for reading was impossible. I watched the landscape in
a stupefied daze.
Then, going across Indiana on the New York Central two
days later, which happened to fall on a Sunday afternoon,
I heard the Clairaudient Voice a third time. Understand, it did
not come to me at my own behest or invitation. On none of the
previous occasions had I expected it. So now, when I had
reached the place where I dared wonder consciously about the
phenomenon in New Mexico, my thought was answered with an
audible sentence.

AGAIN it serves no purpose to tell what the question

was which I was cogitating upon, or the answer I received. But it
was a direct confirmation of the fact that there was a greater
significance to my vivid concepts of Jesus throughout childhood
and adolescence than mere delusions or Messianic complexes.
I got to New York appalled by what was occurring to me
and to the work which I seemed bidden to do in interpreting
phases of Messianic doctrine, which up to that time had been as
abstruse to me as to any purblind ecclesiastic. But the

37
last thought in my mind was to tell anyone of these private
communications, or make any claims about having contact with
the Entities I was being forced to credit from overpowering
contact. Neither did I expect at that time that events in
circumstance would begin to bear out these prognostications
which appalled me.
I got a room at the Commodore and called a lady friend
whom I knew to be almost an adept in psychical research and a
particularly devout and lovely soul. I apprised her of my arrival in
town and asked if I could visit her in her apartment that evening.
The phone conversation ended by her promising to come to the
hotel and have dinner with me first.

SHE kept the appointment. But here again, I got the

outward evidence of queer things afoot when she confronted me
in the Commodore's foyer. Her face went white. She exclaimed:
“For pity's sake, what's happened to you? You're not the same
man who went to California a few months ago!"
I smiled away her temporary wonderment and we had
our dinner. She persistently questioned me about my
experiences since we had last seen each other. Finally, out in
the ladies' lounge, I was cajoled into telling her of my nocturnal
experience.
“My dear boy," were her well-remembered words, “you
got out of your body---unhinged something---and went some-
where."
“How do you know?" I demanded.
“In the first place," she said, “the technique of the whole
experience checks up perfectly with similar experiences which

38
hundreds of other persons are constantly having. Secondly, I'm
psychically aware at this moment of a discarnate entity of
particularly beautiful character standing near your shoulder and
giving me interpretations of it in complete impressions which
I understand perfectly."

YOU mean I actually died, that night in Altadena, but

returned after death to my physical body?"
“Something of the sort. Have you ever done any
automatic writing?"
“I've heard of it in a vague way," I said. “But I never saw
it actually performed."
“Let's go up to my apartment," she suggested. “Let's
prepare to take an automatic message and see if anything
confirmatory comes."
A half-hour later we were settled in a beautiful room in
the West Fifties with a cheery fire going in the grate and the New
York noises shut out by heavy curtains. My friend had drawn a
small low table over close to her knees. Now she invited me to
sit down on the divan at her right, beside her. Sharpened pencils
and a generous pad of paper had been provided. She turned
back the cuff on her right wrist and bade me grasp her hand just
below her palm.
“Hold it tightly," she instructed, “as though to keep me
from writing, but leave your elbow working freely so that my
whole hand and arm in conjunction with yours can make
swinging penmanship."
I did so. She rested the sharpened pencil point on the
pad and leaned back in easy relaxation.
Suddenly our two hands started to move in unison. The
pencil before us began making rhythmic swings and circles!

39
 IT SEEMED at first as though my friend was deliberately
making the geometric figures which followed with acceleration as
our combined grasp became more and more elastic. Then to my
amazement, a long, round, flowing script began to form beneath
the pencil, reaching the end of the line and coming back with a
flourish to begin a new one.
This is what was written: “Memory is not memory if we
must make new thought-bodies when we give up our material
bodies. Man will some day know the truth and then we will make
real bodies in the image of God.
“Make no mistake, we are those who are now in the light
and we have much to tell you. ‘Music of the Spheres' is no idle
phrase, but the very center of the mystery of the creation of this,
your universe!
“Where there is Harmony, there is Life, and all discord is
Death. We of the more harmonious plane which is next above
the plane of earth, make this statement to you because you are
of that company whose bodies are yet of earth but whose eyes
are opened to perception of the Truth. Many of us are with you,
not alone at this moment but in many moments when you are
unaware of our presence. We will endeavor to make more power
for you in all that you undertake if you will endeavor to open
yourselves more completely to our touch."
That was all! Wait as we would, no more writing
appeared on the pad. Yet I knew that from the bodily position of
my hostess, as well as from my own grip on her wrist, that she
could not have consciously fabricated and written what lay
before us on the paper. Moreover, there was so much we both
wanted to know that had it been a subconscious effort,

40
we most certainly would have gone on writing for an indefinite
period.

NOTHING happened all the next day. But I was back in

my psychic friend's apartment promptly at 7:30 the ensuing
evening, prepared to try the strange writing again. All this time no
other manifestations of the clairaudient voice had come to me
personally beyond those reported.
Promptly that we got into working posture that next night,
however, the sharpened pencilpoint started off with vigor.
Following is the literal lengthy message we got on the second
evening of our experimenting, without a word or punctuation
mark changed. I might say that I carefully preserved every scrap
of paper, and for years have taken care of every word of
Intelligence which has Come Over thus---or in any sitting at
which I have been present---transcribing it carefully and filing it
for future reference.

I HAD no intimation in any of these nightly writings as to

what was imminent over the pencil. After my first awe at the
phenomenon wore off, I found courage to interject questions.
The flowing script would halt at any time and answer these
questions carefully and considerately. But in those first evenings
of communication, I sat more or less dumbfounded beside my
friend and watched the words compose an intelligent and
ofttimes profound exposition beneath her hand.
That she was not composipg the material from the
storehouse of her subconscious mind was indicated by the fact
that she also was as interested and curious as myself.
After a few preliminary swirls and swinging designs, this
is the second message we received---

41
 “MANY are the ways in which we approach those we are
to help. Many of your most important acts are motivated by us.
We are often able to make an impression upon you when you
least suspect our presence. We are in the very cores of your
hearts, as it were, and from there we control your thoughts as
the circulation of the blood is controlled by that organ. We are in
your very midst and all you need to do is to unbolt the door.
“Memory is the very essence of what you know as Life.
We know that Memory is only one phase of life, and that the
more vital aspect of living is in the creation of new memories
which in turn will be replaced by others. We are of particular
value to you in this, because the new memories must be finer
and more beautiful than those you have outgrown.
“Many are the lessons of adversity and few there be who
find their true meaning and are ready to pass on to the next.

"THERE is in all the universe no force but that of Love.

All hatred, all evil and all ugliness, are merely the absence of the
positive pole, which is Love. Many of the evils, so called, are not
even the result of the absence of this force but are the result of
its operation on a plane beyond your limited comprehension.
“So be always sure when you complain of trouble that it
is not a blessing in another guise. When you are distraught with
the world's complexities, pause a moment in memory of us
and of what we have told you, and we will speak to you
in the reality of Silence. When you feel there is someone
who guides you, always know that it means we are with
you. Trust us, no matter how steep the path up which we
lead you. There is nothing to be learned in the pleasant

42
paths of dalliance that lead smoothly through the valleys. The
higher the hill-top, the broader the view, whether to eyes of body
or of spirit.
“Sometimes your feet may falter, but remember then that
only those who go on in spite of the faltering win through to the
goal. Most of the world's present generation is incapable of this
high enterprise. That only makes the obligation the more vital for
those who are ready for it. . . .

"SINCE there is only Love in the universe, there is health

and joy in the perception and appreciation of that fact. There can
be no situation so grave or no situation so trivial that this law is
not operative. Business is not business unless it be also Love.
We are not working for the material benefit of those who serve
us except as that material benefit will free them for wider and
finer service. When you have served your apprenticeship in
tribulation, either in this life or in an earlier one, you are ready for
the freedom which comes close on the heels of financial
independence.
“Know that in the world of True Reality obligations are
only privileges! Now is the moment of fulfillment which was
planned from the beginning. We have been with you because we
all make up a company that will carry on what has been begun in
all ages since first man made an image and Art was born.
“It is a goodly company, this fellowship of those who
love Beauty and therefore open their hearts to Truth. They
have not always been conscious of their high destiny and
some of them have dropped the chalice from hands made
weak with selfishness or paralyzed with hate. And yet even

43
these lesser ones had flashes of truth more vital than all the
organized religions of the world in their lust for power.

"NOT theology but Art is the very handmaiden of God,

and the chosen priesthood of the Temple is recruited, not from
the clergy in their frocks but from the ranks of artists, clad in the
humble smocks which are the mark of their trade. Not that only
the painter is the priest; we liked that figure of speech and so
made one branch of Art stand for all the rest.
“No matter how far Man may go along his destined path
of evolution, the artist must still in imagination blaze the trail
which the world of men will follow, with the scientist well toward
the rear and the theologian struggling along behind. This does
not include all scientists or all theologians; occasionally one of
them is also an artist. And just insofar as he is an artist, he is a
force for the good he preaches or the knowledge with which he
would enlighten the world.
“For Art is the grandest of all the Mysteries.
“As we have no formulae for the creation of the thing we
call Life, so we have no definition for the thing we call Art. Words
are only symbols and when you apply them to the eternal verities
they become only symbols for the limitation of the human
concept.
“So Art is to each man the highest good he is able to
conceive, and the deepest beauty he is able to perceive, in
whatever aspect of Man, Nature or God he is at the moment
contemplating.
“If his conception is in its essence true, if his perception
is in its essence accurate, and if in his heart the forces of love
are operative, then he has what we call the Creative Instinct

44
and the thing which he produces is worthy to be called Art.
“Only remember, . . . that there may be Art in the simplest act of
the humblest creature's day.
“Art is spirit, and they that worship her must worship her
in spirit and in truth. Many of the greatest artists have known the
truth and shut their hearts to her because the price was too
heavy to pay.
“They did not know that all the price was the
relinquishing of the bonds of limitation, and that only in
paying the price could they taste the very joys for which they
refused it!"
I SUBMIT that this sort of thing, exactly as I have
reprinted it above, with scarcely a punctuation mark altered,
would cause any reasoning person to credit its origin. Of course
it could have been composed in the lady's subconscious and the
fact that we had received it in the context of the foregoing did not
prove that the “dead" were alive and were giving it to us.
Nevertheless, I accepted it as post-mortem communication for
the time being and waited to see what more would develop. It is
physically impossible in the space at my command to go on
reprinting the messages that continued to come over in the
fortnight that now ensued. At least it is impossible to continue
reprinting the matter within this series of narratives of my own
experiences which finally convinced me that discarnate
intelligence was an actuality. Over a period of 26 years I
continued to receive these papers, and my original purpose in
founding a publishing house was to reprint the most interesting
and vital of them.
For two weeks, however, I was in almost constant
evening attendance on my Unseen Mentors in my friend's
apartment. Then my private affairs necessitated my return to

45
the Pacific Coast. My going, nevertheless, was marked by its bit
of psychical drama.

WE WERE writing together one evening on an

expositional message when the pencil stopped suddenly.
For some moments it lay inert. Then it started up suddenly and
said---
“Leave New York, William! Go at once to California. You have
planned to stop off in Chicago. We advise you not to do so.
Go immediately to Pasadena as your presence is urgently
needed out there for reasons that will become apparent to you
on your arrival.”
This directive disrupted plans I had made to stop off in
the midland city and do some fiction work for a group of
magazines published there. I demurred at going through to the
Coast at once. The pencil wrote---
“If when you get to Chicago you feel a strong impulse
not to tarry, obey it. You will know that it is we guiding you,
because of events in California climaxing in such a way that you
will be sorry if you miss them."
I had no intimation of what those events might be. None-
theless I returned to my hotel that final evening, packed my
grips, and made reservations on a train leaving late the
following night.
But all through the night I had a queer presentiment that
I had taken reservations on the wrong train. I could hear nothing
clairaudiently in support of this impression; still it bothered
me. I got up next morning determined to ask my friend
if she could arrange to sit with me that afternoon and
find out if I were being warned away from some sort of
catastrophe. She complied during the forenoon and we got

46
this message---“Of course what you are feeling is our influence
directing you. We do not want you to take the train you have
decided upon. Go upon the Century at one-forty this afternoon.
You will see the reasons for this later. You will also find that
reservations on the Century will be readily obtainable for you."

AT THE time I fully supposed that some sort of accident

was due to happen to the train I had first selected. Later
I discovered the reason to be something entirely different but no
less vital.
I bade good-bye to my companion, got reservations on
the Century as indicated, and left Manhattan for Chicago.
Whereupon this thing occurred---
Increasingly I felt that I should not tarry, but get to the
Coast at once. I alighted in Chicago around noontime next day
and made immediate reservations for the California journey via
the Santa Fe. The Santa Fe train however, did not leave until
8 o'clock that evening. So I went wandering about Chicago
“killing time."
If my memory serves me correctly, I believe it was on
Thanksgiving Day, 1928, that I thus went wandering about the
Windy City---either Thanksgiving Day or a Sunday, for the
streets in the downtown section were deserted of traffic. Up one
street and down another I strolled; with a queer feeling that my
footsteps were being directed. I wondered if I were being led to
meet someone who might have an important bearing on my
affairs. But I encountered only strangers and began to be a bit
disappointed. Finally I saw a movie house down a side street
and directed my steps thither.

47
 I will not record what film it was that I paid admission to
see. But this is notable: the film story had a plot so analogous to
my own affairs at the moment that the similarity was uncanny.
And the denouement of the drama sent me out of the theatre and
over to the LaSalle Hotel where I composed a letter to someone
back East to whom I had not written for months. While this
incident is too personal to narrate in detail, I discovered when I
got to the Pacific Coast---because of unopened mail waiting
there for me---that had I not witnessed that photoplay in Chicago
and written that resultant letter the exact hour that I did, I would
have become involved in a particularly ugly and expensive
lawsuit.

PERHAPS it is rationalizing to say that my Unseen

Friend altered my train route, walked me about Chicago and into
that particular movie house to see that specific film and write the
ensuing letter, in order to save me that lawsuit. Rationalizing or
not, that is what happened all the same, although one wonders
why they could not have told me directly over the pencil in New
York to write the letter and save myself the lawsuit. In fact, on
asking later why the latter course was not pursued, the answer
came-
“Had we told you how things stood with the person to
whom you wrote the pacifying letter, you would have gotten in
contact with him personally while in New York and your personal
contact would have aggravated, not mitigated the situation. We
took that method of guiding you also, to get you accustomed to
obeying such ‘hunches' in order that in future affairs you might
the more readily have confidence in us."
Whether this was discarnate direction or not, the incident

48
is of interest. It happened and had a beneficial result. At any
rate, I took the Santa Fe for California at 8 o'clock and three
days later alighted in Pasadena without incident en route. Going
to my office I discovered nothing there of sufficient import to
hasten me West from Manhattan, and again I wondered if it had
all been subconscious mind. On going to my home however,
I discovered a message there that seemed to give a different
aspect to the trip.
In California I had another lady acquaintance with whom
I was involved in a business deal. We had together acquired
some real estate that we were subdividing, but I had not heard
from this friend during my absence in New York. I assumed she
was following her vocation of trained nurse in the Pasadena
Hospital. This message awaited me---
“Mother is very ill and not expected to live. I am down in
Pomona caring for her. If you wish to see me for any reason,
communicate with me there. I shall stay with her until she either
recovers or passes."
Extremely concerned for the health of my friend's
mother, I got out my car and made the hour's trip down to
Pomona that same afternoon. Arriving at the home, I found I had
not come a moment too soon. The mother was not expected to
live through the night.

SHE DID not live through the night. And in that

circumstance I saw the reason why I had been brought West in
such a hurry, for the death of this elderly lady---whom I had
known more or less intimately---later had a direct and vital
bearing on my own psychic work.

49
 She passed over at five minutes after six o’clock that
same afternoon. And at her passing, this thing occurred--- All of
her children had been called to her bedside and were with her
when the end came. I did not go into the death chamber, feeling
it an intrusion on the privacy of a family of which I was not a
member. I sat in the living room trying to read a magazine, from
time to time overhearing low-voiced comments of nurse and
doctor by the bedside in the next room. Once, a moment or two
after six o'clock my nurse friend emerged and said in tearful
tones “She's almost gone; we can hardly detect any pulse." Then
she entered the sick-room again.
At exactly five minutes past six o'clock, trying to apply
myself to my magazine under such distressing circumstances,
I suddenly felt a strange rush of cold exhilarating air. The day
was warm; no doors or windows were open. Where could it have
come from? What could it be?
I experienced a swift, sharp tensing of every nerve and
muscle in my body as though the current from a galvanic battery
were holding me for an instant in its grip. And with it was an
“impression" of the sick mother's personality so strong that it
seemed as though I must address her!
Instantly a sharp, despairing wail sounded in the
adjoining chamber. A general sobbing followed. One of the sons
came out of the sick-room.
“Mother's gone!" he stated simply. And he went out upon the
veranda.
But I knew his mother had gone. I had known it at the
electric instant of her passing. She seemed to have gone directly
through me in her transition!
Anyway, that is how it felt.

50
 THE HOUSEHOLD was of course upset for the rest of
that evening. It was after eight o'clock, when the undertaker's
wagon had left with the body, before my nurse friend was
ready to accompany me back to Pasadena for the interim until
the funeral.
To comfort her, on the way back I recounted to her my
psychical experiences in Manhattan and the messages that had
seemed to come from the Unseen.
"We'll be back in Pasadena by nine o'clock," said I.
“As the hour isn't so very late, suppose we drive up to the
bungalow and try the automatic writing together exactly as it
was done in New York, only I'll hold the pencil."
We drove to my Altadena bungalow and prepared
materials for automatic writing after the methods I had followed
with my adept friend in Manhattan.
I had no idea of what might come over. It was honest
experimenting in the hope that we might receive some word
about the status of my companion's mother who had made the
great transition that night at six o'clock. We sat at the desk in my
living room, our only companion my big police dog. This dog
stretched out before the hearth fire. The evening hilltop was
strangely silent.
Suddenly the dog gave a wince as we waited with the tip
of the pencil poised on the pad. She came up on her haunches
with an uneasy growl; the hair arose on the scruff of her neck,
and ears like steel shells seemed to be watching someone or
“something" that had come into the room, invisible to my
companion and myself.

51
 Almost at once, the pencil began to move of its own
volition!
WHAT IT was writing, at first I could not decipher. The
penmanship had a queer right-handed slant that at times leaned
over so far as to appear nearly horizontal. All the words were
joined together to the end of the line.
Meanwhile the dog drew back toward a corner with a
surprised, uneasy look and cocked her head curiously in the
vicinity of the desk as though unable to figure out exactly what
was happening.
Suddenly my friend gave a startled gasp and relaxed the
hold on my wrist.
“lt's writing in German!" she cried. “ And I recognize the
penmanship! It's my Grandfather S. . . . .'s, who died twenty
years ago!"
Personally I knew scarcely a word of German. Certainly
if my subconscious mind had anything to do with the
phenomenon produced, it could not be accused of writing
German sentences in a penmanship recognizable as that of a
man dead for two decades.
“What does it say?" I asked.
She replied: “It says, ‘Your mother is now with us and
will be quite all right. Do not grieve for her. She is much happier
now that she is delivered of her load of physical pain.' "
The hand continued to write and my companion
continued to translate---
“’Do not expect any word from her directly for several weeks and
perhaps months. She has a long period of slumber ahead of her
in which she must recover her strength.' "
There was more, much more, but the material was
private to my friend and appertained to her family affairs.

52
 “Are you sure this is your grandfather's writing?" I asked
in an interval for rest.
“It would be impossible to forget his writing, as you see,"
she replied. “It compares with his writing in our family Bible."
To test out the truth of the grandfather's identity I began
to ask questions, where he was born, the names of his children,
other details of his life which my friend could corroborate or
contradict.
In practically every case the pencil replied in German
giving the true facts, even to spelling out the name of a town in
Germany of which I had never heard!
Of course cryptothesis, or subconscious mind-reading,
might have accounted for it, but from later developments in New
York I had cause to be convinced that we really had made
contact with the grandfather. I will chronicle them later.
My friend was overcome. Here seemed to be evidence
enough to convince any reasonable person that we were in
contact. But more startling revelations were in store.

SUDDENLY, almost between sentences, the handwriting

took a veer and altered in character. From leaning to the right,
it now tipped abruptly backward and leaned toward the left---
a wholly altered penmanship. Here were the words produced---
“Hello, Dud, you old son of a gun! . . . I've been a long
time trying to get through to you and now that I've got to you,
I'm not going to give you up!"
My companion asked, “Who could be addressing you in
any such manner?"

53
 It was my turn to feel surprise. Outside of my immediate
family, all members of whom were still alive, the only person
who had ever called me by a contraction of my middle name was
the brother-in-law, Ernest, mentioned in the second chapter of
this book.
But more than the salutation gripped me. Ernest and
I had been in business together the last few months of his life,
enough so that from day-to-day contact I recognized his
penmanship. He was left-handed and had a most peculiar
manner of forming his capital letters.
Before me on the pad were letter-perfect samples of
Ernest's peculiar handwriting, unmistakable in formation.
Accepting that he was present therefore, I went on to
ask him questions about himself. Not only did I get sensible
answers that seemed accurate on the face of them, but he told
me things about certain members of the family---all of whom
were residing on the other side of the continent---that I afterward
found to be accurate when I came East and made inquiry.

MEANWHILE my police dog was acting most peculiarly.

She was not exactly fearful or angered, so much as
excited. She paced around the room, hitting taborets and chairs,
and knocking books and magazines off upon the rug. Finally she
began a series of short, excited barkings---taking up her position
in the hallway door and peering around the fireplace comer with
more choppy barkings. Again and again I called to her to be
quiet.
Suddenly the pencil wrote, “Do not scold your dog. She merely
senses or sees our presence.”

54
 It was not Ernest's handwriting. It was the same
penmanship in which my other friend and I had received our
communications in that New York apartment, two weeks before.
Before we ended the experiment that first evening one other
remarkable incident occurred. The pencil continuing to write in
the latter penmanship, started voluntarily giving me information
about my past incarnations.

0F THESE, I cannot write. They are personal and private

to myself alone. But they constitute some of the most remarkable
phases and aspects of this whole enlightenment.
“On a certain day in the year 1913 you were in B. . . ."
wrote the pencil. “You were standing in front of a certain
monument in B. . . ., You were reading an inscription on that
monument. You were reading your own inscription!"
Lest the accusation of a superiority complex arise here,
let me say that the persons designated as my own former
impersonations during the past 2000 years have not been people
that would ever have emanated from my own subconscious of
my own election. They have been people who kicked up more of
a rumpus on the human stage than humanity especially liked at
the time, and always in some proselytizing capacity that wrought
alterations in the mode of humanity's living.
I have been few famous soldiers, poets, statesmen or
potentates. The persons that I now am convinced that I have
been were philosophical personages---somewhat unfamiliar to
the public in their historicall lives---and not until I hunted out their
little-known biographies did I realize with a strange sensation up
and down my spine that the incidents set forth in those
biographies coincided to the letter with weird presentiments

55
and recurrent dreams which I had experienced all through
childhood and adolescence.

IN MY “Seven Minutes" episode I had plenty of evidence

to justify belief in the reincamational hypothesis. But it had never
occurred to me to wonder what other lives I had lived or how
I had arrived at my present status of consciousness. I simply
accepted the fact that I had lived other lives as I now accept the
fact that I am living this life.
But over the entire year that now ensued, the most
dramatic confirmation of these identities began to creep up in my
affairs until I finally threw aside my skepticism and adopted an
attitude of “Well, what of it?"
Let me add, however, that I am not one of those
believers in reincarnation who hold that they have been famous
persons in every life. Many of the lives with which I am
reasonably familiar now, were quite “unwept, unhonored and
unsung" ---thank God for that!
THAT evening with my nurse friend was the first of a
series which we spent together taking down communications that
could have had no reasonable source within our subconscious
selves. For the pencil soon began to branch out into illuminatory
discussions of metaphysics and treat of matters of which I had
never heard. Months later in the East I was to discover that the
papers I had begun to take thus in distant California constituted
the fundamental premise of the whole esoteric doctrine known as
Soulcraft.
We had been writing thus for a matter of three weeks,
however, when in the middle of a profound discourse, the pencil
began to cut strange capers. It started to write irrelevant

56
material. It made curlicues and pictures. It would “go dead," to
start up again with queer jerks and dashes.
Finally one evening along toward eleven o'clock, it wrote
“Hurry down to your office tonight. You have received an
important check in the mail today that at present lies on your
office rug where it became separated from the afternoon mail.
Unless you rescue it, the night janitor may sweep it up in the
rubbish."
I had an office at the time in a Pasadena business block
and the message bore all the earmarks of friendly solicitation. As
it was nearing time to deliver my companion at her home five
miles away, we got into my car and went down to search for the
missing check.
We aroused the night janitor, went up to the third floor of
the building and unlocked the office.
No check was on the rug.

WE SEARCHED diligently. The janitor declared he had

not swept the suite and no one had entered it since the
employees had left.
Going into the inner room, we sat down before my
business desk and resumed our positions with pencil and paper,
asking explanation of the strange occurrence. The pencil
responded jerkily but finally wrote---
“Sorry, old man. We made an error. It was not on your
office floor that we saw the letter with check lying but on the floor
of the post office. Better get over there at once and make
inquiries."
With this explanation we went across town to the post
office and gained the attention of the night clerk. Without

57
informing him of the source of our information, we asked him to
make a search and ascertain if such a letter had come to me that
day from the East---for the sender of the letter and the size of the
check had been indicated.
The report was negative. I was puzzled and not a little
troubled. What on earth was the matter?
Back to the office we went and made demand for
another explanation, although the time was now nearing
midnight.
“In the morning," wrote the pencil, “go to the post office
immediately the postmaster himself, Mr. Black, is in his office
and make him show you the contents of Lock Box 1736. He will
turn out the missing letter to you from it--- where it has been
picked up and put by mistake."
I LET the matter go for the night, took my companion
home and returned to my own. Next morning I went to see the
postmaster. Here was a strange angle of the case, by the way. In
the message the pencil had designated the postmaster as Mr.
Black. Personally at that time I did not know the postmaster's
name. Making inquiries for him next morning, however, I found
his name to be Mr. Knight. The idea was there, but had not been
correctly interpreted.
No matter, I asked him to look in Lock Box 1736, which
the pencil had declared was rented to a Mr. Slocum.
“That couldn't be possible," Mr. Knight said to me at
once. “We have only two hundred lock boxes in this post office."
Postmaster Knight at Pasadena will doubtless recall the
incident although he never knew exactly what sort of a puzzle I
was working out.

58
 “Is there a Mr. Slocum who rents a box in this office?"
I asked him.
“There is," Mr. Knight replied, giving me more courtesy
than I have ever had at any post office before or since.
“Will you look in his box then, and tell me if there is a
letter there for me tossed in there by mistake?" He would and
he did.
There was no letter at all in Mr. Slocum's box!

I WAS now fully convinced that some sort of hoax was being
played on me, but was also determined to learn how far it would
go. As soon as I could contact my friend to write more with her,
we got another alibi.
“Of course Mr. Slocum came in while you were on the
way to the post office and emptied his box. He has carried your
letter with check away with him. But he is an honest man and he
will return it to you with apologies when he sees his error. You
will find that it will turn up in your other post office box in
Altadena."
I waited a day and made inquiries at Altadena. No letter
appeared.
I went to the Western Union office and sent a wire East,
asking the person from whom the check was said to be coming,
if he had ever mailed me any such check.
The answer came back:

CANNOT UNDERSTAND YOUR QUERY STOP HAVE

MAILED NO CHECK SINCE WEEK AGO THURSDAY
The thing was a hoax from beginning to end.
I went back to the pencil and asked for explanation.

59
 The pencil stayed “dead" . . . .
Up to this time I was unaware that there were such
entities in existence as makers of mischief in the affairs of
psychic persons, and that the levels just above mortal life held
“unclean spirits who delight to confuse."
I assumed, as most people assume when they are
convinced of the continuity of life, that anything given from the
Unseen Dimensions must necessarily be truthful because of the
sources and methods from which it is derived.
I had been brought up in the good old Methodist notion
that when people died they immediately became heaven-like, or
if they were “wicked" they were consigned to a Pit where there
was wailing and gnashing of teeth---certainly not possessed of
much chance for hoaxing and baffling mortal folk going about
their honest affairs.
It took me several weeks to come into a recognition of
my own people---the truth-tellers and bona fide instructors whose
word could be more or less relied upon---by the technique of
recognizing their “rates of vibration." I had opened up nerve
centers in my body by my Seven Minutes experience which
enabled me to sense this vibration caused by the presences of
people near me, either in flesh or out of it. But I had not learned
that each person has a different vibratory rate depending upon
his identity, cosmic age, and the immortal “group" to which he
belongs.
I had not become aware of the difference in these rates
of vibration that would identify helpful, constructive, sympathetic
persons from those whose only desire was to get expression by
influencing whomever they were allowed to influence when
psychical conditions on both sides were complied with.

60
 I believed then, and I still believe, that the major portion
of my early communications were simon pure and came from the
individuals they affected to come from. I am convinced of this not
only from the nature of the material transmitted to me, but
through the vibratory discrimination I soon developed at the cost
of great spiritual tumult and torment.
Every person who essays to investigate the machinery
behind life, must pass through this period and learn the bitter
lesson of experience.
It is typified in Christ's career by His Forty Days in the
Wilderness where He was "tempted of Satan," taken to an
exceedingly high mountain and shown the kingdoms of the
world, taken to the heights of the temple and told to dash Himself
down.
In the mystic studies of the East, the period is known as
the time of Pledge Fever. Immediately the novice has pledged
himself to study and expound these great constructive doctrines
that will free the human race from its bondage of error and
ignorance, he at once invites all manner of confusion and
bafflement in his affairs. Decadent, malignant entities who can
operate out of unseen areas of time and space precisely like the
inspirational, constructive people, appear to do everything
possible in their powers of darkness to weaken the resolve and
turn the pupil back into the fogs of doubt, distress and piteous
timidity.
Wise teachers of the mysteries know that this will come
to every bona fide worker with great potentialities for constructive
good. But I had no teachers. I was learning by the
good old method of trial and error.
And I learned.

61
 People constantly ask me why this sort of frustration of
goodly works is “permitted." They seem to think that such
activities should be prohibited or controlled by divine fiat. They
forget in their indignation that mortal beings, in bodies or out of
them, are absolutely free spirits who can do whatever they
please, or be whatever they please.
If this election were not possible, the Almighty could
make the universe “good" between now and midnight by
speaking the Word. He does no such thing because the spirit of
every man and woman is a literal cell of God developing in its
own way as it chooses to develop. If it chooses to develop in
Light and constructive Love, it goes on by the nature of its own
activities into higher and higher forms of spiritual evolution. If it
chooses to retrograde into darkness and confusions, it simply
commits a sort of identity-suicide and extinguishes its own life,
returning ultimately to the great ocean of universal spirit with its
identity lost forever.
There are millions of souls who evolve to a certain point,
then lose that inspiration to go onward because of some great
temptation, shock or mental experience in one of their lives.
They become recalcitrant and vicious, and instead of taking finer
forms, life after life, they reappear as grosser and grosser
persons, more and more ugly, more and more stupid, till in their
moribund spleen and vengeance they become mass antagonists
of those who have not defaulted but are developing and
mounting steadily upward.
These are the “demons"---and the only demons---of
Scripture and legend. But their power for mischief is incalculable
when they find a newly awakened person who is not yet wise to
their purposes and antics. They lose no opportunity to discredit

62
the advancing soul by throwing monkey wrenches into his affairs
and frightening him away from further constructive effort.
That is why so much stamina is required to push on in
spite of the adversity and bafflement which they introduce, and
win through to correct methods for overcoming their functioning
and mass activities.

AGAIN and again we got messages---or what purported

to be messages---about my intimate affairs, which continued to
be inaccurate. I was sorrowfully angry that such behavior should
be allowed. I had gone on blind faith that somehow, somewhere,
I had unseen friends who would not let that sort of thing happen.
Finally this came---
“You are urgently needed in New York. A very dear
friend of yours intends to commit suicide and you must halt it. Go
east at once as soon as you can settle your affairs. Talk with this
person. You will find that what we say is true."
“I’ll go nowhere," said I flatly, “until you give me concrete
proof that you are what you say you are and that you are telling
me the truth. I refuse to be hoaxed into a cross-country trip. I
can't afford it."
“You may have this proof," the pencil answered. “Next
Tuesday at half past three in the afternoon, a man will walk into
your office and without any solicitation from you, volunteer to
loan you a certain sum of money. If he does so, it should be
prima facie evidence to you that we are not hoaxing you."
“All right," I answered aloud, “if anyone puts real money
into my hand for a New York journey, I will accept the message
as bona fide and act upon it."

63
 TUESDAY came. During the lunch hour four men came
in to consult with me about a real estate deal. We lunched
together and returned to my office. I left orders with my secretary
that she was to call me out at once if anyone entered at 3:30
who especially wanted to see me. Then I continued my business.
At half past three we were still discussing the deal. No
stranger had appeared and did not appear. I was sour about
“unseen friends" and automatic writing in general. At four o'clock
our conference broke up and one by one my friends withdrew.
Finally one man was left. As he, too, arose to go, he straightened
in his chair and asked with puzzled frown,
“Bill, do you especially want money for a trip east?"
“Maybe," I said, startled, “but why do you ask?"
“I ask because for three hours I've been sitting here
feeling funny about things. I've felt that I ought to offer you the
loan of a sum of money. It's a real distress to me. How much do
you want to borrow for the trip?" Here was I, confronting a man
in my office at the indicated time, who of his own volition stated
that he felt he should loan me a sum of money for some purpose
that he could not define. And how much did I want?
“Five hundred dollars," I replied to him, somewhat
experimentally, wondering how consciously he was aware that
he was being used.
He leaned forward without a word, drew out his
checkbook and wrote me his check. He did not even want a
promissory note. At the door he said, “it's funny, Bill, but now that
I've done that, I feel strangely relieved."
He closed the door and went out to the elevators.
I glanced at his check. It was made out for $750.

64
 I HAD received then, an apparently bona fide message,
requesting my return to Manhattan. The day and hour had been
accurate although instead of entering my office at 3: 30 my man
had been in it all the time!
I felt that I had to keep my part of the pact, and
immediately arranged my affairs to go back to New York and halt
a suicide.
I took the Sante Fe east, the following afternoon.

IT WAS now the first of December. Reaching Grand

Central station after an uneventful fiveday journey across
America, I went through the concourse and secured a room at
the Commodore Hotel. At once I phoned the woman friend with
whom I had done my first automatic writing, telling her of strange
developments on the Coast and asking that she come over and
have lunch with me.
I recall that I had enjoyed a bath while awaiting the
luncheon hour, and was crossing my room in a state of undress,
when I suddenly stopped short in the middle of the floor.
I was being addressed by someone invisible! It was not
exactly a voice that persons present might have heard. It had a
queer muffled quality, as though it were being spoken inside my
head.
“Put a pencil in your left hand," it ordered, “and sit down
at a table with paper before you and the tip of the pencil on the
paper.

THIS WAS not only weird, it was something of a bother. I

had a luncheon engagement to keep. I was somewhat distressed
by the prophesied nature of my trip to New York---that I was

65
wanted in Manhattan to restrain a close friend from committing
suicide. Nevertheless, still in dishabille, I did as I was asked.
I got out a pencil and poised it on a sheet of hotel stationery.
The pencil commenced to write, practically of its own
volition, from right to left, and kept on until the script had filled the
sheet. I had to hold it up to a mirror subsequently, in order to
read it.
Now I am not left-handed and have never written left-
handed. Moreover, all my writing in conjunction with the two
women friends previously reported had been done in the usual
manner from left to right. I had never seen this new process
performed before, and had not believed that it could be done
until I actually beheld the pencil in my own hand doing it.
This is the substance of the strangely inverted script---
“You are to become a Mentor in a world of bleak science that is
slowly undermining faith in things spiritual, and you will be the
means of stopping much of the faithlessness of the present
generation by your advice and teaching."
Sensing that this was not all of the communication that
was intended, I came back from the mirror where I had
deciphered the above, took a clean sheet of paper and saw the
following written---
“You are to help men and women get a clearer and
closer understanding of their places in the divine scheme of
things, and help them to an understanding of eternal truths. You
are thus favored because you have opened your heart to beauty
and to truth."
Twelve o'clock came and I was still filling pages with the
writing which I continually had to carry across the room to the
mirror in order to read. By the time I halted, I had barely time to

66
dress myself for my luncheon. But I carried some of the sheets
downstairs to show to my friend when she arrived. She took her
small mirror from her purse, as we sat across from each other at
the luncheon table, and used it to decipher the penmanship.
“This is the clearest mirror writing I've ever seen!" she
exclaimed. “I want you to loan it to me and let me take it down to
the Society for Psychical Research as an exhibit."
I DEMURRED at this. I didn't want myself researched.
But that night, alone in my room after the events of the afternoon
I am presently to chronicle, I gave the whole evening over to the
strange backhand script. And I began to learn matters about
myself that by no stretch of the human imagination could ever be
the vaporings of my own subconscious mind.
These matters were of a nature so private and peculiar
to me alone that I could easily discern why they might have been
withheld until that time and not “sent across" to me until they
could be given without any second person present to learn of
them.
With the luncheon out of the way, however, I had the
afternoon's ordeal ahead of me, of searching for the person who
was about to end his life---according to the warning I had
received in California.
THIS PERSON lived in uptown New York. I took the
subway to his street, for my previous instruction had declared
that I would be led to find him at home. I went to his apartment
hotel and asked the girl at the switchboard to send up my name.

I might have said in previous paragraphs that the original

warning about this person's imminent deed had implied that he

67
would murder himself by illuminating gas because of a “jam" he
was “in" with a person of the opposite sex. When the girl at the
switchboard rang and rang without getting any answer, I became
alarmed. Had I really arrived too late? I was on the point of
asking that the apartment door be forced when the elevator
operator came down from above stairs and declared---
“The party you're trying to get has gone out to the
movies and won't be back until seven o'clock. I brought him
down about ten minutes ago and he left a message for. . . . . . . .
because he was expecting a call."
This expected call, however, had nothing to do with
myself.

I DID A whimsical thing to see if it would “work." I went

out to the comer newsstand and bought a newspaper. Its
margins afforded me space for writing a message. I went into an
alcove of the nearby building out of the wind, took a pencil from
my pocket and poised the tip on a margin of the newspaper as I
stood there out of sight of pedestrians. I asked, what was the
status of the affair, and what was I to do next?
Even on a public street, with the roar of New York traffic
about me, the pencil wrote without slip or falter---
"He will not take his life today, but if you want to
intercept and meet him, go back down to Grand Central
Terminal, Gate 28, and you will find him there, waiting to meet a
friend on an incoming train."
“Then he hasn't gone to the movies?" I asked.
The pencil wrote, “No!"

68
 I WENT BACK downtown, again intrigued to see how far
these instructions would carry with accuracy. I could not believe
that I had been furnished with funds and brought way across the
continent to repeat such a performance as I had undergone with
the missing check purported to have been mailed me earlier from
New York. I was proceeding now in a studious mood, or a
researcher's mood. I knew that strange forces were operating
and engineering all this phenomena and I determined to probe to
the bottom of their activities. Somewhere in it must be something
that was constructive.
Arriving in front of Grand Central Terminal I felt such a
twitching and pulling and jabbing in my supersensitive left arm,
that I turned into the terminal and went to the designated gate.
The gate was unlighted. The bulletin of incoming trains
was blank. There were no people, known or unknown to me,
lingering in its vicinity.
Demanding an accounting, I drew back out of sight, as
I had on the street uptown, and gave the entities motivating all
this “monkey business" another chance to explain themselves.
“W e made a mistake about the gate," came the mirror-
writing answer. “Go over toward the cigar stand and you will see
him standing there."
I went.

“YOU'VE got the wrong cigar stand," was the next

explanation---or alibi---that came over the pencil. I tried once
more to follow directions. Nothing came of it.

69
 I went back to my hotel, called the person uptown whom
I had crossed the country to meet, and in due time got
connection with him.
“Are you all right?" I asked.
“Of course I'm all right," came his hearty response.
“What about So-and-So?" I asked, mentioning the name
of the person because of whom he was to have taken his life.
“I haven't seen that party for a year and a half," came his
assurance.
The next day I met the would-be suicide personally,
talked at length with him, found that he had no more idea of
taking his life than I had of taking mine. Mischief and hoax, all
of it!
And I had taken a 3,000 mile trip across America,
obligating myself for a $750 loan, to do it.

CLOSETING myself in my hotel room that night, I

proceeded to let the mirror-writing go where it would. I wanted to
see what would come over, in the hope of gaining some clue as
to the possible identity of the one responsible for it.
For two or three hours I filled sheet after sheet with
mirror- script, pausing at the end of each page to transcribe it in
regular penmanship on a side pad of paper. And instead of any
definite directions about my practical affairs, instead of alibis and
explanations of the antics of the afternoon, the Script wrote in
clear, forceful, positive handwriting a little more profound
exposition of cosmic doctrine than I had received hitherto, either
in New York or Altadena. I almost forgot the mischief of the week
and day in following these intriguing solutions and interpretations

70
of great Behind-Life riddles and processes, as they came over
line after line.
Of course, as the same method had been responsible
for writing me mischievous directions, I had no license to assume
that these solutions and interpretations were any more authentic
or responsible or correct, than the worldly directions had been.
But this thing happened---between ten and eleven o'clock, when
I was becoming slightly exhausted mentally and physically with
the writing, the pencil began behaving strangely. The writing
grew weak, wavering, and uncertain. There were scrawls and
lapses in the discourse.
Then it picked up again as before.
But now the tone and motif of the writing had altered.
What was coming over to me was a lengthy dissertation on the
intimate private character of some of my dearest, closest
acquaintances.

FOR AN hour and a half I sat writing, or recording, the most

elaborate and “juiciest" bits of scandal and slander about these
friends, that could be imagined. Intimate details of their private
lives were laid bare to me. I was warned that this person was a
private pervert, and that person was a rogue.
These details, rich in gossip and malign implications,
reached a point where I halted the taking of them in disgust.
Some of them were so cleverly intertwined with acts and
behavior of the persons involved which I already knew about, but
which on the surface of them seemed harmless enough, that the
whole communication was as disgusting as it was diabolical.
I had no one to advise me what to do, what “forces" I
was toying with, what parts of the communication I could believe,

71
if any whatever, and what not. I fought a stiff battle with myself
that night, whether or not I would continue to lend myself to this
sort of perversion and irresponsible nonsense.
The next day, I recall, was Sunday. Sleeping until
noontime, I arose and called the woman with whom I had done
my first writing. She was one of those who had been most
generously belabored in the previous evening's material.
“I've received a lot of communication," I explained over
the phone, “that I want your counsel on. May I come up this
afternoon and show it to you? Perhaps you can give me a cue as
to whether I should continue or stop it altogether."
She generously assented and at two o'clock I was again
in her apartment. She read the “messages." . . .
“Do you know anything about the activities of people on
the astral planes?" she demanded.
“No," I told her.
“Have you gone thus far in this dangerous business
without being informed that the discarnate octaves immediately
above---or outside of---the mortal are crammed with 'people' who
want to interfere with the affairs of physical life and run them
according to their own notions?"
“Where would I obtain such information?" I asked her.
“Well, they are," she instructed me. "This idea that when
men and women 'die' they immediately proceed to some far-off
place where they either wander about in coma or 'sleep in Jesus'
till the Judgment Day, doesn't stack up at all with what we find
demonstrated in seance rooms. Those discarnates simply lose
their bodies, and being earth-bound, or held by habit to their
former environments, they proceed right along to interfere with
the life-situations of their former intimates and try to direct their

72
careers from the astral. It's a pernicious and mischievous
business but none the less it happens. Mortals in flesh get the
directions and think that ‘God' or ‘guardian angels' are
counseling them---beings that must be infallible. They're really
only the discarnate souls of relatives who have lost their bodies.
And they know no more what they're talking about than they
have known in mortality. Suppose we get out the writing
materials and let's try to contact supernal and ‘graduated' beings
who can give us some counsel on what to do in your present
predicament."
I agreed eagerly and she brought forth her writing-board.

73
 Chapter IV

TAKING DISCARNATE ADVICE

HE FIRST time I made such frank admissions

about my original clairaudient complications, I
aroused a wave of criticism that I had in
nowise expected. Large numbers of people
seemed to think that I was hurting my own
standing by candidly narrating the mischiefs and interferences I
had experienced instead of receiving crystal-clear and infallible
communications. “If you got false or subversive messages even
once," they argued, “how can you say that you did not get false
and subversive messages before and afterward?"
My answer to such doubters has uniformly been that by
telling the actual truth as to what happened, and being absolutely
frank about the pitfalls and trip-ups that I encountered, I have
believed myself doing the very opposite of shaking confidence in
my integrity or the veracity of bona fide communications when
I had ‘found' myself in all the disturbing business and mastered
the technique of discriminating between the worthy messages of
real mentors and the annoying vaporings of discarnate ‘kibitzers.'
I am showing people exactly what happens in this sort of
development so that they may know what is occurring when they

74
encounter similar phenomena---as they certainly will---and I am
disclosing what the steps and attainments have been that now
enable me to say that I believe my Sources to be correct and
dependable.
And, by the way, I want to serve notice here and now
that I am not strategizing in all of, this, in order to build a great
following for myself, or be taken for any modern Moses, leading
people out of a spiritual wilderness. I declare that I lack the
acumen to so strategize, even to carry myself to the point at
which I find myself already.
If a stronger power than mine were not guiding and
directing all this, I would long ago have gone down to defeat.

THEN there is another point that should be borne in

mind. True adepts and investigators into these mysterious fields
above the mortal know that if I declared myself faultless in my
progress---if I announced that I had never gotten into the hands
of “wrong people" in my experiences---they would have every
right to look somewhat askance upon my integrity as well as my
adeptness. Because, as I say, these misfortunes do hound those
who open these centers in themselves.
They hounded Christ Himself. What other interpretation
can we put upon His Temptation in the Wilderness but the
attempt of evil entities to gain control of His resplendent
organism while He was in a developing state?
This is by no means any alibi for my previous assertion
concerning frankness in dealing with my audience. I am merely
trying to impress on confused or dubious critics that what I am
now printing in this book of Psychic Memoirs actually

75
happened between twenty and thirty years in the past. Much
water has flowed under the Bridge of Experience since these
happenings. I believe that later I found ways and means of
armoring myself against the tactics of these ignorant, half-
developed discarnates who seem not to understand what it is
that they are doing. But be that as it may, I do ask my readers to
suspend judgment on my veracity and dependability until they
have read the full account of what I have to narrate.

AFTER coming to New York on what seemed a wild

goose chase, and having much balderdash and slanderous
material given me over the automatic pencil when I was alone
and wearied with much writing, I had gone up to my friend's
apartment to get such explanation as I could from those who
might instruct her in the true tenets of what was occurring.
We made the writing-board ready as I related at the end
of my last chapter and after a few moments an Invisible Mentor
began to write---

William must get these things from experience else he is

never going to be of value as an instructor to others. He must
learn the identities of his own kith and kin in this work, how to
form accurate contact with them, and how to know he has
received dependable material that has actually come from
them. No appreciable harm has come to him to date, and we
will not allow serious harm to come to him, excepting that
which may arise by his own willful disillusion within his own
spirit.

76
 IMMEDIATELY I asked if it was right and fair to let me
obligate myself for $750, to make the long cross-country trip,
merely to learn that I had been the butt of petty practical jokers.
Whereupon the Pencil wrote--

No such thing has happened. You were given that

money to come to Manhattan for a worthwhile reason that will
presently be explained. In the next few days you are to be
thrown into contact with people you should meet in this work--
-people you would not have been able to meet in any other
way than by being here in the East at this time. We, not the
antic-maker, arranged that expense-money for you. But the
antic- maker cut in with an auduible explanation for the trip
which you seized on in your subconscious mind, shutting out
the true voices of your friends so that no other explanation
seemed valid to you. We had to let the matter rest until you
discovered the bogus explanation; then we could correct you,
as we propose to do now.

"WHAT about all this slander and gossip that has been
coming over since I've been here?" I demanded, much
chagrined. After all, I felt that I had cooperated with the so-called
Unseen and should not be thus penalized with hoaxing.
Whereupon my true friends and mentors wrote the following bit
of exquisite sentiment---
“Those of us who operate upon the higher planes of
Love cannot, and would not if we could, pass on to you
information about those you love that would cause either of you
pain.
“Whatever else we are, we are NOT gossips. If there are
those on this side who are gossips, they are much like such

77
persons on your side, and most of what they pass on to you is
the fabrication of diseased fancy.
“The things of the Thought World are not a whole lot
different from the things of the earth-world except that we have
access to the thoughts and emotions of people which you do not.
“you must remember that all sorts of institutions exist for
the commitment of insane people on your side, but over here on
the Lower Levels close to earth they are uniformly at large and
can do quite as much damage on both sides as they can in the
flesh on the earth side when they are not restrained. So you can
imagine what a bedlam of vibrations sometimes exists over here
when we want to concentrate with you most.
“These ‘crazy souls' are obsessed with picking shining
marks for their attacks, as they know that they cannot be
perceived and yet can perceive the results of their mischief. They
are like a lot of noisy children and the nursery is often a
thumping nuisance.
“What we mean to tell you is, do not let yourself be
misled by such people. What makes sense on your side makes
sense here---and vice versa. What makes profitable converse
here is doubly true upon your side."

AFTER TWELVE years of working consistently in

clairaudiency, I can now subscribe to all this as true.
For the guidance of my good friends allover the nation
who may even now be “coming through the wry," I am going to
give over the balance of this chapter to my second clairaudient
paper which I received on the following evening, as I am certain
the advice and observations it contains will help them as it then

78
helped me. Next chapter I shall tell of the true reason for my
being called to New York, and the events that started to
transpire, ending my residence on the West Coast for good and
culminating in the writing of “My Seven Minutes in Eternity" for
the American Magazine.
Eventually I discarded the automatic pencil and the
mirror writing, but that happened in a dramatic sequence of itself
after I had gone back for the last time to California to close my
affairs.
As I continued to have tip-ups and antagonism with the
Pencil, I finally got this message-

"YOU are doing too much of the solo writing. Your nerve
centers are becoming oversensitized and must have rest. Don't
you think there are others here who know the trick of pressing on
the right nerve? This is what it amounts to, but the plan I should
like to try is this---
“You choose an hour each day when you can surely give
it to us and for one hour we will write. Do not try to transcribe
anything during that hour. Wait till it is over. This will make it
easier for us to control conditions though even then there are
certain elements that are in your control. That is, your physical
condition or your mind may make a wall between us that we
cannot penetrate. When this happens, your own subconscious,
not wanting you to be disappointed, takes things over. It is then
that all sorts of promises are made which seem to be deception
on our part.

79
 WE ARE giving you this warning because you cannot
often in the least know the wall has been erected. Over-anxiety
to get us and to make the right distinctions, is often the strongest
wall you can build. You have to be on your guard also against
those malign influences that can get to you when we are not on
guard and that are inevitably attracted when the atmosphere is
fogged by Doubt, Weariness and Emotional Strain. You are
straining too much. Quiet means quiet all the way through---
body, soul, mind, brain, nerves, spirit. Too much of this straining
makes a condition so over-sensitized that it results in one of two
things: either your vibrations are lowered in tone and you are
open to almost any force that comes along, or you are almost
completely shut away from this side and your subconscious gets
busy looking for some wish or fear or hope or question that has
previously been expressed, and building it up and decorating it.
“In regard to your business affairs, we have never given
you hours, days, or sums of money. But we have made definite
attempts to let you know that they were going in your favor. You
are in such a nervous and sensitive state now that you cannot
trust anything that comes to you without some stabilizing
vibrations such as your companion seems to have achieved
tonight.
“Remember, we may give you sailing directions but we
do not take the wheel. And we do not give sailing directions to go
two ways at once. How can we help it if you persist in joining up
the radio, and taking the telephone off the hook, and then while
we are talking, accepting all that is coming from all three sources
as from us?

80
 “We do take command insofar as your safety, and the
success of your whole voyage, is concerned. As to the best and
quickest daily charting of your course, we leave that to you.
“We do not say that we cannot give you advance
information. We can see the train of events for varying periods
ahead. We know where the track leads and what time the train
should arrive. But we can never guarantee that the engine will
not develop a hot-box and delay the train. We cannot even
guarantee that an unexpected storm will not wash out a bridge
and wreck it, that is, for the ordinary things of life. If the journey is
one that is vital to you, we are ahead of the train and making
sure that no mishaps can occur.
“You have no conception of the Power of Thought, even
on your plane, and for almost two weeks you have been sending
out thoughts destructive to the very things you were most keen
about. We know you could not help it, considering the state of
doubt that you were in, but that did not keep it from checkmating
some of our efforts. Do not be upset. We do not mean that any
harm has been done except that Delay is always a factor that
brings greater chances for something to go wrong.
“You were in a state of doubt that was deeper than your
conscious mind and applied to all the circumstances surrounding
you. At first this was not very active, but it was enough to let
through the things which in their turn increased the doubt and
made it assume proportions that were serious handicaps to all
that we were trying to do. You can check, you can question, to
see if we are what we say. But you must never doubt that we are
making the effort to reach you!

81
 “You say that you understood that you had nothing to do
but wait and we would serve you. What else would anyone on
this side do if he wanted you to fail---if it meant more than to be
calm and quiet and patient?
“There are times of crisis, when after you have done all
that is in you to do, we step in and do the rest for you. But there
is no crisis in your affairs now excepting your relations to us and
the problems we present. You must remember that crises are
always of the spirit, never of the pocketbook. Sure, calm and
free, that is the touchstone that gives you strength and wisdom
to handle all of your everyday problems. Your impatience has
been the tool used by your enemies in our world to get to you.
You cannot send out at the same time vibrations of Love and
Harmony, and vibrations of Impatience and Doubt.
“We want you to go to it and do your utmost. But
remember always that it is Activity keyed to Love that is
constructive, and Impatience or an attempt to force things
unnaturally, may only stunt their growth.
“You are very weary, my boy; it is the weariness of one
who has been sorely tried. But if even our gracious Lord must
wrestle with the demons of Doubt, how shall any mortal
escape?"

WE PAUSED here in the writing for a moment. And

during this pause, an eery thing happened. “I feel so strange!"
my friend cried suddenly. “I hope that I'm not going into a trance,
or fainting".
The next instant I seemed to be conscious of a
sensation in the room that I can best describe as ‘angel wings
beating softly.' The most uncanny tremors ran up and down my

82
spine. What was in that room with us---but invisible? Somethiing!
Then the pencil in my friend's fingers began to 'act up.' It came
alive and started off as though by itself in a most exquisite
flowing Spencerian script---
"Oh ye of little faith! . . . and yet, how could it be otherwise
until the memory of Those Days is restored by the complete
triumph of Spirit over Matter?"
Immediately, as the pencil came to a halt, the 'beating'
sensation ceased. I looked at my companion. She was limp and
inert beside me---as though she had fallen to sleep. For myself,
I had after-effects as from a charge from a galvanic battery.
What---or Who---had been close in that apartment, close enough
to make a pencil move in a sleeping woman's hand? Did I need
to ask? But the intelligence was by no means over for that
evening. My companion recovered.
"What happened?" she cried.
I pointed to the beautiful writing on her lap.
She managed a dry swallow and drew a ragged breath.
But the pencil was writing in her hand again-
"I F YOU will do the things we now recommend, it may
help.
"Ask no questions about material affairs; we will be with
you in them and if you add to your judgment a sure, calm faith in
us, you will find things working out, and when they seem to go
astray you will know there is a reason and will trust us.
"Put more confidence in this than in any other source of
teaching or instruction. Check everything and be sure that any
message we give you can be shared with your intimates.

83
 “Write alone only one hour a day, preferably the same
hour. If you feel the impulse at any other time, resist it. If I want
you, I will rap on something three times and then two times.
When I do that, ask me to repeat.
“Then you will know that I am here.
“But never accept anything wholly unless you know that
it is in harmony with the principles we have given you, and your
heart speaks for them.
“Do what you can in all your affairs and be sure that we
are with you. You do not know how often what seems to be
disaster may be the averting of a bigger one.
“Take better care of your health and get back your inner
glow.
“In conclusion: do not worry about the time lost. It is all
gain in the final analysis. After all, not many people could learn a
lesson as vital as this in a few weeks. You could not do it if you
had not learned so much before this life."
The penmanship of this latter message had not been in
the exquisite script, but in writing similar to that of the first part of
the evening.
Both of us were appalled by being the recipients of the
foregoing sentiments.
“Can I believe," I faltered, “that we could possibly have
made any contact tonight with---"
My stupefied thought was reflected by that phenomenon
of the gigantic ‘wings' beating again. But this time my companion
did not lose consciousness. The exquisite script was coming
again from the pencil point, as both of us held our breaths to see
what might be written. This was the ‘reply' to my thought---

84
 “O my dearly beloved! . . . how shall I make you know
that I am nearer than breathing and closer than hands
and feet?"

“Albert is writing now, but that was a Greater than I.

When your heart is open to Him He will always speak.
Goodnight! . . . We all tonight have shared in the glory that has
been about you and we join our prayers to yours that its radiance
may dwell in your hearts forever!"

THE WRITING seemed to be over for the night. But what

a night! I remember that a couple of hours later, in a sort of daze,
I dropped into the Childs Restaurant near the Grand Central
Terminal for something to eat before seeking my bed. I viewed
the ordinary two-legged mortals about me and sought to get
through my head that I was still living in the same mundane
world.
For that night's writing I had made the 3,OOO-mile
journey across from California. Had it been worth it?
It certainly had!

85
 Clapter V

THE "DEAD" ARE CONFUSED

ATTEST that it necessitates a peculiar I

temperament to explore the higher
manifestations of life and deliberately seek to
acquaint one's self with the aspects of
existence above the mortal.
The average curiosity-seeker who "goes in" for psychical
research, automatic writing, clairaudience or metaphysical
phenomena of any kind, lands in all varieties of snarls because
he expects higher manifestations of life to accord with those on
this earthly level, and when they do not do so, he becomes
suspicious or discouraged. Then too, there are cases where the
inability to correlate the methods, manners, customs, and
thought processes of the different levels, preys on the mind of
the amateur investigator; he attributes these inconsistencies to
the prankings of devils; he thinks he has “sold himself" to evil
forces and continually brooding over it causes a rupture in his
reason.

THERE are many students who have gone further into

phenomenal phases of psychical research---the so-called
“supematural"---than I profess to have gone. But over several
years of intensive study and exploring, I have come to this
conclusion---

86
 If the various levels of life were not different in their
manifestations, there would be no necessity for life to exist at
different levels.
It is because they are different that we have Research---
to find out wherein they are different. This, as well as to prove
that those various leyels exist.
The profoundest thinkers and investigators in these
matters agree---and their experiments go to prove---that people
do not alter their temperaments in the slightest by “dying," but
they do awaken to a world vastly different in environment. In
orienting themselves to that environment---or in the combination
of these two factors, temperament and changed environment---
some phenomena are produced that are often confusing on this
mortal level.

I QUOTE from a manuscript that came into my office for

publication in a later issue of my magazine: “People on the earth
are much disposed to herd together according to their kind.
The rich seek each other, the poor huddle into crowded
tenements, the thieves and gangsters have their resorts. Every
city has its Four Hundred section, its Bohemian Quarter, and its
slums. In the Land Beyond the Veil, people are also separated---
on the basis of their moral development---into levels, more
commonly called “planes" or “spheres" that surround the planet.
“The ‘spheres' of lowest vibration---though of a vastly
higher vibration than what we know on earth---are closest to the
earth---in fact, the lowest intermingles with the earth's surface. In
a regular ascension from the center are spheres of higher and
higher vibration, and in each of these spheres reside people---
ex-human beings---of various degrees of evolutional

87
development, the ignorant and the sinful occupying the lower
spheres and attaining to higher spheres as they advance in love
and wisdom."

TO QUOTE further: “When a truly good man dies he is

usually not conscious in the full sense, for quite a space of time.
He passes somewhat quickly through the lower spheres, to
about the Fourth---or whatever corresponds in vibration to the
moral development he has attained. Those of wicked lives
remain in the First Sphere, being what is known as Earth-Bound
spirits. They are unconscious for a long while after death, and
when they arouse, find themselves in a region of almost total
darkness, bare of vegetation and inhabited by the lowest of the
low and the vilest of the vile. This condition corresponds to the
Purgatory taught by the Roman Church. Swedenborg speaks of
it as ‘The Hells' . . . .
“Those who are simply ignorant and weak, rather than
downright depraved and vicious, find themselves in the Second
Sphere, where it is lighter, and there is more opportunity to gain
knowledge of higher and better things.
“The great mass of everyday, ordinary people, not very
wise, neither good nor bad, just full of blunders and stumbling
along---these find themselves in the Third Sphere. Here is where
Raymond, son of Sir Oliver Lodge, tells us he landed, and
though his intelligence and moral development very shortly
permitted his rising to the Fifth Sphere, yet he announced that he
was going to stay in the Third and await his parents, and so not
chance going beyond them and missing them when they came
over.

88
 "THE VERY best of mortals, men and women whose
lives have been developed to the service of mankind, go to still
higher spheres, each sphere being thus inhabited by beings of
parallel development, and therefore harmonious and happy. The
higher the sphere, the smaller the population, is the condition
that follows, and the numbers in the higher spheres are reduced
by the custom of those advanced souls' spending most of their
time in spheres below their own, where they go to teach and help
the less advanced and weaker members of the race. Wherever
they go they are at once recognized by their brightness. There is
no uncertainty as to their moral standing. No hypocrite in the
‘heaven world' can pass for better than he is, and no saint can
fail to be known.
“A real Master, resident of the Ninth or Tenth Sphere, is
a most splendid object to look upon, with serene and lovely
countenance, superb beauty and dignity, and a brilliance
dazzling to the eyes."

I MENTION these matters because as one advances in

research, he finds they account for much of the inconsistency in
phenomena, and confusing reports of the “after-life," as given by
those who have shuffled off their mortal coils. They also account
for the inability of certain souls to communicate at all, while
certain vile souls, on the very lowest planes next to earth, spend
most of their time raising the Old Harry with the lives of sensitive
people whom they can control and obsess as soon as the
psychical centers have been awakened without full knowledge of
how to utilize them.
The question is frequently asked me, why is it that I am
expounding so much about the Earthly Revisitation hypothesis,

89
life on life, when hundreds of other sensitives, equally as good
recorders, who make contact with those in higher planes, do not
get confirmatory statements about the process at all?

I REMEMBER once, in my own development and lack of

knowledge of these matters, crying out in anger and
exasperation: “I wish these people on the Other Side would get
together and agree on their fundamentals to tell those of us on
this side!"
Now I know that there are literally millions of discarnate
souls on the Other Side, inhabiting the lower spheres where they
have no difficulty in making contact with their friends in physical
flesh, who know no more about the great life principles than they
knew while they were mortal men and women. Souls who know
about the process of earthly rebirth are high and advanced, on
planes well away from the earth's surface. They are the ones
most completely apprised of the phenomena at work in letting
souls get down into earthly bodies---so that they are able to tell
us in detail about it. Those below them find themselves behaving
at the behest of Forces that to them are as blind and
unexplainable as those that catch a mortal person in the whorl of
a Kansas windstorm. He would not be able to tell where the wind
came from, what brought it about, or where it was blowing him.
He would only know that he was going along.
But by the same token that there are expert
meteorologists who know all about how these natural storms are
caused, where they came from and where they will expend
themselves, so there are the Great Souls up in the Lofty
Spheres, who take much time and trouble to explain to those still

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in earthly bodies who will listen and profit, just what happens to
them, in and out of life, cycle on cycle.

FOR THE information of the sincerely curious, I might

say that I have reason to believe that in my discarnate
experience which I called “My Seven Minutes in Eternity,"
I attained to the Seventh Sphere---where I found many of my
friends residing in the most colossal beauty and harmony of
environment and relationships. I say this for what it is worth to
those who enjoy a knowledge of such matters. But it seems to be
rational and reasonable, because of the machinery that I feel
I have developed, that I am cutting through the reaches of the
various lower levels and getting my instruction that I am passing
on to my fellows now from Great and Wise Mentors who are
residing upon the Ninth and Tenth Spheres of activity.
It is really a form of super radio, that I believe I---and
many others---have developed within our organisms over the
cycles of lives we have lived and the many descents we have
made into flesh to become masters of the process.
Be that as it may, I had to attain to conscious knowledge
of these vital facts in a new earthly body this time, by trial and
error with the lesser developed entities, by instructions over the
automatic pencil, and by the final development of my Inner Ear,
before I was able to penetrate up to that Thought velocity where
I could get simon-pure instruction.
It is a process that seems to be necessary to perfect all
over again in each life cycle, although I know now that I did bring
much through with me subconsciously when I entered my
present body nearly seven decades ago.

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 I had to reach that stage of cosmic learning by definite
experiencing, so that I could recognize to what Level of Thought
any given soul had communicated with me, by the knowledge of
cosmic facts that the had to communicate.

I HAD gone through an agonizing period of disillusion up

to the time the Master Messages began to be delivered to me.
Whenever I became depressed or fretted, I had opened my
sensitive equipment to persons One, Two, and Three Planes
high---in a manner of speaking. They were the ones who were
tricking or confusing me.
And yet I did have a subconscious realization that there
was something higher and better to contact, and that by keeping
on I would contact it. In a manner of speaking, I was
“remembering my own kith and kin" back up there on those lofty
levels of Thought and Service. I knew that they would not let me
down. Ultimately I had to win through to my goal.
That subconscious faith, it was, that kept me going,
when otherwise I would have ditched the whole business as the
work of sheer evil.
It was to awaken me to this subconscious knowledge
that I found now that I had been brought back to New York. I had
been put in funds, and I had traveled back to Manhattan from
California, not to be hoaxed and disillusioned by those on the
first two planes of life who had found they could make
themselves known in my affairs, but to meet certain members of
my own group in mortal flesh who were more fully awakened
than I was, propinquity with whom soon began to bestir my own
subconscious as to our group-missions.

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 All this time I had steadfastly kept from writing about my
discarnate experience in California, and I had told few friends
about it. I continued to write clairaudiently, night after night, to
meet people more awakened than myself, to feel the dim stirring
of recollection in my mind and heart. The weeks began to go by.
I remained in New York, living at the Commodore Hotel,
writing many stories and articles for the national magazines,
trying to absorb the realization of the stupendous things those
High Masters were occasionally getting down to the Group.
December passed.
One morning in January, I got a queer, sharp command
I shall never forget.

THE EDITORS of the American Magazine had again

and again suggested that I write the story of my “rejuvenation,"
but as I have said before in these pages, I had no desire to
emulate Sir A. Conan Doyle and “spoil" my writing career by
“going Spiritualist" . . . Really, I never expected to write of my
experience---and what was following it in clairaudient
development---unless it might be for private distribution.
One morning early in January, I had come up from
breakfast and had prepared myself to write a fiction story, when
a semi-audible voice spoke to me in tones of terse command---

All is propitious. Write the story of your Dispensation today.

You will find that it will be accepted with alacrity and will have
the repercussion in enlightenment that we want to produce in
society at this special time.

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 I was cheerfully willing to cooperate then. I sat down at
my machine, twirled in paper, and wrote “My Seven Minutes in
Eternity" in slightly less than two hours.
Some of the pages seemed literally to “write
themselves.”
I finished the manuscript, jogged it up, clipped it in a
folder, took up my hat after hurriedly reading what I had written,
and went up to the American Magazine offices. It was then about
noontime.
“Well, I've written the article that you wanted," I said.
“Here's the story of ‘getting out of my body' that night six or eight
months ago.”
The editress before whom I laid down the manuscript
had already pinned on her hat---they pinned their hats on in
those days---and was ready to go to lunch. But she delayed in
order to read the first two or three pages of that “Seven Minutes"
article. Suddenly she sprang up and went into the office of the
editor-in-chief. She was gone forty minutes. In those forty
minutes I cooled my heels and wondered if I had made a
supernal ass of myself.
But Merle Crowell himself came in. There were tears on
his face.
“I've just read the story of your discarnate experience,"
he said. “We're buying it from you and dispatching it to the
printing-plant in Springfield, Ohio, this afternoon to catch the
current issue of The American that's now about to go to press."
What they actually did was to stop the presses in Ohio
and insert my Seven Minutes in Eternity story, beginning with
page one, ‘pulling' the featured article that had already ‘opened'
the March, 1929, issue of the magazine.

94
 Two weeks later, some three million people read my
account of the hyperdimensional visitation I had made out of my
Altadena, California, bungalow some eight months beffore.
The Crowell Publishing Company paid me $1500 for the
contribution.
Within a week it had sold out the current issue of The
American Magazine, and a mail comparable to Col. Charles
Lindbergh's after he had flown to Paris, began to show up in the
offices of the publishers.
I had thrown a major switch in my personal career. . .

95
 Chapter VI

PROPHECY CAME NEXT

LITTLE realized, as I lay down to sleep that

memorable night in May, 1928, that I had
come to the end of my secular career. All that
I had lived since birth, up to that moment, had been nothing but
worldly preparation for that which was to open with the coming of
morning. My life was to change, my thinking was to change,
even my mind and its properties were to change. I was to find
out the true reasons for my life at all, and proceed henceforth to
discharge my Job.
The discarnate experience came and went. I found
myself in possession of strange talents and powers. I went
through six months of increasing awakening to the realities of
life, and the significance of my experience.
But it was not until I had consented to write the story of
the whole uncanny episode for the American Magazine that my
career opened definitely into channels that were to lead to . . .
Soulcraft!
My interests in California had called me back there
again, and I was living temporarily in Pasadena, when “My
Seven Minutes in Eternity" was published throughout the nation.

96
 Over and over again throughout my automatic writing
work, the phrase had been used in connection with comment on
the story, “Now is the time that was planned from the Beginning."
. . . but just what was meant I could not then decide.
With the appearance of the magazine, however, on the
nation's newsstands, I was quickly to realize that Kismet had
spoken strangely but truly.

I HAD supposed that when that article appeared I would

have to run a gauntlet of raillery or skepticism, slander or abuse.
I had decided in advance to be prepared for commiseration from
those who would think that my head had gone addled. I had an
armor of defense-mechanism around myself---an air of
indifference to the outcome that I by no means felt inside.
My first reactions came from people with whom I had
been intimate in business relationships in Pasadena and
Hollywood.
Instead of an outburst of skepticism and scoffing, people
sought me out with the magazine surreptitiously concealed about
their persons, to close my office door mysteriously and ask for
confidential interviews while they gave me information.
I began to discover that the same experience had been
undergone by my most intimate friends.
Man after man came into my office, apologized for his
confession, then launched into details of psychic or discarnate
experiences that soon had me wondering “where I had been all
my life," that so many people about me had been undergoing
them in a silence that had never permitted me to know there
were such things in the world.

97
 I SHALL never forget one experience with such a man
late one night in an almost-empty office where we had repaired
for a private conversation.
I had gone back to California this time with the idea of
permanently closing up my affairs, disposing of the bungalow
home in which the experience had occurred, and returning to
New York to make Manhattan my residence. With great difficulty
I nipped off the threads of enterprise after enterprise in which I
was embroiled, sold the lease on my office, disposed of such
effects as I did not mean to transfer to Manhattan, and offered
my real estate for sale. The landlord of the building in which my
offices had been, allowed me an empty room where I had moved
a desk and some chairs. I sat in this room one night with a
business associate with whom I had been connected for a year
without the slightest inkling of knowledge that such matters were
even known to him by hearsay.
As we sat talking, I felt a strange vibration in my vicinity
as though someone had taken a position behind me. My left.
arm, which had been supersensitized since I came back into my
body that night six months before, told me that we were not
alone in that office. Glancing at my companion, who had been
talking until that moment about a business project, I saw his eyes
widen and heard his voice sink till it trailed to a whisper.
"What's the matter?" I asked.
“Do you know there's someone standing behind you?"
he asked.
“Yes," I admitted, wondering how he knew. "Do you
mean you can see---?.
“---he stands about six-feet-two or three, dressed in long
white robes. . . I can't see his features, they're so brilliant . . .

98
he's got his hand on your left shoulder. . . now he's moved it to
your right. . ."
All this time my friend---a solid, substantial business
man---was gaping at the empty wall-space behind me. “I'm
aware of it," I assented. “I can feel the hand."
“I see," Joe faltered, “a n-name . . . as though in burning
letters, just over your head and across his chest. I can see the
letters BAR. . . H A V A . . . I can't read the rest-it's blurred in his
brilliance."
I was puzzled. The name meant nothing then. Later in
New York I was to recall my friend's second-sight phenomena
with startling implications.
The “vision" faded and we resumed our talk.

I WENT over to Hollywood and met a friend with whom I had

associated in my film ventures. Of all persons on the West
Coast, I expected facetious comment from him. When I walked
into his office, he had a copy of the American Magazine lying
upon his desk, opened to my article. He looked up with a
whimsical smile.
"Thank God, Bill," said he, laying his opened palm upon
the page, you’ve come to your senses at last.
"What do you mean, come to my senses?"
"Somehow I always thought you'd awaken someday to
certain facts of life. It's come in one night. You ought to be
grateful."
I had spent this man's money, worn his clothes, slept in
the same bed with him, driven his car, over a three-year period,
being in the closest business associations with him the while---
without ever knowing that he was an adept in metaphysics

99
and performed such strange feats as talking with his brother
nightly in a distant country by physical thought transference,
besides having many experiences out of his body, in which he
had seen himself in previous incarnations.
So it went.
Once I had “broken the restraint" or reticence by my
article, I found scores of people ready to talk about such matters
and attest to the validity of such phenomena. People in film-land
whom I had supposed would "razz" me until it hurt, would call me
on the phone, waylay me in corridors, ask me into corners---to
discuss similar experiences of their own and ask interpretation.
Several of these confidants had seen their relatives pass out of
their bodies at death.
It was all most unbelievable.

I GAVE away Laska, my police dog, to a friend, dismantled my

bungalow, packed my goods for shipment.
And yet night on night I was still doing my daily allotment
of automatic writing, getting a grounding in metaphysical
fundamentals that later was to stagger me again when in New
York I came to compare the knowledge in my messages with
profound books on the same subjects received by others.
Not only was it wholly unnecessary for me to read occult
books written by others, but gradually I discovered that in many
cases the wisdom I had been allotted surpassed that which had
been compiled by the most erudite metaphysicians. I will return
to these later in my story.

FINALLY one night I took another upward step.

100
 With the goods of my household in process of moving,
only a few chairs and a table cleared for use amid the crates and
boxes, I was seated in a corner of what had been my library
dictating my mirror-penmanship aloud to my nurse-friend who
had come up to assist me in my packing.
Late in the clear California twilight, with scarcely a sound
to break the crystal stillness, I glanced up at her in puzzled
surprise.
“These words I'm writing backward. . . I'm hearing them
spoken distinctly to me before my pencil pushes them out on
paper!" I cried.
“You're sure?" she asked. “Or is it your imagination?"
“They're being spoken clearly and distinctly within my
head. I don't need the pencil! I can hear them as plainly as I hear
your voice. Take down what I give you as long as it continues."
She started to do so.
The Voice continued to talk on and on. Frequently
I interrupted it when some word was spoken that I did not
understand.
Someone within that room, invisible, was definitely
speaking to me, and I was hearing him!
The voice talked on and on, into the hours of early night.
In the quarter-century that has passed since these weeks of
which I am writing, I suppose five thousand persons have put the
question to me, about how it “feels" to get the clairaudient voice
inside one's head? Do I hear it literarily or do I merely “think"?
Truth to tell, the phenomenon savors of both. I hear the
communicating voice addressing me “in thought." But strangely
enough, I frequently know when the communicator is chuckling
“in thought." I have been in the midst of a message of gravest

101
import when the room's telephone has rung. I have excused
myself as I might to guests who were present in the flesh. I have
carried on a lengthy phone conversation about some business
matter, to return to my chair and have the “voice" resume the
clairaudient dictation from the middle of a paragraph.
That it is an independent intellectual force operating
externally seems attested as well by the fact that on other
occasions I have had this thought Voice speak to me in
languages other than English---and ancient biblical Aramaic is
the only tongue with which I am familiar outside of English. Six to
twelve pages of purest Sanskrit was thus “dictated" or
“overheard" one evening later in Manhattan---which on being
recorded phonetically was quickly and readily translated by
Sanskrit scholars who saw the original.
I was to spend a prodigious nine years recording the 844
pages of the Golden Scripts, and twenty-five years recording the
1,500,000 words of the Great Soulcraft doctrine that now is
world-wide in its reading public. Today, up here in 1954, the
physical rematerialization of many of these Mentors has long-
since corroborated and confirmed what they have so generously
conveyed to me.
After that night I continued to rely on that clear Inner Ear.
To show how accurate it became, this happened:
After a fortnight of continued instruction in actual events
ahead in my life, many of which have since come true, I found
myself complaining because I was being held in California by an
escrow that I could not close until I had more money.
I felt it absolutely essential to return to Manhattan. But
go I could not till the money was raised.
I had stopped sleeping in the bungalow and taken a
room in a hotel in Pomona in order to be near some friends who

102
lived there. Each night, after a day spent in closing my Pasadena
affairs, I would get into my car and drive the thirty miles to
Pomona and bed.
One night I was especially upset at the way things were
dragging. Suddenly came the Voice:
“You will have the money within 24 hours and be on the
Santa Fee train tomorrow afternoon!"
“More mischief!" I lamented. “There's not the ghost of a
chance of my getting the cash I need within 24 hours. A miracle
would have to happen."
I had a bad half-hour. The Mischief-Makers were
appearing again, evidently to hoax me so at a time so important.
I abused them. I told them to pack themselves off and get out of
my life.
The Voice was insistent, gentle, patient.
“You will have the money within 24 hours and be on the
Santa Fe train tomorrow afternoon!"
My friend and I ended our scripts in dismay. If any such
money failed to materialize, I didn't know what to do thereafter,
or what Voices to trust. I locked the bungalow, backed the car
from the driveway, took my friend home and started for Pomona.
I had a bad drive down. My life had all gone sixes and
sevens. If I were to be hoaxed about this money promise, how
could I depend on the other intimations of impending events and
my part in them?
By the time I reached Pomona I was flaying myself for being so
gullible as to so disrupt my affairs to follow such a Will-o'-the-
Wisp. What had seemed so alluring was as the voice of forty

103
devils sneering and jeering at me. And I was beggaring myself to
go on serving them. Or so I thought. Then this happened swiftly:
I found a garage for my car and walked over to the hotel.
As I came in the door, the night-clerk sang out: “New York's
been trying to get you on the long distance phone ever since 8
o'clock, Mr. Pelley. They'll call again at 11 o'clock and asked that
you be here."
New York! Who would call me at such an hour from
Manhattan?
At 11 o'clock I was in the lobby when the phone-bell
rang. It was one of the editors of the American Magazine.
“What are you doing out there all this time?" was the
disgruntled demand across the continent. “There's a mail like
Lindbergh's awaiting your answering here in the office from your
Seven-Minutes article."

"I CAN'T go back till I've closed an escrow out here that
will take a lot of money," I explained.
“How much money?" I named the sum.
“Is that all that's holding you? If we have that sum
advanced to you by bank draft the first thing in the morning, will
you be on the returning Santa Fe train tomorrow afternoon?"
“I will!" I promised.
“California is four hours behind New York in the matter of
time. We'll have our bank transfer you the money so it will be
available to you by the time you get out of bed in the morning.
I fumbled the receiver upon its hook.
At nine-thirty next morning when I got to Pasadena, the
sum was on deposit in my bank. I closed my escrow, caught the
2:30 train.

104
 The Voice had not hoaxed me. I was heading east, to
New York for good.

ON MY arrival in New York after closing my affairs on the

western coast, I took a bachelor apartment in the West Fifties
and converted it into a combination living quarters and office.
I furnished this apartment with the appointments of my California
bungalow. I mention these furnishings because of an incident
that occurred in connection with them, which I shall describe in a
future chapter on Levitation of the Consciousness.
The biggest job that confronted me in that strange spring
and summer of 1929 was the answering of the tremendous mail
that came to me as a result of publishing “My Seven Minutes in
Eternity," in the American Magazine. Daily I would go over to the
offices of the Crowell Publishing Company, on Park Avenue, and
bring back armfuls of unopened letters in sheaves of heavy
manila envelopes. I have never fully counted how many of these
there were, for they have been continually arriving over the years
that have since intervened. They ran over thirty thousand.
Those letters which I took away with me were addressed
to me personally. The editors of the American Magazine
received an equally appalling burden of mail. The American's
circulation at the time Seven Minutes was printed, was
approximately 2,250,000 copies. The great advertisers of the
nation figure legitimately that every copy of a standard
magazine is read by four to five people before it is finally

105
given away, filed away, or destroyed. Figured on this basis, it
may be suggested that “My Seven Minutes in Eternity" was read
in that magazine alone by something like ten millions of people.
Not all of them took the trouble to write either me or the
publishers, expressing themselves upon the article, else I should
probably be answering vast quantities of mail even to this day.
But enough leters were received so that I kept one, and
sometimes two, stenographers busy for nine months,
acknowledging or commenting on the astounding epistles that
the article prompted.

HAVING read the first letters, I sorted them into

classifications. I found that at least 50 percent of them were
merely letters of commendation, praising me for my “courage" in
penning and printing such an article and attesting to the
unspeakable inspiration the article had proven to my
correspondents. The majority of these begged me to go on and
tell them more of such experiences; in fact, I understand that
request was the burden of almost 90 percent of the mail that
went directly to the American's publishers. To these I gave a
more or less formal reply, thanking the writers for their interest
and good wishes and promising to let them know when I next
published anything further of similar tenor in the nation's press.
The second great classification came from writers who
had undergone similar experiences and wanted me to know
about them. Some of these narratives would run to dozens of
typewritten pages. Strange psychical experiences, adventures in
the levitation of consciousness to distant parts of the earth or into
the higher planes, the attested materializations of people who

106
had “passed on"---these began to pile up until I realized that all
unwittingly I had the nucleus for a miniature psychical research
society in my private files.
But what staggered me most of all in these testimony
letters was the great number of persons from every walk of life,
of every age and of both sexes, who avowed to a similar
experience---or similar experiences---at some time in their
present lives. And here was the amazing evidence that these
correspondents were not fabricating---
In four cases out of five they would not only affirm having
gone through exactly the same sensations as I went through in
my own discarnate experience, but they would go further and
give me details and descriptions about the sublimated planes of
consciousness which I knew to be true because I had witnessed
them on my own adventure, and yet I had said nothing about
them in the article nor mentioned them to a living soul!

HOW DID these people get their information unless they

had penetrated to a definite place, as I had claimed to have
penetrated to a definite place, and seen or contacted exactly
what I recalled having seen or contacted?
In only two cases that I recall were there details given in
letters that persuaded me the writers were fabricating, or the
victims of delusions of grandeur.
I recall in particular one astounding sheet of manuscript
which I started to read, sent me from an address up in
Massachusetts. As I perused the sheet I became increasingly
astounded. Whoever had written the text was giving me the most
minute description of what I said and did that night on the plane
that I reached after quitting my body.

107
 It attested to my personal behavior; it spoke of the
specific friends I contacted; it mentioned the mistakes of which
I was guilty, in not recognizing certain “dead" friends at once on
account of their enhanced personal aspect over that which I had
known of them in mortal life.
How did this writer come to be apprised of such definite
and truthful details? I got to the bottom of the sheet and found
this footnote:
"The above communication was sent through Mrs. Blank
sitting in S…..,Mass., on last Thursday evening, by Dr. N…..,
attesting to the veracity of Mr. Pelley's published narrative. Dr.
N……. is a spirit and has ‘been over' since 1925."
THE THIRD class of correspondents comprised that
great army of readers who had recently lost loved ones of their
own and wanted more specific details of their survival, their daily
lives, customs, and possible abilities to communicate. Some of
these begged for more light in a way so pitiful that it wrung
my heart.
They propounded questions to me which I simply had to
answer. And yet the answers involved long expositions of cosmic
law that would have been magazine articles in themselves.
Some of them meant replies that would have taken me a half a
day to answer. I simply could not do it. And yet the appeal of
them haunted me.
There must be some way of getting this vital information out to
people, information that current theology kept people from
procuring, telling them that such was “sin" . . . .I meditated on
this problem through the balance of that year, trying to explain to
the most pathetic cases, in as satisfactory a way as possible,
why I had to respond in a manner so circumscribed.

108
 MEANWHILE, this flood of correspondence was running
into money that I could not afford. People begging me for
advanced information would enclose a two-cent stamp for reply,
and apologize profusely for taking up my time. Thereby they
assumed they had done their whole duty, and there were many
who later wrote abusively, accusing me of fraud, when I failed for
purely economic reasons, to give them the satisfaction they
sought. If I had really had such an experience, and was
possessed of so much information about the higher planes of life
and the fact of survival, why was I not frank and generous with
my responses?
I was spending three to five hundred dollars a week
even to be courteous to these thousands of inquirers. No matter
how short a letter I wrote, and I simply could not be short to most
of them, the cost of answering was averaging 50c per letter. The
American Magazine did not, and would not, help me stand a cent
of this expense, although the publishers did make certain
advances to me against future deliveries of fiction manuscripts
when the demands on my time answering this correspondence
withheld me from turning out my usual fiction and thus keeping
up with my current expenses. Moreover, the American's editors
emphatically did not want any further articles on this great
subject, after perceiving the furor which the first had stirred up.
“It is obvious that we cannot make the American a metaphysical
magazine," they announced, “and that is just what we might do if
we continued to publish more articles by you along the same
line. Moreover, we know of no corps of trained writers capable of
handling such material in addition to yourself, and we must think
of our other writers. There are just as good writers as yourself in
these United States, and we must play equally with all of them;

109
we cannot afford to let you become indispensable to us. Go back
to your fiction and try to forget this whole faux pas in publishing
Seven Minutes, as soon as possible!"

BUT THERE was no such thing as “trying to forget the

whole faux pas" . . . for the public would not let me do it.
Answering a correspondent's first letter as politely and
exhaustively as I could, did not solve the problem. For every
one-page letter that I would finally get around to answer, a five-
page letter would come back from that same person. Moreover,
great numbers of them would pass my replies about, and that
would breed more letters.
But that was not all. So titanic was the interest in this
question of survival as I had attested to it, that the March issue of
the American containing the original version of Seven Minutes
disappeared from not only the nation's newsstands---selling out
clean!---but it disappeared from library shelves and cellars and
attics where past issues of magazines usually arrived before
reaching the junk-man.
Every back-number magazine shop, not only in
Manhattan but throughout the country, became suddenly
denuded of American Magazines for March, 1929. Uniformly
they brought $1.00 a number whenever they could be located.
I have known of cases where prices as high as $10.00 were paid
for this specific issue. I saw scores of instances where the article
was clipped out, pasted together, and carried in a pocketbook
until it was ready to fall apart from much handling.
So when an American Magazine could not be procured
with the article in it, other publishers began to write the editors,

110
or myself, asking permission to reprint the story in their own
magazines and thus supply the demand. As I had written the
article to get a great truth out to the public, and not to make
money---since I could have written a fiction story in the same
time and made twice as much money as I got for Seven
Minutes---permission was freely given for republication.
I had in my library at one time fully twenty publications
besides the American that had reprinted the account. This added
hundreds of thousands more to the number of readers who had
seen the account as it first appeared. These too began writing
their quota of letters.

AS A reasonably popular writing-man, I had penalized

myself heavily for daring to open up a subject in which the
reading public showed such interest. I had been with the
American Magazine on and off as contributor since its inception
in its present form in 1915. Once before, in Sep- tember, 1917,
I had written a bit of literary work for them that had cleaned out
all copies on the nation's newsstands. The Crowell Publishing
Company was my “bread and butter" in a manner of speaking.
It is not generally known to the public that writers
uniformly go by “families" . . . there is The Saturday Evening
Post group, the Hearst group, the Crowell group. High-priced
popular writers acquire such personal relationships with editors
from constant contact with them that they follow the legitimate
practice of making all first submissions to the editors of the group
who publish most of their material and give them greatest favors
in the way of exploitation. I had been more or less identified with

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the Crowell group ever since the regime of the American's great
editor, John Siddell, that ended with his death in 1923.
But now having written Seven Minutes, it gradually came
to me that I had been too successful in stirring up a mare's nest.
One of the American's editors said publicly at a luncheon one
noontime, which I attended at the home of a friend in East 74th
Street: “Publishing Pelley's Seven Minutes was one of the most
disastrous mistakes the American ever made. It aroused a
demand on the part of the public which the magazine couldn't
continue to supply. But worse than that, it diverted Pelley from a
highly successful writing career. It turned a first-rate popular
author into a second-rate metaphysician who has yet to prove
himself."
This, remember, was in 1929.

SHORTLY after the publication of Seven Minutes, those

editorial luminaries on the American who had most to do with
getting the original article published, handed in their resignations
and left the company. I wrote two fiction stories for the magazine,
mostly in the endeavor to discharge the advances made me
when I could not work because of the mail that needed
answering. Just before the resignation of this editorial regime, I
also wrote a short serial for the American, with a slightly mystical
motif. When the new editor took charge, I saw him only once and
that not by his invitation. He graciously said that he had always
liked my material, but that the American intended to conform to
new standards of publishing; it was “going in" for sports,
business articles, typically Americana from the metropolitan

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viewpoint. The story with the small-town, or mystical motif, was
to be persona non grata.
I have written little since for the American Magazine.

BUT I could not suppress the interest that had been

started. Mail, mail, mail! Day after day! Why didn't I write more
for the American? Why didn't I write more like Seven Minutes for
other magazines?
I tried, and the material was consistently refused---
excepting in some of the smaller five-and-ten cent store
periodicals where my name went unnoticed. Yet something had
to be done! It came to me with overwhelming force that under the
skin of the average person there was more real interest in this
great subject than in all the “sports, business articles, and
Americana from the metropolitan viewpoint" that would find
publication in American periodicals in the next twenty years.
Whereupon came astounding directions from psychic
sources instructing me to write a novel that should explain to
distraught and perplexed people what they so avidly wanted to
know.

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 Chapter VII

STRANGE AID IN MY BUSINESS

HE SUMMER of 1929 which now came on,

seemed to be one full program of a series of
psychical happenings. I had seen evidences
of discarnate guidance so pronounced in my
affairs up to this time, that there no longer
remained any subconscious doubt in my mind that relatives and
friends whom the world called dead were not only alive but in
touch with me and intensely interested in everything I did.
This attitude of mind left the door wide open for anything
to happen. It consequently happened. And I grew to think little
of it.
As I have said elsewhere in these pages again and
again, by admitting the imponderable we have the ponderable
demonstrated.
I accepted the fact that the dead were not only alive but
far more sentient and active than people are in the mortal state.
And while unusual occurrences brought their quota of surprise, in
the main I ceased to be awed.
I continued the taking of psychical transcripts day after
day and night after night. Two outstanding events occurred to
show how supernormal guidance manifested.

114
 The first was the sale of my third novel, “Drag," as a
motion-picture production; the second was the writing of my
fourth novel, “Golden Rubbish."

I WAS taking a doctrinal message in the apartment of a

friend one evening early in the summer when there came an
informal aftermath to the discourse. The Friend who had been
transmitting the communication always chatted a few moments
with me before ringing off on the Cosmic Wire. This particular
evening he declared to me:

We rejoice to tell you that something extremely pleasant

is in prospect for you. We look ahead and see a man in a
certain office signing papers of sale on literary property
which you own, that will mean a large amount of money
for you.

I have always been skeptical of messages which

purported to predict “large amounts of money," legacies, and
other expositions of unusual good fortune. It has been my
experience that if these things are to happen, they will happen
anyway. To talk about them and discuss them in advance
frequently sets vibrations in motion that defeat the end in
materialization.
Besides, it is a favorite dodge of the mischief-makers to
predict wonderful good fortune that fails to materialize and thus
cause loss of faith and confidence in psychical interpretation. So
I said:
“That's fine. When and how does it happen?" The
answer came in the clearest clairaudience:

115
 “Tomorrow morning you will receive a 'phone-call from a
man here in the city who wants to buy the rights of your
novel ‘Drag.' He will make you an offer that seems
ridiculously low. Do not accept it at once. Wait for my voice
instructing you. I will advise you what is going on in the
inside of his brain; he has been instructed to buy the work
within a certain price but he will not tell you what that price
is, at first; you set your figure high and bargain with him;
when you come within the neighborhood of the price he has
been authorized to pay, I will advise you and do you close
your deal. Do you refuse to be hoaxed or intimidated. He
wants this book and is willing to pay a satisfactory sum for it.
I will be an unseen third party to the deal because you are in
need of the funds to carry on our mutual work. Do not forget.
No matter how the trading goes, wait for my voice advising
you when to close your deal."

I WENT home wondering whether I confronted a new

manifestation of mischief. Those were anxious sequences,
waiting for the Higher Counsel to prove up in event whether or
not the voices could be trusted.
Nevertheless, around 8:30 the following morning I was
awakened by the ringing of the phone near the head of my bed.
My motion-picture agent was on the wire.
“I've just received a call from First National Pictures," he
informed me. “They're interested in buying the movie rights to
‘Drag' to make into a production starring Dick Barthelmess.
We're to have a conference with their New York purchasing

116
representative at ten o'clock. Please be at my office and we'll go
over and discuss the deal together."
At ten o'clock we were in the office of the picture
concern on upper Madison Avenue. I learned that my Counselor
of the evening before had been absolutely accurate in his
statements. The trading commenced. Pursuing the tenets of his
calling, our buyer started in by telling me what a frightful writer
I was, and how the novel that he wanted to purchase was
shopworn goods that I ought to feel honored to have First
National make for nothing. But he graciously condescended to
name a figure---which I as graciously condescended to refuse---
by which the transfer of the rights might become valid in law.

WHAT no one in that room, at least in mortal form, knew but

myself was the fact that we three mortals were not alone. I could
“feel" the vibration of my unseen Friend's presence in my
sensitized left side like a galvanic battery. I knew he was
standing about 20 inches from my left shoulder, taking in all that
transpired.
Clearly in my Inner Ear came his voice. “Tell him you
want the following amount of money for the rights," and a sum
was named almost three times what our buyer had first
proposed. I did so.
“Are you crazy?" cried our buyer. “We wouldn't pay that
much for movie rights to a best seller by a first class author!"
“Suppose we split the difference," suggested my agent.
“Never!" cried the picture man, “but I'll come up three hundred
dollars."

117
 Then I'll come down three hundred," I rejoined, making
the result equally as absurd.
Up and down, back and forth we jockeyed. Again and
again my unseen counselor at my shoulder advised me at each
new offer:

“He's not telling you the truth as to the highest price he's
been authorized to pay. Keep on trading."

Several times we drifted off upon other subjects. Again

and again we came back to how much the movie rights to the
book were worth. It had been ten o'clock when we entered the
buyer's office. At a quarter to twelve he jumped to his feet,
thumped a copy of the book upon his desk and cried:
“Listen to me, both of you! I'm going to tell you the
topnotch price I can possibly offer you. If you don't want to trade
on it, everything's off."
He named a new price. Distinctly and emphatically in my
ear my counselor cried:

“He's telling you the truth. Accept it and close your deal.
But make him give you a certified check before you leave
this office."
“Okay," I said aloud. “But only on condition that you draw
my check at once."
I walked out with the check in my pocket.

THE adept student in psychical phenomena may raise the

question concerning this episode as to whether or not the whole
affair might not have been my clairvoyant powers coupled with
the practice of cryptothesis or subconscious mind-reading which

118
I translated to myself in terms of a discarnate voice of an unseen
friend at my elbow.
My answer is: It was indeed possible but not probable.
I base this contention on the vibratory phenomena that went with
his presence, and the nature of his asides to me clairaudiently
from time to time during the trading.
He gave me a more or less literal recount of exactly the
thoughts that were transpiring in that buyer's mind, things which
it would not be in the nature of my own perceptions, conscious or
subconscious, to receive.
Also, if I had this gift of cryptothesis, why should it be
confined only to business deals of this kind? Why do I not have it
for use in a hundred other situations? I solemnly affirm that
I have not. It was only for this one sequence that the clairaudient
voice came to me advising me so. Try as I may, I cannot
summon a repetition of the performance at will.

I TOOK the money, relieved a badly strained financial

situation which had accrued from pulling up stakes and moving
to New York from California. Then a month or so later a similar
phenomenon happened “out of a clear sky," so to speak.

Again I was in communication clairaudiently taking a doctrinal

message. The Voice added:

“During the week that is ahead, you are going to be

invited to a dinner with a certain New York publisher. He will
proposition you to write a book for him. When he makes you
the proposal, do you accept it. The book will be dictated to
you by us for a very special purpose in connection with the

119
 work you are doing. He will make you the proposal at our
instigation although he will not be aware of it. "

At the time I received this news I had no intention of

writing a new novel. I was far too busy with other things. But two
or three days passed and then I was suddenly invited to go to
the old Waldorf-Astoria to hear a lecture by Dr. Crandon,
husband of the famous trance-medium, Marjory, of Bos- ton.
The friend who gave me the invitation mentioned off-
handedly that she had also invited one of the members of the
publishing firm of G. P. Putnam Sons to go along with us. We
would have dinner first and drive over for the lecture afterward.

HERE, apparently, was the opening that had been

predicted, I accepted both invitations and on the evening in
question sat through the meal with no proposals coming from my
newly-found publisher friend.
Not until we were approaching the Waldorf in a cab did
the talk turn on the literary work that I might have in prospect.
I mentioned something to the effect that I had had such poor luck
with my last publisher that I had no heart to write another novel
for anyone just then.
“Do you mean you're thinking of changing publishers?"
he demanded.
“Perhaps," I bantered, “if I got a proposition good
enough.”
“We wouldn't take you away from another publisher
unless you wanted to make the break yourself," he declared.
“But if you're seriously thinking of changing, won't you come and
see me before signing up with anybody else?"

120
 Again the Voice seemed to know what it had been
talking about. I said that I'd drop in and talk with him about it the
following afternoon.

TO MAKE a lengthy episode brief, I had a new contract

for three novels signed, sealed, delivered, and stored away in my
safe deposit box, within a week!
But what to write about?
I recall that I was not in an especial ”story-telling mood"
. . . the creative impulse was not really strong enough just then---
with all that was happening to me psychically---to apply myself
over the extended period of time that a book requires for its
composition.
I went home and looked through my oId manuscripts of
partially-written plots such as every writer has stored away in his
bureau drawers against faulty inspiration. Finally I found the
beginnings of a story that I had begun three years before and
abandoned. It presented possibilities and as I had the product
sold before it was produced, I felt justified in reopening the yarn
and seeing how it went under possible psychic guidance.
No sooner had I revamped the premise of the plot and
gotten launched in the first two or three chapters, than I was
aware of that strange vibratory exhilaration at my left shoulder.
Someone was standing there, directing what I was
writing! Chapters flowed out from beneath my typewriter keys
with amazing facility. It seemed time after time that I was merely
taking dictation. The language and the style were not my own.
I would type whole pages as swiftly as my fingertips could touch
the keys.

121
 The moment came finally when I leaned back in some
perplexity and demanded:
“Is someone literally dictating this story to me?" The
answer came distinctly: Of course! I asked: “Who is it?"
Whereup I heard the name of a world-famous author spoken as
plainly as I might have heard it addressed to me across a
telephone wire.
“I can't believe it," I told a friend who later came into the
room. “Why should a man so famous spend his time following
me around, giving me a story in his own style, when he'll never
get any credit for having composed it? I feel as though I were
sailing under false colors, anyhow."
Within a week I was getting absolute proof that this great
author---several years dead---was indeed aiding me, and the
reasons why he was doing so.
He spoke to me confirming it, by a voice heard in a room
by half a dozen people who were present at the episode!

122
 Chapter VIII

I TALK WITH “DEAD" FRIENDS

NOW come to the most intriguing, and---to my

way of thinking---the most convincing phase
of my personal experiences, attesting to me
beyond all doubt that there is no such thing as
Death or blotting out of the personal
consciousness.
It is one thing for a person to claim that he has had some
sort of sojourn in another octave of time and space, and quite
another for him to prove it. It is one thing to claim that he has
“hearing" so finely attuned to Thought Speech that he can pick
up messages from the higher realms of life and still another to
demonstrate scientifically that he is not subconsciously
composing what he “hears," though he may not be consciously
aware of it.
But in the winter of 1929, in New York City, and on into
the spring and summer of 1930, I had a series of experiences
which there seems to be no refuting, rationalizing of, or
explaining by any other method than that I was actually talking
with the souls of people who have gone Beyond the Veil. It will
take several chapters for me to relate in detail all that happened.
But the first experience happened while I was writing my esoteric
novel, “Golden Rubbish."

123
 I HAVE mentioned that while writing this book it seemed
to me that whole pages, and even chapters, were being dictated
to me faster than I could record them on the typewriter. I was
making no effort to “think up what I was writing," but the words
poured into my brain in such connected, logical, and artistic
fashion that all I had to do was put them down, and I had my
story. Whereat I cried:
“Is anybody dictating this narrative to me?"
The answer came back dinstinctly: “Yes! You have so
much work to do that you are being helped in composition by---,"
naming a celebrated author who had “gone over" during the past
decade.
As I recently stated in these pages, I was skeptical that
any such personage should be devoting his world-famous talents
to aiding me. Why should he do it? And yet beyond a doubt,
whole sequences of the story were his, in his style and filled with
his idioms.
I had read much of this author and admired him much.
But I had never become so imbued with his style that I had
subconsciously copied it; in fact, my style in my three other
novels and scores of short stories was about as far removed
from his as two author's styles could possibly be.
This was borne out so graphically in the story itself that
many people have since refused to believe the novel was mine
when it appeared in print. It was in fact, a curious hodge-podge
of two men's literary styles and is a curious exhibit of what can
happen when this type of clairaudience is practiced consciously.

124
 TO CONVINCE me that I was indeed taking the dictation
of another brain in my story, this strange episode occurred:
I had reached a place in the narrative where I wanted to
describe Louise Garland's resentment at her early life---or at life
in general---because it had denied her social advantages. She
was furious at the way she was bested time and again in the
social comities, and her lack of childhood training brought her
social handicaps that maddened her.
I struggled with the right word to describe her plight.
Suddenly my famous author's voice said gently in my ear: “Use
the word ‘interclusions,' William!"
“Interclusions!" I cried aloud. “There's no such word; at
least I never heard of it."
“Oh yes, there is," my discarnate helper returned.
“Consult your dictionary and you'll find I'm right."
I recall that I walked into the front living-room where my
big dictionary was kept, and hunted for the word. I found it! And
it meant exactly the thought I had been struggling to get over.
Little ‘proofs' like that can sometimes be more
convincing than spectacular seance-room manifestations. In the
séance-room manifestation there is always the wonder as to
whether or not the Sensitive has put over a trick or illusion.
I went back to my machine and used the word. But I did
much thinking the balance of that day. More dramatic things had
happened to me, and were slated to happen to me still,
convincing me that those in the Higher Dimensions can
communicate with people in mortality at will. But the ‘speaking' to
me of this utterly strange word---a word I had not known as
existing---made a profound psychological effect on me. There

125
was to be still more concrete proof of this author-discarnate,
however.
That week I made the acquaintance of that very
remarkable psychic, George Wehner.

I DO NOT know whether you have ever chanced to see,

much less to read, George Wehner's autobiography, “A Curious
Life." It was published by Dutton, I think, back in 1930. In it he
told exactly how he came to recognize and develop his peculiar
talents.
George was a commercial artist, about 30 years old, a
bachelor, who had shown the remarkable faculty from childhood
of separating his soul-mind from his physical body, vacating the
latter, and handing it over to “disembodied" souls from a higher
level of life who wished to use his organism for a brief visit to
earth conditions. In other words, he abandoned his own physical
mechanism with which he had been born and gave it over to the
temporary use of some “dead" person, allowing its spirit-soul to
come into it, take possession of it and use it as though it were his
own. George got out of his own bodily vehicle, in other words
and loaned it for a couple of hours to souls who had lost their
own bodies by the process we commonly know as “death," thus
permitting them to converse with their former relatives or friends
precisely as though they had had their former bodies restored to
them.
An interchange of souls took place, and on a score of
nights I saw it happen. George “went off" with his mother---so he
told me once---for an evening with her in the discarnate octave,
and permitted discarnate or bodiless spirits to inhabit his
physical self until his return when mortal ‘visiting' was over.

126
 He would arrive at my apartment, where I always had
friends gathered to witness the phenomenon, about 8 o'clock in
the evening. The room would be closed and heavily curtained;
it was usually lighted by one floor lamp. George would relax
himself in a chair with his head thrown back comfortably and
those of us in a semicircle about him would recite the Lord's
Prayer to tranquillize all of us. Then I would turn the dials of my
radio until I came on some selection of dreamy music that aided
the medium in falling into a trance. George would at first appear
to drop to sleep. His eyes would close, his head would droop.
Next it would seem as though his eyeballs sank into his skull. His
face took on a waxy corpse like hue; his mouth fell open and his
tongue filled it.
It seemed to those of us who were watching that a dead
man sat in the chair before us!
The breathing became phlegmatic, then seemed to stop
altogether; the hands grew cyanotic. Eight or ten minutes of this,
with the radio finally shut off and silence in the room where all
the doors had also been shut.
Then suddenly it would appear to us that our “dead man"
was in distress! The breathing resumed, signs of vitality came in
his face, but his head would start jerking and roIling in his collar.
His hands would come up and claw at his throat. A moment of
this and then he would start whistling.

AT FIRST sittings it was all rather terrifying. But I soon

got used to it. When the whistling came, I learned that George's
spirit had left his body and it had been taken possession of by

127
the soul of a young musician, who told us one night that he had
been killed in an accident in Detroit some years before. He
always rendered us an obligato of his own composition before
the real work of the evening commenced with the entities.
Frank stayed with us for about ten minutes and then the
transition took place as before. George's body went through
another period of distress and then the deep bass voice of an
American Indian would issue from the medium's lips with a
salutatory “How!"

THE question is repeatedly asked by the novitiate why

so many mediums have these American Indian “controls"---or
souls who act as guards and protectors while the rightful soul is
out of its body, to see that it does not become permanently
possessed by entities who have no right to such permanent
possession.
The answer seems to be that our American Indians lived
so close to nature that they are still vibrating in what might be
called the “elementals." That is, having always lived in close
earthly conditions throughout their mortal lives, they are more
conversant with work of this nature, and it gives them an
opportunity for service peculiar to their earthly capacities.
Be that as it may, the voice of an aged Indian issued
from George's lips and greeted us each in turn. He gave his
name as White Cloud and persisted in singing us a ditty in his
own language. The rendition over, he addressed me personally.
“You like my people?" he asked.
I said that of course I liked his people.

128
 “You make words walk on paper," was his manner of
describing my vocation as an author.
I assented to this, also.
“You make words walk on paper about my people," he
informed me next. “You make words walk on paper about old
chief. You are good man. You make words walk on paper about
your people who are good men. They help old chief who is good
man," and he waited for me to confirm this.

I SEARCHED my memory. What was he talking about?

Then it came to me. Twelve years bygone I had traveled for a
time with a Wild West Show outfit to get some firsthand material
for a series of stories that appeared in The Saturday Evening
Post. There had been many Indians with our outfit. One sedate
old Ogallalah chief had intrigued me by his size. I had become
acquainted with him and written a yarn about him.
And White Cloud knew about it and was recalling it to my
attention.
Not another person in the room had known I had written
such a story. I asked White Cloud to suggest more details about
the plot of the story. He did so! He was quite correct.
Perhaps he read my subconscious mind to accomplish
this. I cannot say and the matter is unimportant.
What is of importance is, that on this particular night
White Cloud had no sooner finished his comment on my
Saturday Evening Post story about the old Ogallalah chief, than
we beheld Wehner's body sinking into its “dead" aspect again
and we knew that a substitution of souls was taking place.

129
 When the substitution had been made, and the body in
the chair had shown signs of reanimation, I beheld the muscles
of the face altering till the expression of a celebrated author of
English sea stories had become so plain that the identity might
be recognized. This author, by the way, “went over" in 1923.
When this entering spirit-soul had oriented himself to the
Wehner mechanism, he started a strange motion with his right
hand, while his elbow rested on the chair-arm. Afterwards
I grasped that the motion of the hand and wrist was really the
capricious swinging of an invisible monocle. . . .
“Good evening,” he greeted me and my companions.
“Good evening," I replied, properly awed if this was
indeed the speaking soul of the world-famous literary-man
whose books are known in every quarter of the globe.
“This is---," giving the name of the famous author who
had addressed me clairaudiently several days before.
Continuing to swing the invisible monocle, he turned to
me, seated on his left and asked whimsically as if identifying
himself---
“Well, William, have you learned the meaning of the
word ‘interclusions' yet?"
Here was a double-check on the incident of the previous
afternoon when I had been alone in my apartment and heard
obviously this man's thought-speech in my ear only. Wehner had
known nothing of the dictionary reference. I certainly had not
been expecting either the famous author's advent into George's
mechanism nor any allusion on his part to his dictionary
suggestion. How to explain it? It was easier and saner for me to
accept the obvious and concede that the clairaudient speech

130
was bona fide than it was for me to figure out the hocus-pocus in
it---if the episode were fabricated.
It might have been cryptothesis, or subconscious mind-
reading, I grant anew---if the incident had comprised allusion to
the word and nothing else. But I forthwith proceeded to have a
lengthy conversation with this particular author about the book
we were jointly engaged in writing, about literary work in general,
about incidents in his own writing career that were not generally
known and which were not in my subconscious mind at all.
Not only did he confirm his previous contact with me by
discussing audibly through George's larynx, points of story
development which we had previously debated clairaudiently, but
he gave me information about his own work while in mortal life
that would be priceless if the public could only be convinced that
I had actually talked with his “departed" soul.
I recall that I said to him: “lt seems a little bit unfair for
you to dictate literary productions for me out of your own fine
mind and experience, and by your skilled technique, giving them
to me for publication as my own. I feel that in putting out such
material over my own signature, I am masquerading under false
colors."
Smiling indulgently he answered: “My dear William, you
will discover as you go along in this work that such is the
procedure. In aiding you I am but paying my debt to others who
in my own mortal writing career, aided me. I got all my own
books psychically, from another dimension, exactly as every
author does, whether he is conscious of it or not. And when you
return to us after your own work is completed, you will repay not
me, but some other craftsman who needs higher supervision."

131
 “Are you still writing?" I asked him.
“Certainly,” he answered.
“What disposition do you make of your writings when
done in the higher realms of consciousness?"
“We have great libraries over here," he replied, “whose
size and contents your mind could not grasp. We write for people
in the higher dimensions exactly as we wrote in life for those in
the three-dimensional world. More often we compose, however,
for transmission to some mortal author to aid him in his career,
although he may accredit our help only in the sense of
‘inspiration.' "
“But why were you especially drawn to help me?"
“First, because I had read and admired your work
before I made the Transition, and was able to get close to your
character mentally and spiritually when I had shed the husk of
my physical self. Second, and the more important, I am
interested in you for the greater work of spiritual revelation which
you are attempting."
“You mean psychical work?"
“I mean the candid way in which you are telling the
public the truths about what each person actually encounters on
passing through the change called Death. It would make such a
vast difference in mortal psychology, and the interrelationships of
men everywhere, to have actual facts of common knowledge---
abolishing all fear of Death and thus making life itself more
beauteous---that we all want to assist in such revelations. You
would scarcely accredit the identities of some of the souls who
collaborate to give you the messages which you receive and
pass on to the public."

132
 MY CELEBRATED author-friend stayed with us almost a
half-hour, discussing literary methods, technique, careers of
other famous authors whom he claimed he was living among on
a higher plane---material which by no stretch of the human
imagination could have been in the subconscious brains of either
George or myself. Then he bade us a polite adieu and we beheld
George's physical body in the process of devitalization and
gradual moribund coma. We sat discussing among ourselves
some of the precepts we had just heard---for one of my friends
present was a prominent New York magazine editor---when
sudden vitality appeared to seize hold of George's body and a
woman's voice issued forth from his lips.
“Hello, Bill!" came the clear, surprised greeting. “How
long have you been interested in this sort of thing?"
“Who is it?" I inquired.
“June!" came the answer in a tone that seemed
exasperated that I did not grasp it at once. “June Mathis!" In a
flash I adjusted myself.
I was talking with the soul-personality of a famous
Hollywood scenarist who had “gone over" some two years before
on sudden demise while at a play in a New York theater.
Looking backward over ten years of the most dramatic of
experiences in psychical research, I am forced to assert that no
other one incident has since furnished me with more conclusive
and irrefutable proof that there is survival after mortal death, than
the appearance of this woman in George's physical instrument,
and the conversation which consumed the next half-hour
between us. Talking “face to face" with people who have made
the Passing is always a hair-raising experience.

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 I had known her on and off for a three-year period on the
West Coast while I had been out there making movies prior to
my “awakening." She had at one time been story-editor for one
of the big film companies and I had sat in her office for lengthy
periods and discussed prospective screen material with her.
Here was a person whom I had definitely known in life in
recent years, of whom I could ask questions, the answers to
which were known only to myself---thus proving the survival of
personality irrefutably.
“Haven't you heard of my Seven Minutes in Eternity
article in the American Magazine?" I bantered.
“Yes," she replied, “only just tonight. But the world over
here is a dozen times the size of the world of mortality, although
contacts are pretty much the same. I heard about you tonight
through your English author-friend and came along to be present
because of my great admiration for him.”
I had a way to check up on this woman---
unquestionably. It was a way that George Wehner could never
fabricate, if all this were a phenomenon of his subconscious
mind.
“Do you recall where I last met you in earth life?"
I asked.
Just before she “died" in the National Theater in New
York, June had married one Balboni---an Italian gentleman of
parts who I understand became head of Mussolini's state movie
monopoly in Italy. Husband and wife had made a movie of their
own from a script called the “Vienna Melody." But they had
decided this name not to be a good box-office “pull", so they
had---wittingly or unwittingly---purloined the name of my first
novel “The Greater Glory" for their picture. I had been required to

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sue them in the California courts for this bit of appropriation, and
had won a decision. They had recompensed me $2,500 for this
use of my title. In consequence, my first pleasant contact with
June had terminated in a legal coolness. However, tonight---
occupying George Wehner's body for the moment, she seemed
to have recovered from it.
But I recalled definitely where I had last seen her in the
physical flesh---a meeting that was known only to the two of us.
I had been out to the First-National-Warner studios in Burbank,
just before quitting California, and had inadvertently come face to
face with June at the flowered gate just behind the administration
building. None but the pair of us had been around. I had opened
the gate for her and spoken to her pleasantly. But the memory of
our recent lawsuit over the “Greater Glory" title had still rankled
and she had given me only a perfunctory nod. No matter! She
had come through to New York the next fortnight, gone to the
National Theater to witness a play, and dropped dead of heart
failure in one of the aisles between the acts. Now I wanted the
June Mathis spirit-soul in Wehner's body to tell me where we had
met face to face for the final time in California. The spirit in
Wehner “thought" for a time.
“Yes," she responded. “Out in the rear of one of the
executive buildings at First National Studios in Burbank,
California. We met at the gate over one of the walks that led to
the stages." This was absolutely accurate, but how could
George, the medium, know it---if it was George masquerading as
June?
Come on, you materialists and skeptics who declare
that “death ends everything" and that there is “no device
nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest." If June Mathis'

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discarnate but perfectly conscious and remembering spirit were
not located in George Wehner's organism that night in New York,
how did whatever personality WAS in George Wehner, know
how to reply to me accurately in the matter of this last spot and
place in which June and I had ever come face to face?
Try and explain it by your fantastic theories of
cryptothesis if you can! I say you can't do it---or rather, that our
“explanations" must be three times as fantastic as the one made
obvious by this Mathis-Wehner-Pelley episode. If you want more
positive proof than this that personality and consciousness
endure after physical demise, I'm afraid I can't give it to you.

I CANNOT report in detail the conversation that followed,

because it appertained to private contacts, relationships, and
business associations that June and I had experienced in
screenland. But here is the absolute proof on which I rely, that I
was talking to June, and that she is very much alive in her new
phase of consciousness.
She made intimate statements about her contacts and
business associates while in life, and confided data to me about
the personal affairs of people in movie-land, that I had to check
up on when I was next in California, and which I proved to be
absolutely correct!
Here was information about this woman's activities while
in mortal life, and her trade and professional relationships, that in
a manner of speaking were secrets “buried with her." By no
chance could they have been known to anyone present, either
the medium or myself. Yet here she was, telling them to me. And

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they turned out quite correct when I made inquiries in Hollywood
months later.
She told me what certain Hollywood officials were doing
in the business at the moment, what future plans they had for the
industry, which were to be trusted and respected in future
dealings, and which were untrustworthy and to be avoided.
Incidentally, she confided that she in turn had become a
great screen writer while in mortality through having a thorough
knowledge of psychics. She said that a world-famous movie star,
in whose career she assisted, had been clairaudient as I was
clairaudient. They had shut themselves away in a Hollywood
room together time after time and gotten story material from
others in a higher dimension which she had sold to Hollywood
producers without the slightest difficulty. All her professional life
and affairs were guided by instructions received in this manner.
It was a half-hour's talk with an old friend just as graphic
and real as though she was there in her own physical body. And
yet in Hollywood during her earth-life it had been "touch and go"
between us. She was no intimate of mine. We had met in trade
contacts as fellow authors and nothing more. There was no
especial tie between us, impelling her to look me up.
The visit ended and June withdrew. It was a perfectly
gorgeous time that I enjoyed with ”deceased" literary celebrities
on this particular evening of which I write. June had no sooner
vacated the Wehner mechanism than a soft, beautiful and
obviously cultured spirit-soul took possession of the Wehner
mechanism.
"Robert Louis Stevenson!" it announced.

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 THIS was pretty “tall" . . .
Were all the famous authors of Eternity crowding into the
Wehner body that night, intent on honoring me with their
felicitations? Frankly, I was a bit skeptical at first. But not after
Robert Louis started talking.
He began to tell us---myself, and the group that was
present that evening---of his “explorations" on the bottom of the
Pacific in the discarnate condition, since he had been living in
the unobstructed universe.
“Why are we thus honored?" I wanted to know.
“Authors," he explained gently, “are a special family unto
themselves in the Higher Dimensions. Their mutual profession
unites them together. We who have been over on this plane for
a time have come to identify the Great Souls who are incarnate
in the bodies of unknown people of the present earth-period, and
we want to do what we can to facilitate their present worldly
labors. As for my researches, I wish that I could prevail upon you
to take clairaudiently the result of my Pacific Ocean researches
since my demise in Samoa. I have been down to unbelievable
depths. You have no idea of what is hidden by that great body of
water. I was not only impressed by the submerged Lemurian
cities but by the forms of animal life that exist on the deep floor of
the Pacific. For instance, there are worms down there that never
have seen the light of day, that measure thirty to a hundred feet
in length. They are tremendously scaled, to withstand the water
pressure at the depths at which they live. Occasionally a
submarine volcano or earthquake precipitates them to the
surface, and when they appear at the top of the water, sailors
behold them and take tales of ‘sea-serpents' in to port. But
actually they aren't serpents---they're worms!"

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 The description of the submerged Pacific life that the
spirit purporting to be Robert Louis Stevenson gave us that night
made us forget that we were present at a sort of spiritualistic
seance.
“Will you take a manuscript clairaudiencly which I have
written?" he requested.
I was “snowed under" with literary work at the time, and
yet didn't wish to appear impolite.
“you come to me clairaudiencly as you can," I said, “and
if I can get your ‘voice' I'll transcribe your manuscript."
It was a couple of months before we actually made the
contact, however, and I only “captured" one chapter of the
Stevensonian manuscript. I still have it in my books of “scripts."

I HAVE never had much patience with the type of

investigator in psychical research who passes over the obvious
explanation for phenomena simply because it is obvious and
frantically hunts for causes of unusual happenings on the
principle: “---if something ain't wrong, t'aint right." Such a type is
not an investigator, anyway. He is not interested in getting at the
truth. He is perpetually witch-hunting fraud. If he cannot find
fraud, he is subconsciously disgruntled. He does not accredit
that in failing to find fraud he may have confronted new and
startling discoveries. He says: “If I have failed to find fraud,
it doesn't prove that fraud does not exist; it merely indicates that
I have not been smart enough to detect it."
All this is viciously negative. No engineer would go about
investigating the possibilities in electricity by first assuming that
electricity does not exist.

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 Yet that is precisely what happens in the matter of
psychical researchers of the type who try to convince themselves
of the truth of survival, negatively.

ENTERING into this subject with the serious attention

it deserves, we find people disposed to accredit only that which
they can perceive with their physical senses. They fail utterly to
take into account that those with whom they are establishing
contact are operating from a dimension where all the laws of
procedure applicable to the mortally finite do not maintain.
Consequently when they do not get the same kind of proof in
manifestation that they get in the material world, they are either
disgruntled or skeptical.
It is a childish attitude, but one that often works
incontestable harm, inasmuch as it leaves the researcher open
to constant doubtings, and these doubtings in turn reduce the
investigator to that state where all sorts of misrepresentations
occur from the dimension being investigated.
Now the alternative to all this is not to cast all
phenomena aside and say that it is falsehood and fabrication,
but to take into consideration the handicaps and limitations which
people on the Other Side are under in forming contact with This
Side, and appreciate in a way that our problems are their
problems as well, inverted or turned about.
They want to form contact with us and convince us of
their existence, but they have just as much difficulty in
manifesting in the conditions of our dimension as we have in
manifesting in theirs. So we have to look for proof of their
existence to the kind of manifestation that is reducible to the
medium in or from which they perform.

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 This is not rationalizing, but the truest part of truth, as
thousands of sincere and positive investigators have discovered
to their profit.
Which is all another way of saying that people on the
Other Side give evidence of their survival via the mental
senses---mentality being the medium in which they function---
whereas we on this plane give evidence of our survival via the
physical senses. And the wise constructive investigator has to
correlate the two.
Now and then this is done successfully, as in the
incident I am about to relate.

ONE EVENING in the Wehner sittings, a person who

Identified himself simply as “Frank” came through and talked with
one woman member of our group that I shall refer to hereinafter
as “Minnie." He claimed that just after the Spanish War he had
been killed in Detroit in a streetcar accident. Succeeding to
occupancy of George's mechanism for the moment, he
conversed with Minnie about himself and his ante mortem
adventures in a way that allowed Minnie absolutely to identify
him. They chatted as old friends, because Frank had reduced
himself, as it were, to the physical by being allowed to use
Wehner's mortal mechanism. I was auditor to the conversation
that went on. They referred to childhood pals and outings
together which by no manner of coincidence the medium
Wehner could have known about.
If the claim is made that the medium might have
possessed himself of all this knowledge beforehand, I want to
ask two questions: How did he know that Minnie was going to be
present that evening, so as to prepare himself and acquire all

141
this information in advance, and how could he possibly acquire a
plethora of such information that he had a ready and absolutely
accurate answer for any reference which she made to past
acquaintances that came to her mind at the moment?
It would have been necessary for the medium to spend
weeks running down the information and get it in such perfect
form that he knew the “ins and outs" of Minnie's life as
adequately as she knew it herself, in order to carry on such a
conversation as we listened to between them, that evening.
I AM PERFECTLY aware that a great library of
information exists among charlatans, which they exchange
among themselves for a consideration, informing them of the
past histories of those coming to sittings. But here was a case of
a woman who was an utter stranger to the medium, whom he did
not know beforehand was going to be present this particular
night, and who asked questions on the spur of the moment as
they came into her head about people who could not possibly
have been known to any others than herself and the friend who
had died at the time of the Spanish War. The streetcar accident
in Detroit she had not known about.
If there is a simple and reasonable explanation for such
happenings, why not accept it in preference for one that is so
involved and preposterous that it exceeds in phenomena the
obvious one of survival and contact?
Minnie and Frank talked together as old friends, and not
in one single reference or allusion was there a flaw in the
information, an evasion, or a hesitancy, in carrying on the
complete conversation.
But Frank was only a precursor of the much greater
evidence that was presently coming, proving survival

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definitely in an episode that stands out in my own thinking and
acceptance, higher and clearer than almost anything else that
has happened to me within recent years.
A few nights later we were in seance with Wehner and
the same moribund conditions of his body were evident as
before. Suddenly after one of his physical revivifications, the
voice of a little old lady---feeble as became her years---sounded
from the mouth of the medium. She was not talking in English,
however. She was talking in German. .
It was Minnie's grandmother directly addressing her, with
the intonation, accent, and idioms of that particular woman's
speech, which no one could have duplicated without knowing her
personally.
And Minnie's grandmother had been on the Other Side
something like forty years!
It was a somewhat poignant reunion. I sat to one side
and witnessed the whole of it.
Haplessly, however, I do not understand German.

THEY discussed different members of the family, details

concerning the last illness of Minnie's mother-who had Gone
Over a few weeks previously---idiosyncrasies of friends and
situations, domestic and financial, which prevailed among them.
After recalling little intimacies between them which had
occurred four decades before, and which Minnie had well-nigh
forgotten, the grandmother gave as near-perfect evidence of
positive survival as I have thus far confronted.
She proceeded to sing a droll little German folk song to
Minnie, with which she had rocked Minnie to sleep as a child!

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 HERE was no medium asking for cues and lead-lines on
another's life, fumbling and evading, suggesting and fabricating,
making slips and mistakes, and generally groping to present the
illusion of a discarnate person sending a message. Here was all
the evidence of a grandmother and granddaughter meeting after
a forty-year separation and chatting about life as they had lived it
in intimate contact in a little Iowa town among people long
forgotten.
It was not invited, the medium could not have known
who was to be present that evening---in fact, he knew almost
nothing of Minnie or her association with me or the work at that
time.
Even a little dachshund named “Tip" was brought into
the conversation, and Minnie had to search her memory to recall
that when she was about three years old her family had owned
such a dog for a time, but that her mother had been forced to put
it out of the way because a neighborhood puppy afflicted with
rabies had bitten it. Her mother was fearful that the dachshund
might develop hydrophobia and bite the young children with
whom it romped.
Her grandmother declared that the soul of that long-for-
gotten pet was now with her mother in the Higher Level of
conscious life, and was her incessant companion!
THE whole session was one of the highlights of my
psychical experiences. Other manifestations I have had---from
my own “dead" relatives and others---but none were quite so
clear and convincing as the rendering of that pathetic lullaby in
German, which by no reasonable chance could have been
fabricated under the circumstances. The medium would have
had to be possessed of the entire life-knowledge of those

144
who were functioning in this peculiar mental-physical manner,
and there was no source or sources of such information in
existence outside of the brain of Minnie herself!
In the face of such evidence is it gullibility to accept the
obvious explanation: that Minnie's grandmother was alive and
was functioning---conclusively proved to both mental and
physical senses---through George's organism?
The claim is often put forth that persons trying to identify
themselves from the Higher Levels use too peculiar allusions to
accomplish it. They call to mind descriptions of persons, scenes,
or episodes, which the one on the physical side thinks frail,
insignificant, or to which they do not have ready mental access in
memory. But suppose that a friend you have not seen or heard
from for twenty years suddenly calls you up on the telephone
from a distant city and says: "This is Joe Smith. Don't you
remember me? We went to school together twenty years ago in
Oshkosh. Don't you recall the picnic at Watson's Glen? I was the
boy with the red hair." You may have forgotten most of the
people in Oshkosh excepting those you have retained contact
with in the interim, you may have forgotten any specific picnic at
Watson's Glen, for you went to a score of them while you lived
as a child in Oshkosh. And scores of companions might have
had red hair. On the other hand, Joe Smith with the red hair saw
that picnic through wholly different eyes and re- membered you
distinctly. Furthermore, it may have been the only picnic he ever
attended at the Glen. The episode stands out in his memory and
he uses it to identify himself. But because it has not remained
with equal clearness in your memory is no proof that Joe Smith
is a hoax, or that the man at me other end of the line is an

145
impersonator. He may be, of course, but the chances are twenty
to one that he isn't, because he would know that sooner or later
he could recall something to you that would either irrefutably
identify him or expose him.
So it is in identifying those who have been graduated
from mortality over a period of time. Giving them me benefit of
me doubt leads to other contacts that gradually prove they are
bona fide acquaintances of other years.
Whereas to slam down the mental receiver on the hook
and assume impersonation and hoax as a policy, can result in
nothing but total termination of any contact whatever.
Results depend entirely on proper cooperation!

I ARGUE along these lines, not because I am over-

eager to establish contact with those who have gone and
therefore seize on such phenomena as reasonable proof, so
much as because I have found this psychological attitude to be
productive of the most astounding and convincing results.
Minnie's German grandmother talked to her for half an
hour on the most intimate phases of their family relationships,
referred to happenings back over forty years in a little city in
southern Iowa, and then terminated the visit finally with the
singing of the lullaby.
How could George Wehner ever have gotten that detail
concerning Minnie's family into his subconscious mind in a
million years, without having been a member of Minnie's family
himself? How could he have known what the lullaby was, which
Minnie's grossmutter had sung to her, nearly a half-century in the
past? Minnie had practically forgotten it herself. The voice which
came from Wehner's throat was not his own, but the old lady's

146
personal voice---something it would have been difficult to
fabricate. True, it was produced audibly by Wehner's vocal
chords, but the pitch or tone of anyone's voice is largely
determined by the tension or “frequency" of his own individuality.
How could the whole feat, I demand, have been
accomplished by other methods than those indicated---the
interchange of spiritual personalities in the one body? The whole
thing was done in a fully lighted room and without the slightest
preparation having been made in regard to who would be
present.
I have had plenty of cause to learn all about the breed
of psychic renegade who makes appointments to give some
student-seeker private “readings" of a phenomenal nature, and
who reads up on the innocent and gullible victim---eccentricities,
experiences and family complications---or gets such information
from colleague scoundrels, and equipped with such information
merely turns it back to the victim as psychically acquired. None
of this could have happened at the Wehner sittings, even if he
had been that kind of Sensitive---which emphatically he was not.
In the first place, George almost never knew who was going to
be present at these groups in my apartment until he had arrived
there and been introduced. Sometimes I did not know who was
to be there, myself. Many of my group's members would bring in
friends unannounced. But George---or whatever spirit-souls
came into his organism---would converse with these last minute
arrivals quite as intimately as Minnie's grandmother talked with
her about their family life back in Iowa.
Another phase of the strange business was this---

147
 Lest it be argued that Wehner as a “sensitive" could read
the subconscious minds of such sitters, how explain the fact that
time and time again throughout the balance of that summer of
1929, as we held the gatherings one evening a week, the
“occupying" souls would impart information---later found to be
absolutely correct---that had not been in our subconscious minds
at all? June Mathis did this several times. "
She chatted with me about Hollywood and movie-colony
affairs as if she might have come on from the West Coast within
the week, and when I next went through to California and
checked on what she had told me, I discovered she had been
right, to the hair.
It's merely a rationalization of something that can't be
otherwise than the obvious, to call all such phenomena “the
action of subconscious mind." What sort of action, and just what
part of subconscious mind? The rationalization in scores of
instances was far more unlikely and even bizarre or fantastic
than accepting the fact of consciousness-survival.

148
 Chapter IX

THOUGHTS ARE THINGS

HAVE uniformly kept to the viewpoint in

examining or receiving these higher and more
delicate exhibits of life, that personal actuality
and identity require establishing by something
more reliable than fantastic displays of
phenomena to physical senses. What I mean
is: it would satisfy most people to see with what they term “their
own eyes" the fully materialized body of a friend or relative that
had previously been lowered into a cemetery grave. They would
then subscribe to the evidence of their senses, or what they take
to be such, that the identical person was not dead but very much
alive and the question of survival no question at all. What they
want for proof is Form, or rather, Appearance. Given this, they
are appalled but satisfied.
On the other hand I have never yet encountered a
researcher in psychics of any prestige or experience who has not
agreed that nothing is easier to trick than the eye. When I say
trick, I do not mean intentional hoax. I mean illusion. If the
apparently materialized figure of one's grandfather walks out of a
medium's cabinet, corresponding as to size, features, whiskers
and general corpulence to what the old gentleman resembled a
week before his physical death, there is reasonable indication

149
that his Light Body has somehow gotten itself clothed with
ectoplasm and that it is indeed he whom one visited in the
country on so many pleasant vacations when one was young.
But if, in the conversations that ensue, the materialized
personality cannot describe where his farm was located, or give
the first names of his children, or carry on intelligent intercourse
concerning the principal happenings in his long and venerable
life, then something is decidedly wrong and though the projection
look like one's forebear, even to the mole below his eye, little or
nothing is proved beyond the fact that a replica of one's
grandparent's figure is existing in the room.
Speaking for myself, I have never been one to scurry
around from seance room to seance room, observing the “work"
of this or that medium, watching for deceits or witch-hunting
frauds, and taking delight in stirring up and recording fresh
psychical sensations to gratify curiosity or “prove" survival.
Somehow my inclinations didn't exercise that way. Particularly
they didn't exercise that way after I began to realize the terrific
potency of so-called Thought Forms. Also in my Higher
Instruction I continually had hints as to Astral Husks of people
who had in turn “died" out of the next elevated octaves and left
their more tenuous “remains" for possible occupancy by
mischief-makers or renegades.
What I did instinctively was to concede the probability of
spiritual survival, make it after a fashion a fundamental of my
thinking, and thereafter let things happen. Uniformly, I say,
they happened. But when it came to checking validities
and identities, I found myself giving forty times as much
credence to a proof of survival contained in the German
folksong rendered by Minnie's grandmother as I did to

150
materializations that pounded tables, creaked chairs, levitated
trumpets or picked up some fat man and hung him from the
steam pipes. I say this, no matter what familiar aspects such
materializations take. After all, personality is a thing of spirit. I
know you, and you know me, directly and definitely because of
what is embedded in the way of knowledge of one another and
our concerns, in our minds. If you die physically while I am owing
you a sizable sum of money, and you find a way to contact me
after your passing, either through a clairaudient message or a
mediumistic materialization, and cannot tell me how much the
sum was and under what conditions the debt was contracted,
I have every right to entertain reservations as to your identity till
you do tell me. “Dead or alive," you may well remember all right,
whether in your new orientation you may have forgiven me the
debt or not. So what I call Mind Proofs have been the criteria of
identity on which I have relied up across the last dozen years,
to establish implied contact with personalities I have known in
overcoats of flesh.
I would far rather have two or three irrefutable Mind
Proofs to demonstrate to me that the “dead" are alive, than all
the ectoplasmic materializations that could be crowded into a
seance room the size of Grand Central Terminal. Again I say,
Thought Forms and Astral Husks offer too many chances for
wilful or witless deceiving.

THE OTHER day, visiting in Baltimore, one of my

colleagues told me of a medium whose seance he had recently
attended, who materialized some twenty-two separate and
distinct persons during the course of the evening---a remarkable
feat no matter how you view it. Among these persons was my

151
friend's own sister who had passed over while a girl but attained
to her majority in the elevated octave.
This sister succeeded in accomplishing a materialization
so opaque that as she sat down in the chair next to her brother,
she caused the chair to creak beneath her “weight." She sat
beside her brother for ten to twenty minutes, touched him
occasionally as an affectionate woman will, discussed family
complications from the angle of intimate knowledge and
deported herself to all intents and purposes exactly as she might
have done had she returned in her physical body.
The thing that made the materialization of interest to me
particularly, was my host's description of the beautiful flowing
robe which he said his sister wore. Her materialization was so
complete that she allowed him to take a fold of the “fabric" in his
hands and stretch it between his eyes and the light. He told me
that it seemed to be of the same wonderfully soft substance that
composes a bat's wing---yet possessed of a sheen as exquisite
as rayon. Anyhow, it had no weave in it.
All the same, I was far more convinced of her
hyperdimensional personality from the fact that she had seemed
to know everything which had passed between her brother and
myself in the political campaign of five or six years ago, and that
she had been keeping track of my own personal activities along
patriotic lines since and imparted to her brother details of them
which he could have had no way of knowing about unless he had
remained a member of my intimate personal circle. Which
decidedly he had not. . . .
On the other hand, consider the episode described to
me by Dr. Henry Hardwicke and his wife of Niagara Falls, N. Y.,
the first time I visited at his home to arrange with him for going to

152
North Carolina and lecturing on psychics at Galahad School in
Asheville.

PERHAPS you may have heard of the celebrated medium,

Marjory, wife of the physician, Dr. Crandon of 10 Lyme Street,
Boston, who attracted national attention for her remarkable
exploits in connection with her deceased brother, Walter
Stimpson, during the 1920's. If not, I had better mention her, for
it ties into the Hardwicke incident I am about to relate.
As mutual acquaintances told me the story, Dr. Crandon
had been a physician in Niagara Falls, N. Y., before going to
Boston to take up practice there. Being a local colleague of Dr.
Hardwicke's, my later psychics professor of course knew him
well. In fact, I understand they had been brother physicians in
the same neighborhood. But in due time the Crandons moved to
Boston, where Mrs. Crandon's brother, Walter Stimpson, was
killed in a motorcar accident about 1922.
Mrs. Crandon naturally grieved for the lad, by no means
being aware of her own mediumistic abilities or what was
specifically to result from his “death."
One night---and I admit that I am now relying on memory
for the details---the doctor's wife went to dinner at a friend's
home in Newton or Newton Highlands, when, after talking about
Walter, she felt a strange lassitude stealing over her. Presently
her head went down on her arm amid the teacups. Guests
thought she had fainted or dropped into a nap. Instead, her
husband's quick examination showed her to have fallen into
coma. Suddenly as though from the center of the uncleared
table, the literal and audible voice of the “dead" brother, Walter,

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spoke to the whole dinner group. He greeted them cheerfully and
energetically, explaining in the following few minutes that if the
actinic rays could be filtered out of the illumination in the room,
it would be seen that he had taken ectoplasm from his sister's
body and fashioned it into a synthetic larynx through which he
was addressing them.
This was later found to be so, because photographs of
that ectoplasmic larynx were taken on another occasion. There
was nothing "phony" about such pictures because I have
personally seen and examined them, and I know something
about “trick photography" as a result of my eight years at
moviemaking in Hollywood. . . . Anyhow, that was the beginning
of the Walter demonstrations. They became of outstanding
importance in psychical research, because over the next three
years Walter materialized his hands and caused some seventy-
two sets of his fingerprints to be impressed on dental plate wax
under conditions which precluded all trickery, and upon
comparison with prints left by Walter on toilet articles and objects
in his room before his death, were attested by the Boston Police
Department to be irrefutably authentic. I may come back to
Walter later. But to get back to Dr. Hardwicke and Thought
Forms.

IT WAS a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1932 that I

sat with Dr. Hardwicke and wife in their living room in Niagara
Falls and our conversation turned upon Walter and Marjory.
“One of the most marvelous things I have heard of in
connection with psychical research," remarked Dr. Hardwicke,
“happened right here in this room. Dr. Crandon was back here in

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the city and had dropped in for a half-hour's chat to renew old
acquaintances. It was not quite dark and we had the lamps
switched on. Half a dozen relatives and neighbors had come in.
We were sitting in chairs about this room when all of a sudden
we heard Walter's voice---audible to all of us. ‘Hello, Henry!' he
cried, addressing me. ‘Think I'm dead, do you? Man, what
couldn't I show you if I could only use that nice rich yellow aura
of yours!' I recognized the boy as I had known him a couple of
years before. ‘Go ahead,' I assented jokingly." Whereupon Dr.
Hardwicke recounted to me how he presently felt a strange
drowsiness stealing over him, and a few minutes later, to all
appearances, had dropped fast asleep. Whereupon his wife,
Kate---who later came to Galahad School with him---took up and
completed the narrative. “Walter started talking to us," said Mrs.
Hardwicke, “about the terrific potency of Thought Forms. When
we thought positive and dynamic thoughts, he contended, we
actually projected a literal creation into the Higher Octave
universe. ‘For instance, and to prove what I mean,' Walter said,
‘Suppose you pull off the stunt of “thinking into existence" the
light-pattern body of a bird on the cornher of the upright piano.
Then I'm going to see if I can take ectoplasm out of Henry's
carcass and coat the pattern body so that all of you can see it.
Wait!' We waited," narrated Mrs. Hardwicke. “And believe it or
not, in a moment or so we were conscious of a strange fluttering
on the corner of the piano among the mementos and
photographs. A small sparrow hawk took off from the top of the
piano---while Henry continued to sleep---and darted three times
around the room. Finally it came to light on Mrs. Jones's head."

155
 The name of this lady wasn’t Jones, by the way, but it
will serve to describe what presently happened as Mrs.
Hardwicke related it.
“Mrs. Jones let out a startled shriek and instinctively
raised her hands to brush it off. ‘Don't touch it!' cried Walter, still
talking audibly to us, though none of us could see him. But he
spoke too late. Mrs. Jones had already touched it."

I MIGHT say, myself, by the way, that this same Mrs.

Jones was present there in the living room when the Hardwickes
told me these details, and she corroborated all of them. In fact,
she interjected at this point. “It felt exactly as though I'd thrust the
tips of my fingers into a jar of cold menthol. But the bird did fly off
my head at the contact."
“I’ll say it did," added Mrs. Hardwicke. “It swooped three
times around the room almost faster than the eye could follow it,
and then made a swift dart for my right ankle. Moreover, it came
to rest clinging to that ankle. Its tiny claws cut through my silk
stocking and drew blood. I screamed and tried to kick it off.
Everyone here knows that the tiny wounds that its claws made,
were two to three weeks in healing up and disappearing."
“What became of it?" I asked both Hardwickes.
“Walter's voice broke in," concluded Kate, “with the
exclamation: ‘I guess this thing has gone far enough. I'll take the
ectoplasm off.' Again, believe it or not, that tiny sparrow hawk
simply dissolved from its grip on my flesh. It seemed as though it
turned to smoke and was gone. ‘I wish I could get it through your
heads,' Walter told us, ‘that you people in mortal bodies use your
minds to manufacture such Thought Forms a thousand times a
day, and that those Thought Forms are literal things---or they

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would be literal in your dimension if they could only be coated
with etheric substance. Be careful what you think! You're
projecting literal creations into the higher octaves, just as that
sparrow hawk was nothing but your own envisionment.' "
I had no reason to doubt the Hardwickes or to assume
that they had any motives for hoaxing me with such an anecdote.
Later I was to see and possess actual camera snaps of similar
thought forms, photographed through the filters of a quartz lens.
Such cameras do not lie. They retain what is THERE.
I learned of an experiment conducted in New York in
1930 or thereabout, when a research worker assembled six
people before a bare white wall. On the wall he marked out an
area six feet high and about thirty inches wide. At it he pointed
his quartz-lens camera and inserted a plate.
“I want you six people," he said, “to imagine with all the
thought force at your command, the literal presence of Abraham
Lincoln standing in that space, as in life. I'm going to keep my
camera lens opened on it and see what it produces." The thing
that resulted was a queer impression of six Lincolns,
superimposed one over the other, but with features of face and
figure that could be recognized anywhere.
He had photographed literal projections from six human
minds. I mention them as contention that it may be entirely
possible for a person to go into a seance room wanting to
contact a certain departed loved one, hold the thought of that
person's appearance in his mind, and get a Thought Form
coated with the medium's ectoplasm, in result. The eye could be
tricked, of course. But unless there were intelligent and
motivating spirit inside the Thought Form---grandparent or

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otherwise---I for one would be skeptical as to whether he was my
forebear, dead or alive, real or fancied.
I would want him to converse with me on what he had
done specifically when as a boy I visited his home in Lynn,
Mass., and report precisely what subjects we had discussed
during the long talks we had together. Then I would accept that
he was father's dad, indeed. . . .

YET IN my own case, and continuing the same thought,

consider this---
In the late spring of 1932, it happened that I delivered a
series of five lectures in Norfolk, Va., on precisely these subjects.
Night after night, down to my right in the audience as I faced
it from the platform, I noticed an important-looking gentleman
of middle age in a naval uniform. Finally, toward the end of the
week, I was moved to go down and speak to him.
“I'm Captain J---," he told me, “of the United States
Battleship M---, which is laid up in dry dock here this month. I'm
Scotch by ancestry and was born with the gift of second sight. All
my life I've been intrigued by these demonstrations of higher
existence, but I've been coming out to your lectures here night
after night for quite a different reason than to hear you speak.
Much of what you've said, I've known for years."
“Well," I asked, “what has brought you out?"
“The demonstrations of help you get from the two
gentlemen on the platform with you," he replied.
“Nobody has been with me on the platform!" I exclaimed.
“Even the chairman went down and sat in the front row of the
audience after introducing me."

158
 “Maybe," laughed the navy man, “that's what you think!
But I've been able to see two personages on that platform with
you. One is a tall, dignified man in a flowing white robe with a
bright golden beard and blue eyes. His job seems to be scanning
that audience with an eagle eye to make sure no one in it
intends to do you harm. Call him your invisible bodyguard, for
that's what he seems to be. The other man on the platform is an
elderly gentleman in modem dress, with a short gray beard and a
mane of iron-gray hair. Also he has a peculiar mannerism of
pushing his beard down flat upon his chest and tilting his
right eyebrow with a sharp twinkling eye beneath." I recall that
I gaped a bit. He was describing my grandfather Frederick
William, to a tee.
“Well," I asked, “why is he there with me?"
“He seems to act in giving you your cues," replied the
captain. “Hour after hour as you've been speaking here this
week, he'll step close to your left shoulder as you conclude a
thought or exposition of some point in your discourse. He'll
whisper something into your ear. Immediately inspiration will
break over your face and you'll pick up a fresh thought and go
on with it.
Grandfather Pelley might “materialize" the husk of
himself in a hundred seance rooms, but not one of them would
so convince me of his survival and literality as did Captain J's
perfect description of him that night in Norfolk.
It's the spirit-soul identification that convinces me of
the correctness of such contacts. You can have the bat-wing
robes on the materialized bodies of your sisters. But I want my
deceased grandpop to tell me what he spanked me for in the
cellar bulkhead in the year 1894. If he remembers---as I
remember---I'm prepared to concede he's still the literal
Frederick William. . . .

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 Chapter X

WONDER BENEATH A CHAIR

ND YET materializations do have their place

in persuading the ultra-skeptical that there are
forms of life, or octaves of reality, that are
entirely apart from the state we call Mortality. I
bring to mind an instance of this in the case of
a certain medical doctor who came down to the summer school
in Asheville in 1932. I will give him the name of Dawley. That
wasn't his name---as I remarked of the woman in the previous
chapter who knocked the sparrow hawk off her head---but I do
have to be careful about using correct names in pages such as
these, because of the unwelcome publicity from curiosity seekers
that immediately results when such a book as this is published. I
can, however, locate the gentleman if a situation arises where
my claims are seriously challenged. Dr. Dawley came down to
Asheville with his wife and remained throughout the summer.
Originally he had been a physician at the Massachusetts
General Hospital in Boston, but subsequently had become one
of the outstanding endocrinologists at the Rockefeller Institute in
New York.

160
 Late one night in August of 1932, I sat with him on a
moon-lit veranda in Asheville and asked him how or why he had
contrived to acquire an interest in the subjects I was publicizing
at the school.
“To explain satisfactorily," he said, “I would have to tell
you of a thing that happened when Ada and I were first married."
Ada was his wife, a former nurse at the Massachusetts
General Hospital, whom he had married some ten to fifteen
years in the past. She was sitting a few feet away, and confirmed
what he presently said.

WE HAD not been married many weeks," Dr. Dawley

related, “before I became conscious that Ada was leaving our
apartment in Boston every Thursday night, going out somewhere
in the city and not returning till after midnight. As she volunteered
no information explaining these trips, I began to grow suspicious.
Where was she going, and why didn't she offer to explain her
absences? It may have been a caddish thing to do, but I admit
that after several weeks of it, I made up my mind to follow her.
“The night that I did so, I saw her go over to Huntington
Avenue and finally turn into a brownstone-front that was in every
way a private residence. Then I loitered around outside till she
reappeared---which was nearly one o'clock. I accosted her and
demanded to be told what she had been doing in the place.
"She answered me: ‘Next Thursday night, you come
along with me. I haven't told you about these Thursday-night
absences of mine because I didn't think you'd be interested.
Your mind is too scientific.'
”I waited with ill-concealed impatience till the following
week, however, and when Thursday night came, she kept her

161
promise. Into the brownstone-front I went with her, and presently
I found myself in a big front room furnished only with a rug, a
floor lamp, a victrola, and a ring of hard-bottomed chairs. There
were twelve to fifteen of them.

"THE PEOPLE to whom I was presently introduced were

refined, educated, and in every way desirable to know. They
presently took their places in the big front room, alternating a
man and a woman around the circle. Ultimately someone started
the victrola playing soothing music. We were instructed to join
hands. Ada was sitting on my left. I took her hand and the hand
of the strange woman on my right. It seemed rather silly at the
moment, but I was determined to go through with it and learn
what had made such demands on the Thursday-night time of my
new wife. Some ten or fifteen minutes we had been sitting so,
when a startling thing happened. . . .
“Ada's chair began to wobble. It began to heave and
rock, as though an invisible force were pushing it upward from
the floor. Finally with a little cry, she got out of it. The leader---
I suppose you'd call him a medium---made a quick cry for us not
to break hands, but there was no doubt that something had
pushed Ada's chair upward and an instant later it went over with
a thud.
“Something was actually under that chair. I was as close
to it as I am to you at this moment. It was a great rotating ball of
substance that looked like greyish-white molasses candy, some
two feet in diameter, in convulsive motion. I watched it, stupefied.

162
 “Finally it propelled itself out before me in the center of
the circle. The room was well-enough lighted to watch closely
exactly how it behaved. It writhed and contracted and elongated
and took shape. Then it began to assume the form of a human
torso, with arms and legs growing at the corners. A protuberance
like a head came out. What I was actually watching was the
‘build-up' of a mature human body---a woman's body. Believe it
or not, by the end of ten to twelve minutes a fully formed and
respectably dressed girl of some twenty-five to thirty years was
fully molded in the center of the group and to all intents and
purposes quite the counterpart of any of the mortal women in
that room. Somebody broke the chain of hand-holding then, and
righted the wooden chair which had tipped over under Ada. This
strangely materialized person thereupon sat down in it. Right
beside me!
“I gather that she rather enjoyed my stupefaction. ‘Well,
Doctor,' she queried me, ‘what do you think of that?’"
I interrupted the Doctor to comment: “Then Ada had
Simply been going but each night to some sort of spiritualistic
seance? Hadn't you ever had experience of such phenomena?"
"No," said Dawley, "and if I hadn't seen what I had, with
my own eyes, I would have taken it for fact that I had married a
psychopath---that is, if she'd ever come back to the apartment
and tried to explain what happened at these meetings she
attended."
“Well, the woman was fully materialized. What happened
next?"
“Although I'd seen the apparition shape itself right before
my eyes," Dawley went on, “I still didn't know what to make of it.

163
A fully grown and handsome young woman had evolved out of
the great blob of ectoplasm that had somehow gotten under
Ada's chair---from where, I couldn't say. She sat down beside me
with a sort of Mona Lisa smile on her face and dared me to be
skeptical. I seemed to be the only one in the room who was
particularly startled. I remember that I asked her, ‘Are you real,
or am I suffering some sort of illusion?' She replied to me, ‘Oh,
I'm real enough. Would you care to make an examination?'
Being a physician, I said to her, ‘Yes, I would-if you'll permit it.'
She said that she would. You see, I wanted to find out to my own
satisfaction if she was just a husk or shell of a female, or a
regular woman all the way through."

DR. DAWLEY paused to toss the ash of his cigar over

the veranda railing.
“Well," he said, “I motioned to Ada, and we took the
materialized lady into a small side bedroom. I made an
examination of her, all right. And believe me, she was as solid
and substantial, internally as well as externally, as my own bride,
Ada. That is what astounded me. All her organs were quite as
normal as any living woman's---I mean any woman in physical
flesh. She got a great kick out of my increasing stupefaction.
“ ‘So you expected to find me a paper-mache lady, did you?' she
bantered when I admitted I was satisfied.
“’I don't know what I expected,' I replied.
“Anyhow, we went back to the group. And for the next
half-hour I got a discourse on hyperdimensional reality that
altered entirely my thinking and my practice.
“What she told me was, that people on ‘dying' merely
pulled their spiritual souls or thinking consciousness out from

164
their gross physical flesh, as a more tenuous pattern-body at
once went into function on a higher frequency of electronic
energy in Matter. They were by no means plunged at once into
any theological courtroom, with God himself up on the dais to
‘judge the quick and the dead.' There was no sensation
occurring to them that they were actually ‘dead' at all. They were
continuing to exist in the same scenes and orientations that they
had known in mortality. They could see people in this
materialistic third dimension but conversely the people of the
third dimension couldn't see them. What this girl had actually
done, after a clumsy fashion of explaining it, had been to lower
her vibrations to a point where she became perceptible to people
of the third dimension---using the medium's ectoplasm to solidify
her Light-Self and reduce it to a substantiality where I could see
her and touch her as I had lately done in the bedroom. It was a
real education in psychics that I got that night, and for a long
time afterward I couldn't make out whether I fancied it or not. Of
course, whether I fancied it or not made not the slightest
difference in the actuality of the conditions that people like her
confronted when they passed through the change called Death.
Still, it was all so novel, and counter to what orthodox theology
had gotten me to believe since boyhood, that it took a bit of time
for adjustment."
“How did it end?" I asked Dr. Dawley. He cast a
mischievous glance at his wife. “I’ll bet you'll never believe me,"
he said, “but as I went on talking to this strangely
materialized young woman, it seemed to me that she was
not quite as big as she had been ten minutes before. In
fact, she seemed to be shrinking in size, right before my eyes.

165
 I remember that I glanced down at her feet. They failed to touch
the floor. Really, she was like the fantasy in Alice in Wonderland
when Alice ate the Wonderful Cake that reduced her to a size to
go through the gate into the magical garden. The girl was
growing smaller as I watched---and as we talked.
“By the end of a second ten minutes, she was obliged to
jump down off the seat of the kitchen chair or she might have
hurt herself getting off it at all. She finally walked out into the
center of the circle, a doll-like creature some twenty inches high.
And yet she still kept getting smaller.
“When I last could distinguish her voice, she was
standing out in the middle of the group, a little figure, still
perfectly formed, some fourteen inches high. Then she seemed
to pivot on her heel. With a little wave of her hand to me, she
was gone. Yes, sir, gone! She had shrunk and evaporated into
the atmosphere of that room not unlike the disappearance of
smoke that dissolves into the atmosphere after coming from the
stack of a locomotive."

IT WAS a bizarre recital.

“So, after that," I said, “I take it you continued an interest
in psychical research?"
“I certainly did," he answered. “I've never been able to
get enough of it. Ada and I went regularly to the seances on
Huntington Avenue every Thursday evening after that. I saw
many strange types of materialization but nothing to equal that
girl who ‘created herself’ from a ball of effluvia under Ada's chair
and then shrank to the proportions of a doll before my eyes. "

166
 “lt was remarkable," I contended, “that she could make
herself so solid. The medium must have been able to part with a
lot of ectoplasm."
“I have often wished," Dawley told me, “that I could have
had a set of scales at hand to weigh her, during that physical
examination."
“You would doubtless have discovered," I said, “that she
by no means was as heavy as a normal mortal woman of the
same proportions. We find uniformly in these materializations
that if the medium weighs, say, a hundred sixty pounds at the
commencement of the seance, and the materialized entity tips
the scales at, say, eighty pounds, then the medium during the
phenomena will reduce in weight to eighty pounds."
“In other words, it's a weighable physical substance that
departs the medium's body and is used by the Light Body of the
visiting spirit-soul to make itself opaque and substantial?”
“That's it," I answered. “And I understand that such
ectoplasmic ‘material' has in several celebrated cases been
severed in a chunk from the materialized body, taken into a
laboratory and analyzed. The great medium, Valentine, permitted
this to be done on one occasion during an American visit. The
ectoplasm was found to contain exactly the chemical
components and in much the same ratios, as exist in the
ordinary physical vehicle. . . ."

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 Chapter XI

WE LAY A GHOST

NTRODUCE the subject of discarnate

existence in any mixed company and you are
certain to find one individual present who
responds positively and not a little pityingly,
“I don't believe in ghosts!" They say it as
though it settled the controversy as to whether
ghosts had actuality or not. Usually the tone of voice implies, “---
and I do not wish to hear any more about them either." Such
people are saying, “I have never had any authenticated
experiences with souls in a non-mortal condition and had just as
soon not have. I would not only be frightened if I did, I'd be plain
scared out of my senses." All of which are assertions based on
purest ignorance. Undoubtedly we have people somewhere in
the United States who do not believe in radio, and I ran across
an old mountain woman down in the State of North Carolina a
few years ago who did not believe in the moving pictures. “Come
up to Asheville," I invited, “and I'll take you to a movie show. You
can see that pictures do move, for yourself."
“No," she repeated, “I said that I didn't believe in them."

168
 I have long since suppressed any feeling of obligation to
convince the “I don't believe in ghosts" people that they should
change their views. Mature people, I note, rarely quarrel with
ignorance. Besides, most of those nonbelievers are probably
afflicted with a prenatal fixation. It is not so much discarnation
that they fear as the recognitions and admittances that
discarnation carries with it. They have plunged into physical
materiality as a sort of spiritual anesthesia, to forget the terrible
obligations of karmic adjustments, consciously. They want to live
one day at a time on this plane and persuade themselves that
things are what they seem, or at least what mankind commonly
names them. To admit the facts of discarnation, to witness
phenomena attesting to the actuality of life in more tenuous
octaves, would make a perpetual controversy as to the value or
reliability of this one. They like to think they are practical-minded,
meaning that those who are wiser in such matters are
featherheads. What they truly mean is, that their standards will
become upset whereby they measure the marvel known as
Existence and lest it happen, they will have more peace of mind
if you will change the subject. Then again, there is always the
terror of confronting a situation with which the beholder has no
weapons to cope.
It is the old, old panic of meeting the dinosaur without
the knotted club.

THROUGHOUT my childhood, I recalled the atmosphere

of the weird, with which I heard father tell of phenomena in a
house into which he and mother moved when first married,
though not the house where I was born. Those were the days

169
when young couples spent most of their engagement period
getting their forthcoming home ready and matrimony was the
final act enabling them to move in together and inhabit it.
Father at the time was foreman of a shoe factory in
Lynn, Mass., attending divinity school nights. He had proposed
to mother and been accepted. They rented a modest cottage and
proceeded to get it ready for occupancy. Movable rugs were
unknown back there in the Eighties; each room was measured
and carpets bought, cut and sewed to fit. Newspapers were laid
down against the flooring and then the finished carpets tacked
along the edges.
The only time father had for such work was very early
morning, his evenings as aforesaid being taken up with his
studies in Boston Seminary. He would arise at four-thirty or five
o' clock as the world was just getting light, go out to the new
home and work on the carpets till seven.
One morning he had let himself into the house and was
sitting cross-legged on the floor, sewing carpets in an upper front
room, when he distinctly heard footsteps in the empty rooms
below. Thinking that perhaps the landlord had come in, he went
to the edge of the banisters and called down, “Hello! Who's
there?"
He received no response to his summons. But he heard
the footsteps retreating across naked floors, out toward the
kitchen.
Going downstairs he passed from room to room, looking
in each. No one seemed to be anywhere in the house. He called
again. No one could have retired through the back door because
he declared that he found it securely locked. He was about to
explore the cellar when he gave a start of fright. He was hearing

170
the same foot treads in the rooms above his head. Whoever had
gotten into the house must have managed to get above stairs.
If there was one thing that my dad possessed, it was
plenty of moral courage. I can believe that he did what he says
he did: moved cautiously up the flight to ascertain without giving
his own presence away, in which room the steps were being
made.
Outside the sun was coming up. Street vistas were still
filled with mist, with an occasional early laborer going to work
afoot, carrying his dinner pail. No noises were perceptible
anywhere but those footfalls right there in his "new" house.
In a moment more, father says he heard the footsteps
coming from a small bedroom at the back end of the upper
hallway. Creeping forward, he threw open its door.
The room was as barren of either furniture or intruders
as it was the day the structure was built.
Father at that time was one of those who “didn't believe
in ghosts." He entered the room and looked all around him. He
even pulled open the door of the room's one closet. Still he found
no one.
And while he was debating the origin of the noises, the
same uncanny footfalls sounded in the bigger room on the other
side of the corridor. And the only way that an intruder could have
gotten into that opposite room would have been to pass through
the walls. Right there my parent began to get scared. . . .
Nevertheless he pussyfooted across the corridor and
threw open the larger bedroom's door. That room too was blank.
Shutting the corridor doors to both rooms, he debated whether
he should bolt. But waiting with his hands on both door knobs to

171
see in which room the footsteps sounded next, he suddenly
heard them distinctly in the smaller bedroom. He pushed its door
open.
Again he could see nothing, and with the morning sun
well risen, the compartment was well lighted.
His terrors got the better of him then, and he departed
that house with alacrity. Next morning when he returned, he had
a companion. But as the next morning, and several mornings
after that, the phenomena were not repeated, he began to take
courage. Maybe it had only been a freak of the house's
acoustics. Saying nothing to mother, in order not to frighten her
and spoil her happiness in their new nest, he finally got the
carpets laid and the furniture in. They were duly married and
began their housekeeping.
They heard no more footfalls on the premises, but
mother had not been domiciled in the rooms a week before
father saw that some strain was beginning to tell upon her. She
was restless and worried. Finally he asked her what was
troubling her.
“Perhaps you'll think I'm silly," she answered him, “but
something's decidedly wrong with this tenement."
“How do you mean, wrong?" father wanted to know.
”It only happens at night, after you've gone to your
classes, when I'm washing supper dishes at the sink in the
downstairs pantry."
“What happens?"
“That's just what I can't say. I only wish I could. I hope
you won't laugh at me when I tell you that on several occasions
I've had the direct and positive sensation of a strange man's
entering and taking his position behind me while I'm finishing up
my pantry work."

172
 “A man! Have you seen him?"
“No, but I've ‘felt' him."
Father then ‘fessed up what had happened to him while
laying the carpets.
“Let's move out of this place," mother said firmly.
They did move out of the place---into the house where
later I was born. But the mystery continued. Another young
married couple with whom they were acquainted, took the place
and lived there subsequently. "I hear you've moved," mother said
to this young woman, meeting her of an afternoon.
"We certainly did," the other replied. “I can tell you that
Henry Avenue house has a haunt!"
“Then you discovered him too!"
“I wouldn't keep on living in the place for a million dollars
a week. Why, every evening when I'd go to wash the dishes at
the pantry sink, someone would come in and stand behind me.
I'd swear I could hear him breathing! . . ."

THIS sort of phenomena would seem to postulate that

discarnate bodies possess enough weight to cause floor boards
to creak, or to give off sounds of their literal footfalls, even
though not opaque enough to be seen by the eye. Flammarion
the great astronomer, in his studies into the phenomena in three
hundred and seventy-six such “thaunted" houses in France and
Belgium, came to such conclusion. How it is done is beyond
determination by present day physics. In his celebrated report on
the mysterious happenings in Calvados Castle he relates how
the discarnate, operating on the premises, delighted among
other spookish pranks to clump through the great rooms of the

173
place with what seemed to be small boards attached to its feet---
boards twenty inches long and eight to ten inches wide. It
seemed to be able to pass through the walls with these freakish
appendages, moving from one room to another.
One night the Abbe of Calvados, having undertaken to
sleep in one of the bedrooms in aid of Flammarion's
investigations, heard these prankish footsteps coming across the
room next his own. The abbe was undertaking to sleep in a fat
French featherbed. They made affidavits that the board footfalls
not only approached through the wall across from the foot of the
bed, but traversed the width of the room and mounted the said
bed over the foot-rail. Across the bed they “walked" within an
arm's length of the abbe's quaking body. Moreover, the obese
feather bolster showed the imprint of the oblong “feet" as they
made their final imprint on the pillow and then passed out
through the wall against which the head of the bed was shoved.
We can conjecture that the abbe got to the devil out of there as
fast as his holy legs permitted him.
What we are trying to do, groping about as to why these
noises and imprints are perceptible, is to reconcile the physics of
this octave with the physics of octaves transcendent to our own.
The time may come when we will do it. At present we are only
scratching the surface of facts about the physics of our own
octave. But as partial explanation of why such phenomena
should occur at all, I can fall back on my own strange experience
in 1929 in “laying" one of these locality-bound discarnates.

174
 I WAS typing in my flat on West 53rd Street in New York
one August morning when the doorbell rang and I pushed the
gadget to admit a lady member of our Manhattan psychical
group who had lately taken a job as caretaker of an old mansion
up on the Albany Post Road above Ossining. She had taken the
job not so much for the money involved as for the seclusion it
gave her to finish a book on which she was working.
“I want you to come up to that old house and stay there
throughout one night," she begged.
“Well, what do you think is wrong with it?" I asked.
“The place has got a haunt that's a honey," she
responded in her usual practical manner of expression. “Around
midnight some nights, the worst sort of mischief breaks loose up
in the third floor, and it's now getting so bad that even I can't
stand it."
My caller was well-versed in most phases of psychical
research, so if she maintained that things were bad, they must
be very bad indeed.
“I might as well tell you," she went on, “that the old place
is going to wrack and ruin because of the high jinks that go on
inside it. The family that formerly occupied it is now living in
Europe. When they gave it up and moved abroad, they took all
their furniture out and stored it excepting some wicker chairs and
a bed that I put on the screened porch overlooking the stretch of
lawn to the south. There isn't a stick of furniture anywhere else in
the place. There aren't even electric lights on in the house; I use
an oil study-lamp myself, when I want to work evenings. They
knew of my interest in psychical phenomena and offered me a
free home there for the summer if I wished to stay and keep the

175
neighborhood boys from breaking the windows. But I'm telling
you again, the fumadiddles are too much. They're getting on my
nerves."
“Well," I persisted, “specifically what happens?"
“Racket!" Hazel answered. “Racket and strange
greenish lights! You'd think some midnights that a whole family
was kicking wash-boilers over the third floor and down most of
the stairs. And then there's a phantom white dog that nearly cost
my sister her life last night. . ."
“Your sister!" I cried. “What's she got to do with it?"
“My married sister came on from Ohio last week to
spend her vacation with me. She's going to become a mother
toward the last of November. Last night, just before we retired on
the bed on the screened south porch, she came to me wanting to
know who owned the white setter dog that seemed to be racing
around the house as though getting evening exercise. I said that
I hadn't heard of, or seen, any such creature."
“Is your sister psychic?" I asked.
“No," said Hazel, “and fairly scared to death by anything
abnormal. Of course, when she showed up to spend her
vacation with me, I didn't want to tell her what went on some
nights in that house. So I didn't make much comment about the
mysterious white dog. Anyhow, we went to bed after carefully
locking all the screen doors. I always do that, anyhow, being
afraid of tramps so near the railroad and the river. Suddenly
about two o'clock this morning, Mabel awakened me with the
most ungodly shriek. She was sitting up, leaning on an elbow,
the bedclothes pulled to her chin and indicating something at the
foot of the bed."
“The dog?" I suggested.

176
 “Yes---the dog! The creature was right there inside our
solarium sleeping-porch, standing on its hind legs, with its front
paws on our bed."
“What became of it?"
“That's what caused Mabel almost to lose her baby. The
fool beast sprang down and went with one long graceful leap
straight through the screen door, that was shut tight and locked.
Mabel has gone back to Ohio. I've just seen her off at Grand
Central. Will you be one of a party from our psychical group to go
up there tonight and see what can be made of all the fiddle-
faddle? I know it sounds crazy and against all laws of reason.
But that's what I'm up against, and the thing is getting on my
nerves."

WELL, the long and short of it is, that we made up a

party with two more persons, one a famous New York magazine
editor, got together the food for a basket picnic, and drove up
beyond Ossining in the late afternoon.
The old place, built back in the time of mid-Victorian
architecture, overlooking a lovely expanse of the Hudson, was
entirely surrounded by a grove of elms and maples. It was
reached by a private driveway back from the Post Road.
The house itself, three stories in height, with a
campanile, ran north and south, the lawn stretching from the
south wing being entirely banked with frowsy shrubbery which
had known no gardener's care for years.
Before it got dark, we inspected all the great cavernous
rooms and bedchambers. They were, as Hazel had reported,
barren of furnishings of any sort. Not even shades hung before
the windows and most of the weather-beaten blinds were shut.

177
 In sunset we spread our basket's contents on the lawn
and had our picnic meal. After the sun had vanished, the
mosquitoes began to bite, so we withdrew into Hazel's sleeping
porch and lit the studio lamp. We assumed, of course, that we
had five or six hours to wait for the nocturnal phenomena to start.
I had lighted my pipe and was tilted back in a hard-
bottomed chair against the middle post of one of the window-
casings that held screens in summer and sashes in winter.
Outside, close against the screens themselves, grew a bank of
ragged lilacs. Suddenly during a lull in our conversation, it
seemed that I heard a strained whispering voice. I could have
sworn that it came from amidst the lilacs banked against the
screen ten inches from my head.
“I'm Scott Hillstone," it addressed me. Scott Hillstone
isn't the name that was spoken, but it was a sufficiently unusual
name so that I couldn't have called it up at the moment for the
sake of deceiving myself.
I held up my hand in a warning to my companions to
keep silent. “Yes?" I said aloud.
“I was murdered down here at the foot of the
embankment," the labored whispering said next. “If I'd been able
to go on living in my body, I think I'd be eighty-eight years old."
“Get a pencil!" I said quickly to Hazel. “Take this detail
down. We're going to get something!" Then I pressed my head
against the screen and lilacs. “Go ahead," I coaxed. “What
about it?"
“It's a long story. Thank God I've found someone who
can hear me while I tell it. . . . Back before the turn of the century
I was in the stock investment business down in New York. I had
a crooked partner. He stole one of our client's trust funds and
contrived to put the blame on me. . . . Can you still hear me?"

178
 “Yes, I can still hear you. What was your partner's
name?"
“I . . . don't want. . . to tell you that. After all, I've forgiven
him. . . . But I went to Sing Sing for two years, being unable
to show I wasn't guilty. For two long years I was a convict for
something I hadn't done. . . and every day of those two years,
I schemed and planned how I was going to get even after I got
out. . . ."
Hazel was writing rapidly. I asked, “But how were you
murdered?"
“Finally the time came for my discharge. They let me out
one afternoon about six o'clock. When I finally came through the
gate, two men who looked like Italian thugs seemed to be
awaiting me. . . . They asked if my name was Hillstone. . . . I said
that it was. . . . They asked me if I had known that I was framed
on that theft charge and that my partner had done it deliberately.
I said that I did and was going to have my vengeance. Then one
of them said, ‘We've got plenty grudge against that partner of
yours, too. The three of us should put our heads together and
find a way to ‘get' him that's sure-fire. Suppose we stroll up the
railroad tracks and talk it over.' These men seemed to be in
earnest and I fell into step beside them. We walked northward
along the New York Central tracks till we came to a spot just
below the embankment on which this house is built." The story
was going better now, or I was tuning my ear the better to get the
details. Hillstone, if there was indeed such a person, went on---
“Suddenly a fast freight train hove in sight, speeding
down the river toward New York. We saw its headlight and

179
stepped aside out of the tracks to let it pass. It was fairly dark by
this time. Just as it was about to get abreast of us, I felt a violent
push and a frightful shock and somehow I was free of my body.
What was left of my body, when the red lamp of the caboose had
vanished around the southern curve, was being kicked into the
bushes by those scoundrels, who presently darted into the rows
of freight cars standing idle on the sidetracks, and were gone. . ."
“In other words," said I, to encourage the narrator, “those
two men must have been in league with your partner."
“They were," the weak and ragged “whispering"
continued. “He knew I was getting out that night and would
probably expose him, and he had hired them to make an end to
me. So . . . I never showed up at home. . . my wife and family
took that for confirmation that I had been guilty, and had no
defense to make, and had gone back to a life of crime."
“Have you got folks living now who might identify you
and your report?"
“Yes, my wife is living. . . she was much younger than I
was. . . and one of my girls is living. . . but my wife divorced me
after a time and married again, and I wouldn't want to disturb her
present peace of mind. . . I've had a long time to think. . . . It's my
sister to whom I want to get a message about what actually
happened. Would you somehow manage to get a message to
my sister?"
“What sort of message?"
“She's an old lady now, living in Tucson, Arizona. But in
October she'll be up in New England---at Winchester, Mass.---
for the winter. I wish that you'd write her at Winchester,
the address I'll tell you, and describe to her just what I've

180
said to you. I don't want you to write her in Tucson. The people
she's living with aren't sympathetic and might put her in an
institution thinking her crazy, if she began talking suddenly about
hearing from her brother. She's the only one I want to have know
that I never did go back to any life of crime. Write her in
Winchester after October first. Will you do that? I've remained
around here, around the spot where it happened, an awful long
time, just to have someone come along to whom I could talk."
I said: “Are you, then, the party who's been making all
the racket on these premises of late? Are you the ‘haunt' that's
made people abandon this house because what goes on here
has gotten them so frightened?"
“I don't make any trouble that I know of," the sad voice
responded.
“What about this white setter that races around the place
in deep twilight or moonlight?"
“Oh! Now I know what you mean. I guess if there's any
upset about the premises, it's Mrs. Makarian making it."
“And who's Mrs. Makarian?"
“She's some sort of foreign lady whose husband used to
be in the oriental rug business down in New York. He and she
built the house, I understand. And she flies into a terrible rage
sometimes, at the way the present owners are letting it go to
wrack and ruin. She's got such a dog."
“And small wonder," I returned---Hazel still writing
frantically and throwing her rapidly-filling sheets on the floor---
“when you people who've made the Passing are allowing
yourselves to become discernible to those still in their bodies and
continually scare them to death. Can you connect with Mrs.
Makarian and talk to her?"

181
 “Yes, I think so."
“All right, we'll make a bargain with you. This young
woman wants to remain here for the rest of the summer and
finish her novel without being bothered by Mrs. Makarian, her
poodle, or any other signs of discarnate activity around the
premises. You see Mrs. Makarian and make her understand that
the reason present owners are letting this fine old mansion go to
ruin is because of her annoying rages which they hear at times
with their physical ears. Tell her to stop the whole of it and tie up
her dog. She'll see then, quickly enough, that the property will
‘come back.' You do that, and we'll promise to write your sister
about this communication."
“But after October first!"
“Yes, after October first. Now where should we address
such letter."
He gave us the name and Hazel recorded it. With a
weak “Thank you!" then, and a promise to be on about better
spiritual business, his whispering died away. . . .

WE WAITED for ghostly phenomena at midnight. But

none came. At two o'clock I stretched a hammock out between
two of the trees on the side lawn, while the women made
themselves comfortable as they could in the solarium. Next day
we drove back to Manhattan. . . .
By the end of the fortnight I saw Hazel again. She
reported that never the slightest sign of any ghost phenomena
had showed or been heard since that night's talk with the
murdered stockbroker. Nor had she heard any more whisperings
herself.

182
 Quite recently I rode up the Hudson River on the Empire
State Express and chanced to glance upward at the old mansion
from the window of the Pullman. It was renovated, painted,
landscape gardened, and very much occupied.
Apparently the ghostly phenomena had stopped with
that night.
Now comes the strangest part of the episode.
After October first, Hazel wrote the letter to the sister
and directed it to Winchester.
After ten days it was returned to her by the postmaster in
that place. Across its face was scribbled a notation in pencil---
“This addressee deceased in Tucson, Ariz., around Sept. 1st
last!"
Scott Hillstone apparently hadn't been aware that his
sister was going to make her own Passing in a mere matter of
days.

183
 Chapter XII

THINKING BEYOND THE BRAIN

HAT do we want as proof that the so-called

“dead" are existing in higher forms of
Consciousness? Do we want them to walk
around in mortal bodies in this form of
Consciousness, to open doors and hoist
windows, to eat with knives, forks and spoons,
to drive motorcars and punch typewriters? If they did all these
things, how would their form of existence differ from ours? Why
would there be any reason for graduation out of one octave and
into the other?
What we are chiefly interested in finding---or determining
to a certainty---is, that their personalities remain intact, that they
are living, thinking, and operating as individuals, that it is their
habitat or arena of performance that has been altered, not the
essential personalities of human souls as souls.
The complaint is frequently heard on this plane: “If there
be actual survival beyond physical discarnation, then why is not
the contact with those of us still in mortality more common than it
is? Why must we rely on seance rooms and mediums, on the
chance episode of materialization, on the all-too-frequent

184
incident of discarnates evidencing themselves in times of great
stress in the mundane world?" We forget our unwitting bombast
in thus stipulating circumstances.
Who are we, in this mundane octave, to demand that the
“dead" shall do all the “work," that they alone shall take the
initiative in achieving materializations, that all we must do is to sit
back and wait impatiently for them to perform? Have they not as
much right to say to us, “If you want to prove the reality of our
existence, how about you mortal folks making a few efforts to
come up onto this plane, and contact us, as you expect that we
should contact you?"
Only one individual in ten thousand deliberately sets
about the effort to elevate his consciousness above this mortal
octave. Why should we look for those who have graduated into
the higher octaves to make manifestations of themselves to us in
any greater ratio?

THE FACTS of the matter seem to be, that when a soul

has shuffled off his mortal coil, he finds conditions in the more
tenuous realms so agreeable and opposite to everything he has
known in physicality that only under special circumstances can
he be persuaded to take any interest in the form of worldly
performance which he has left.
Why in the name of all that is logical and reasonable,
should any spirit-soul that has gotten done with the trials and
tribulations of mortality, with its plots and counterplots, its greeds
and its graspings, its wars and competitions, bethink that it
devolves on him to make deliberate effort to come back into it,
merely to convince a lot of dunderheads---who will fight the
demonstration, anyhow---that survival of personality is a fact,

185
that is a problem causing us to wonder why we even have the
demonstrations that we do.
The more I delve into the subject, however, and the
more evidence that I have brought to my attention concerning
the certain survival of the “dead," the more I am persuaded that
such exhibitions of discarnation as we do have, are prompted by
complexes in the minds of so-called “dead" people, more than
they are prompted by any desire on those discarnate persons'
part to convince those left behind in flesh that life has its
continuity and there is no such thing as perishing to extinction. . .
In other words, the “dead" have purposes of their own to
serve in entering back into the physical octave, and they are
usually serving those purposes---unmindful of us---when we
catch glimpses of them in light-body manifestations.
The more I probe into this entrancing subject, the more I
am convinced that everything resolves itself into a matter of what
“frequency" the mind may be operating on.
The attitude that some people disclose, that because
spirit-souls have shuffled out of their physical mechanisms and
begun to employ themselves in an unobstructed universe, they
are spooks, wraiths, shades, abstract ideas, “the stuff that
dreams are made of," unwittingly puts the only premium of
importance on materiality. If, in other words, you are not clothed
with substance, you really amount to no more than last year's
crow's nest---so we might gather from the people who consider
discarnation as becoming comparable to the summer's zephyr.
It is very like a fish on the bottom of the sea expressing
an opinion on the gull winging above the rolling billow and
saying, “Because they are not down here at my ocean-depth and

186
knowing its stresses and strains, I consider that they amount to
no more than the off-shore wind on which they glide. Life down
here at my depth is black and thick and fraught with ever-present
menace. Therefore it is the only life that can truly be called such.
These sea gulls high over the ocean's surface may think they're
alive, but inasmuch as their existence knows little or no
obstruction, of what earthly use are they, to themselves or
anybody?"
The gull could tell the sluggish, provincial and menaced
fish much about freedom of action that the fish never dreams
about.
And yet, granting all that, the average person does seem
to think that it should be easier for the “dead" to contact them,
than for them to contact the “dead." They exclaim---
“We are told that upon making the Passing, souls don't
‘go' anywhere---in the sense of departing for some distant planet
or celestial elevation---so if this be true, and they're somewhere
in our vicinity, and are more conscious of being in our world,
though in an unobstructed state, than we are conscious of being
in theirs, why don't they give more evidences of themselves than
they do and leave no question or doubt about survival?" If I were
to answer that question in the light of a thousand attestments or
communications that have come to my notice since I began my
examinations of psychics as a study, I would say it is because it
gets them nowhere to do it as a practice. In other words, they
make the discovery of the futility of doing so. Either friends or the
public will not accredit the identity or manifestation, or the human
race behaves generally as though life in the mortal vehicle were
the only life that counted and any type of consciousness out-
side of it must be ephemeral and capricious.

187
 TO ILLUSTRATE what I mean, a few years ago there
was photographed in the talkie news weeklies an interview with a
seventeen-year-old boy who had been the victim of a near-
drowning accident in a lake in central Pennsylvania. At a picnic
one afternoon his canoe had tipped over, he had been unable to
do much swimming on account of sudden cramps, and before
rescue could be summoned his lungs had filled with water. State
troopers ultimately recovered the body and laid it out on the
shore. Both pulse and respiration had stopped, insofar as any
physician could discover.
Recalling the details from memory now, I think it was a
Boy Scout leader who begged permission to work upon the
corpse and see what could be done by applying artificial
respiration. The troopers and physicians permitted it while
waiting for the mortician's wagon to arrive. At the end of twenty
minutes to half an hour, officials and spectators were stupefied to
see the physical mechanism responding. The heart began to
galvanize, and to make a weird tale short, eventually the
drowned boy regained consciousness. Rushed to a hospital, he
gradually recuperated.
Of course, everybody wanted to know what his
sensations had been, where he had “been" himself as a spirit-
soul after the water strangled him and before the Scout leader
got his heart and lungs functioning.
“It seemed as if I came up out of the water and took to
the air like a bird," he attested haltingly before the talkie
microphone in bucolic English. Of course, everybody in the
theater tittered. . . .
“Were you at all conscious?" asked the interviewer.
“Sure I was conscious. I just drifted back and forth over
the water and the shore, and when the Scouts brought me in and

188
the Scouts went to work on me, I was outside my body, watching
'most everything that was being done."
“But floating around in the atmosphere, eh?" his
questioner emphasized.
“Yep---that's sort of like it. I saw everything being done
to bring me back, all the same. Then I felt a sort of ‘pull' that
I had to come back into my body, and so I come."
The audience laughed out loud. It was all so very
ridiculous. When people actually died, they went immediately to
heaven, of course, and were judged for their sins; they didn't
float around over Pennsylvania lakes and watch resuscitation
efforts in progress. The boy had not truly been dead---according
to the acceptance of that jocular audience---the spark of life had
still been in him and he had dreamed a dream of being out of his
body. After which assumption, that audience settled down to
enjoy the near-seduction of the screen heroine by the Hollywood
villain and his ultimate beating-up by the hero in consequence.
That audience, in other words, didn't have the psychical acumen
to realize that what the lad was recounting to them was the
sternest phase of truth.
The point I would make, however, is: If that lad, returned
to flesh by artificial respiration, couldn't convince that movie
crowd of his manifested consciousness when out of the body,
how could he---or anybody in similar predicament---hope to do it
with the rank and file, when such discarnation became
permanent?
For that discarnation, in that particular youth's case,
might have been made permanent, had the Scoutmaster not
decided to go to work on him. The mortician's wagon might have

189
come for the remains, taken them to his shop, and embalmed
them. Two or three days later the funeral would have been held.
Would the boy's consciousness not have continued to function
just the same, exactly as it functioned while watching the
resuscitation efforts being made?
This lad came back to tell of it, however, and because he
did come back and did tell of it---even to the extent of an
interview in the news weeklies---his hearers said that of course
he had never been dead, that in his strangled condition he had
merely dreamed a dream.
Countless are the numbers of people who have
undergone a similar experience of discarnation, and detached
observation, while under the influence of surgical gas or ether.
We had one laughable case of it in North Carolina shortly after
the Galahad summer school of 1932 came to a close.
Dr. Henry Hardwicke, the same man who had related the
story of the materialized sparrow hawk in Niagara Falls, suffered
from a serious glandular malady in the throat. He was finally
prevailed upon to go to the local hospital for a fortnight and have
the gland operated upon.
He jokingly told later of getting his consciousness out of
his body during the actual surgery and wandering around
through the corridors and rooms of the hospital and inspecting
the cases and condition of other patients the while. Being a
practicing physician himself, these held more interest for him
than because he wanted to satisfy an idle curiosity.
When he ultimately came back into his body after the
surgery had been dressed---“after he came from the ether" as
the attendants and nurses phrased it---he quickly threw that
hospital into a stupefied turmoil by commenting upon, or

190
discussing, outstanding cases in the rooms on the floors above,
“That woman in five-thirteen needs to have better attention," he
advised the doctor who visited him a half-hour later. “Blood-
poisoning seems to be setting in, and you'd better begin applying
serums immediately."
“How do you know anything about any woman in five-
thirteen?" the astonished physician demanded.
“Because I got out of my body and went through most of
the rooms and wards," returned Dr. Hardwicke, “while you were
down here cutting my throat."
His further narrations well-nigh got the nurses of the
hospital into a dither. Physically he had not been anywhere in
that institution but the one room into which he was admitted for
treatment when he first arrived. Challenge: Suppose Dr.
Hardwicke had elected not to go back into his body, after his
throat had been treated and dressed? The report would have
come forth, of course, that he had failed to survive the operation.
But why should not his consciousness have gone on
functioning? Why should he not have left the inspection of the
hospital's cases and gone out into the town, gone where he
pleased in the whole unobstructed universe, for that matter? . . .
Incidentally, Dr. Hardwicke did make such Passing in
New York City a couple of years ago and is at this moment
enjoying life and consciousness in such unobstructed arena of
existence.

OF MY own similar discarnation in “Seven Minutes in

Eternity" I have told at too much length in my autobiography,
“The Door to Revelation," to take time or space to add any more
here. Except this---

191
 When I published the narrative of that experience in the
American Magazine for March, 1929, I got thousands of letters
from all over America, from persons who at some time or another
in their lives had encountered allied or duplicate adventures in
those higher octaves. But I also got an occasional letter from
some skeptic who advised me that from the psychopathic angle,
what had actually happened to me was the dreaming of a
grandiose or supernal dream. Particularly, the orthodox
psychiatrists took such position. Some of them were openly
insulting about it. But how explain this---
One letter I got from a psychical group up in Salem,
Mass., where the member commissioned to write the attestment
to me, said that during a seance the previous week a certain
discarnate physician who had been working with it from the
Other Side had been queried as to whether or not my experience
had been bona fide.
“Absolutely!" this person had responded. “I was one of
those who witnessed the author's discarnation that night, and
saw him in most of his reactions. If you want a check-up on this,
write to him and ask him if in that hyperdimensional adventure he
didn't do the following---" and forthwith the Salem letter
contained a series of paragraph-descriptions of some phases of
my conduct and behavior, not to mention my contacts and
addresses, that I had not imparted to a living soul up to that
moment. In fact, in one or two instances, this Salem discarnate
recalled episodes to me which I had well-nigh forgotten, myself.
How could such a psychical go-between, working with an
unknown group in Massachusetts, have been in any position to
describe such items if all that happened to me that night in
Altadena had been only an epochal dream? Of course I realize

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that such “evidence" is evidence to me alone, but it has been just
another bit of confirmation of my gradually built up conviction that
consciousness need not depend for its self-awareness on the
housing of the physical brain, that the same consciousness and
sense of awareness that I took with me into that Seven Minute
octave could have gone on operating. They might have found my
discarded remains in that Altadena bungalow and interred them
ultimately, but I would have gone straight along “being myself to
myself" . . .
In these pages I am merely setting down in book form
what my experiences have been as an individual, convincing me
that the “dead" are alive. They may not have been your
experiences, and you may not be convinced as yet, as I am
convinced. I am simply telling you how it has been with me.
Still I haven't finished what I started to say about the
“dead" not commonly manifesting themselves to friends or
intimates still confined in mortality. . .

MY PERSONAL conclusions are, that if any particular

soul makes the Passing with life business undone, or is
obsessed with any notion that involves an earthly spot, act, or
relationship, such mental concentrations may produce the effect
of making his Light Body visible to earthly eyes upon special
occasions. Finding after a time, however, that they are not
commonly accredited in the mundane and that they cannot get
the common contacts with men and things that they got while
operating their former vehicles, spirit-souls simply lose interest in
things mundane as fecundities of their new and higher octave
begin to entice them.

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 To be slightly facetious for a moment, if you had been a
poor fish for fifty or sixty years, and all of a sudden you found
yourself a bird---with real wings, able to soar anywhere---you
would scarcely over-exert yourself to make your way down to the
sea-bottom and hunt up your former brethren-fish just to prove to
them that you had abruptly changed into a bird. After all,
suppose you contrived it, what of it? You know that you're a bird,
and that's that. Convincing a lot of fish that you're a bird would
butter no parsnips either for you or for them in the long run. After
you'd sincerely tried to do it for a time and gotten what might be
called a first class fish-laugh, you'd rather lose interest. You'd
exclaim to yourself: “I'm going to fly and enjoy my wings. Let
those priggish creatures who get their motion with fins, go ahead
and imagine they're the only form of life in the universe that
counts." And you would do so, regardless of the circumstance
that many of your former fish-relatives would cry, “Poor Whoozis!
He once tried to convince us that there was consciousness
above the fish-octave. If there is, why doesn't he come back and
be a fish again for a time, to save us from recalling him as a
fanatic or a liar?"
And yet it does happen constantly that there are many
fish-persons who have existed as fishes for so long, and gotten
the fish complex so firmly fastened into their consciousness, that
being birds does not appeal to them in the slightest. And some of
them have a strange sense of humor and often exercise it to
prove their continuity. In life they may have been practical jokers.
When they become discarnate, they get a great “bang," as we
say in the vernacular, from doing things that mystify or upset
people still in bodies of substance.

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 When such a one “learns the ropes" in the matter of
getting physical results though discarnately motivated, he is
termed in psychical lexicography a “poltergeist."
The word is German and means “mischievous spirit."
In nine out of ten cases, running down the identities or
personalities of such poltergeists, we discover them to be
children or youths---or sometimes lunatics still carrying their
idiotic reflexes into discarnation---who have simply learned the
technique of moving material objects in this octave from the
dimension in which they have found themselves thinking
deliberately.
Uniformly these entities stick to one particular locality, or
one particular house, because if either gets the reputation of
being haunted, it will draw maximum attention and thus the
poltergeist will get itself and its conduct recognized.
Flammarion tells about one of these that became
associated with a peasant's farm in Brittany and found delight in
throwing apples out of its fourth dimensional state, into this third
dimensional state. .
Evangelical Pastor Laval wrote him from Saint-Michel-
de-Chabrillanoux, on December 15, 1922 as follows---Dear
Master: The incomprehensible facts which I related to you last
year, begging you for an explanation, and which you asked me
to verify as far as possible, are unexceptionable. I am sending
you an exact plan of the house and its surroundings as well as
the names of these good people, who are much impressed by
what has happened to them, and you can locate the spot
geographically. I do not see any objection to your publishing my
name and address, if you consider it useful for your scientific
documentary evidence.

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 Poor M. R. has suffered a great deal mentally from the
stupidity and credulity of the people, who look on him as one
sold to the “evil spirits." Perhaps it would be better not to give
his name, which I communicate to you personally, as I do not
wish to take away from the scientific value of the document.
This M. R. is a farmer in our local parish and possesses
property comprising an old house, not far from which there is
another belonging to M. E. He goes to his farm in the busy
agricultural season. The nearest houses to these two are 440
yards away. You have before you a plan of the two houses, with
their barns, the streams, roads, and neighboring meadows, the
lower fields, vineyards, tobacco patches and woods on these
rural properties. I have marked the rooms into which the stones
and apples were thrown from no one knows where; also the
place, at the crossing of two roads, where I myself was hit by a
stone which grazed me vertically from head to foot.
The stones first began to be thrown in the early days of
September, 1921 and continued---with some interruptions---till
the end of December. The maximum phase can be assigned to
the first ten days of October.
They fell at all hours of the day, and even followed M. R.
in the fields, 220 yards away from the house. The front door was
hit, window No.1 was broken, window No.2, which gives onto an
open space of ground 440 yards long, was the one that received
most of the hits. The stones arrived without anyone being able to
tell how; they were not seen until they touched an object. Some
fell vertically.
M. R. has three children---HeIi, twelve years old; Andre,
aged seventeen; Henri, aged twenty-two-who were very naturally
accused. Consequently they were watched and spied upon as

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much as possible, but they were not caught in a single
suspicious action.
One Sunday M. R. begged me to write out for him a
complaint to the Public Prosecutor. I was anxious, first of all, to
satisfy myself as to the facts. The next day, at five o' clock in the
evening, I was in the farmyard, having two children with me and
facing me, when the stone the size of a hen's egg came down
vertically, grazing one of the children. A little later another stone
grazed me in the same way, about 52 yards from the house. The
children were in sight close by me and they could not have been
the cause. The stones fell slowly, and gave one the impression
of falling from a height of about six feet only. This was often
remarked. It was incomprehensible.
I decided to go to bed. Nothing happened in the night.
The next morning, about seven o'clock, in full daylight, while M.
R. with a friend worked in a room adjoining the kitchen, two
apples hit the closed shutter of a window and touched the father.
The first apple knocked out an old board in the shutter which was
very loose, the others coming in through the space thus created.
The friend, believing that I was the perpetrator of the deed, said,
“Is that you, M. Laval, who are throwing apples at us?" Imagine
my surprise! It is true that just at the moment when the apples
were thrown, I happened to be outside facing the window aimed
at. An extraordinary thing was, that I heard something strike the
shutter but saw nothing. Convinced that I had not thrown
anything, this friend, a neighboring farmer, joined me quickly to
see what was happening.
Some seconds later, two other apples arrived through
the same opening into the room and rolled to M. R.'s feet. As in

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the first case, we heard the shock but could see nothing. The
apples really came from the outside. They arrived in a horizontal
direction with considerable speed. It would have been humanly
impossible for anyone to hide in broad daylight in front of the
window, which opens onto an empty field 440 yards long. The
most able man, unless he were quite near the window, would
never have succeeded in throwing an apple through a hole of an
inch or so, however well he might have aimed. While we were
outside, we heard a blow on the window, but saw nothing
entering from outside.
M. R. called the gendarmery of Gourdon which arrived
on the spot. During the four months of these happenings there
would surely have been ample time to surprise tricks of children.
M. R. suspected his only neighbor, whom I designate
as M. E., who has two sons, aged seventeen and twenty-two
respectively. I conveyed a remonstrance to the E. family but they
replied, "Yes, we are accused, but we are innocent.
“Having lived for a long time on a good footing with
M. R., and having up to now considered him a good neighbor,
we declare before our conscience that we had no part in the
inexplicable occurrences at his house."
"How can we explain these things?" writes Pastor Laval
to the great astronomer. “Are we, without knowing it, plunged
into an unknown psychic environment? Do electropsychic forces
exist which thus show themselves?"

PARALLEL to this case is the episode of the Haunted House of

La Constantinie, described in a lengthy monograph by Colonel
Albert de Rochas, administrator of the Ecole Poly technique,

198
published in Paris, in 1896. M. Maxwell, Procurator-General,
conducted his own private investigations into the phenomena
and aided in the compilation of the details. The most significant
excerpts follow-
“La Constantinie is quite a considerable property. The
dwelling house, built on the side of a hillock in Correze, is
composed of structures in the form of a square. That portion of
the house that contains the front doors is on a ground floor,
raised some steps above the ground. It contains a large kitchen
running the length of the building. To the right of the kitchen are
a drawing room and bedroom. . . .
“The personnel of La Constantinie comprised a certain
number of farm servants, Mme. Faure, her mother-in-law, aged
eighty-five, and a young servant of seventeen, Marie Pascarel.
Mme. Faure is a well-educated woman of culture. She comes of
honorable family. Her aged mother-in-law appears to have
preserved all her faculties though heavily burdened by her age.
“The numerous servants of La Constantinie take their
meals in the kitchen, on a solid wooden table three feet wide and
nine feet long. The kitchen contains an oven, an immense
fireplace with a little bench on the left and two chairs on the right,
and some cupboards and shelves.
“The phenomena started in the second fortnight of May,
1895, with knocks apparently made on the wall separating the
dining room from the bedroom of the elder Mme. Faure. On May
21, at about 9 a. m., Mme. Faure told her daughter-in-law that
her bed seemed to move and strike the partition. The younger
Mme. Faure did not attach much importance to this remark,
which she put down to a mistake. Next day, at exactly the same
hour, the sound came again in the same place. This time the

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younger Mme. Faure heard it distinctly. On Friday morning, the
24th, the noise started afresh in the same room with greater
force. The noise was as if the bed had hit the partition.
"An hour afterwards, the younger Mme. Faure entered
her own bedroom and found the quilt, the blankets, the sheets,
and the pillows thrown on the floor. Other disorders occurred in
the house. Three empty casks were displaced in the cellar. In
another room the bed was disturbed, a statuette of the Virgin and
a coffeepot filled to the brim had been transported from the
cupboard to the middle of the room. They were on the floor
beside a crucifix which had been taken down from the wall.
"These things appeared inexplicable to the two women
and they became frightened. Mme. Faure the younger asked her
mother-in-law to sleep with her through the nights Friday and
Saturday. Marie the maid slept in the same room.
“On Saturday morning three great blows were struck on
the door of the attic. The stairs leading up to it were closed by a
door opening from the upper hall.
"When the Faure ladies came to pass through their
bedroom, the beds were in wildest disorder and coverings again
off upon the floor. This time the coffeepot was broken. Leaving
this room they went into the kitchen, but they had scarcely gotten
there before they heard a frightful commotion. They found three
sugar bowls, a dozen cups, photograph frames and engravings
broken on the floor.
“The three women were now very much frightened, for at
the moment when all this damage was being done the farm
servants were in the fields and nobody was in the house
excepting themselves.

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 “A MELE BAYLE, an intelligent and reasonable woman
of thirty, went to the Faures' at 7:30 to see the damage. In her
presence the cover of a soup dish standing in front of the fire
was thrown violently into the center of the kitchen. Amelie was at
that moment sitting in front of the fireplace, with her back to the
fire. This phenomenon scared her. She at once left the house
with the two young servants. At 11:30, however, they returned.
Marie, the maid, was busy in the kitchen picking up the broken
crockery which littered the floor. For, according to the witnesses,
pots, plates, glasses, and dishes were taken down from the
shelves by invisible hands while they watched, and thrown upon
the floor where they broke. Mme. Bayle saw a wooden bottle
jump from a shelf and crash at her feet.
"More disorders were found in the room where the Faure
ladies slept. The bed was upset. A mirror was taken down.
Papers from a shelf were strewn on the floor. Later one of the
papers was opened and two drops of blood, still moist, were
found upon it. Five minutes later when Marie, the maid, went
again into the bedroom, six drops of fresh blood had been added
upon the paper. Nobody in the house had any wounds or could
have done the bleeding.
"From Sunday, May 26, to Wednesday, May 29,
inclusive, no phenomena took place. But on Thursday the 30th,
they started afresh with increasing force. Saucepans hanging
from hooks in the kitchen chimney were violently thrown to the
ground. At six o'clock that night, old Mme. Faure saw her bed
move along by itself in her room. The chair on which she was
sitting was drawn back. She got up at once and the chair was
upset. Between 7 and 8 o'clock, at suppertime, pieces of wood in
the kitchen fell of themselves on the women. Everybody was so

201
much frightened that they went to spend that night with
neighbors.
“On Friday, May 31, they sent for the Mayor of Objat, a
nearby town, and syndic of bailiffs of the arrondissement of
Brive, a ministerial office of high respectability. M. Delmas
wanted to make sure of what was happening as well as to find
out the cause of such occurrences. He went into the kitchen and
placed some plates on the table, where there was already a
stove-brush. He then sat down in front of the fireplace with Mme.
Faure on his left. The young servant worked at her duties.
“Under the eyes of M. Delmas, the brush was violently
picked up and thrown with circular motion into the fireplace. The
servant was at some distance from the table where the brush
had been lying. His surprise gave way to uneasiness when he
saw a pair of kitchen bellows which lay on the bench in the
fireplace, slide along the bench, and throw itself with a loud
clatter into the middle of the floor.
“The Mayor immediately had the house cleared. Just as
she was leaving with the Faure ladies, the young Marie Pascarel
was hit on the back with a stick 16 inches long thrown with
considerable force. They did not see where the stick came from.
“Hardly had the Mayor returned to Objat than he was
summoned back. Fire had broken out at La Constantinie. Marie
had observed that a thick smoke issued from Mme. Faure's
room. On entering the room it was found that it came from the
bed of the younger Mme. Faure. There were no flames and no
brazier. Mme. Faure even used this singular expression in her
account of the episode, ‘---the fire went back into the bed.'

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 “A phenomenon of this kind had already been observed.
Marie Pascarel and the elder of the two ladies had sometimes
noticed a thick smoke which seemed to issue from the old lady's
skirts.
“Two days later, Marie Pascarel left the service of the
Faure ladies without giving notice. They went home and since
then the peace of their house has not been troubled. . . ."

ANYONE who has ever been to a true materialization

seance and seen or heard a North American Indian “cut up" or
“whoop it up" with maximum bombast and clatter in order to give
firm evidence of his presence, will note in the foregoing
phenomena a recognizable similarity.
What we conclude from observing the acts of these
somewhat elemental personalities, is, that so long as they have
someone in the vicinity from whom to draw the materialistic
force, they can exert strength on inanimate objects precisely as
though they were operating in normal mortal bodies. The person
from whom the force is drawn may not be cognizant of it at the
time. Usually a young and extremely robust person is drawn
upon.
The account of the phenomena in the Faure household
ends with the simple statement that when Marie left the premises
without notice the upset stopped abruptly. Naturally it would be
the logical thing for the novice to conclude that by some hocus-
pocus the maid was making the disturbance---although how she
could whack herself on the back with a 16-inch stick out of
nowhere, would require some explaining. The more expert
investigator would rationalize it from his wider observations, that
whatever “wild Indian" had seen fit to attack the Faure premises

203
and scare three women witless, had obtained the electro-
psychical energy from the maid's body and when she removed
herself from the premises, the “Indian" no longer had it available.
Not all persons are possessed of this electro-psychical
energy in sufficient quantities so that it can be used extraneously
to their own conscious wills, which is probably why such
phenomena are not more widespread.
When, therefore, there is a room, a house, or a locality
where material objects are shunted about seemingly without
hands to shunt them---manifestations of what the unlearned call
“spooks" or the supernatural---where pictures sway or crash,
clocks stop, pots and pans bang around, and thumps are heard
in floors, walls or ceilings, the psychical adept is coming to
believe that nothing more is at work than a spirit-soul who has
graduated out of his former physical body but not out of his
mundane psychology, that such spirit-soul is undoubtedly that of
a child, youth, or practical joker who has discovered the
technique of “borrowing" energy from some handy person in
flesh and is using it for the bombastic pleasure he derives from
mystifying people or scaring them.
The latter wouldn't be particularly “afraid" of such child,
youth or practical joker if he retained his own physical body and
did the same things. Why should they necessarily be terrified
because the same effects are gotten vicariously, or with a body
of too delicate a substance to be seized hold of, or bundled out,
or chastised? Of course, it's all in the point of view. Knowing,
however, that there probably is such a thing as an exertion of
physical energy on inanimate objects that can be made from
another octave or dimension, should be a trifle of consolation at
least.

204
 Sometimes such demonstrations can be poignant.
A FEW years ago I had a pastor friend who took over an
Episcopalian parish in a little town in eastern Massachusetts.
The rectory he was called to occupy dated back over a hundred
years. This pastor friend, incidentally, was something of a
musician and a particularly good performer on the harp for his
own amusement and relaxation.
He told me that he had no more than gotten his family
settled in the old rectory, his study being located in the big front
room on the second floor, when he uncovered and tuned his
harp just before dinner one evening, leaving the instrument
uncovered while he ate his meal on the floor below.
During the dinner's progress, the doors and stairs being
open and unobstructed to the second floor, he and his whole
family were suddenly transfixed by the sounds of exquisite harp
music drifting down from the floor above.
Mounting the stairs in perplexity and no little awe, they
could look into the study and see the harp apparently “playing of
itself." The instant they moved into the room, however, and
approached the self-playing instrument, the music came to an
end as though “smothered." This happened on several
occasions.
My friend's foster-sister, a woman of forty years,
undertook to solve the mystery of her half-brother's self-playing
harp. Finally she located a very old lady of the parish who
remembered that forty to fifty years before, one of the rectors
who had lived in the house a decade or more, had possessed a
crippled son---a boy of fifteen years---who had spent most of his
life in that second-floor front room. To relieve his tedium, this lad
had learned to play the harp.

205
 Question: Was this lad's spirit-soul still bound in some
inexplicable fashion to that apartment and when my friend's
instrument had suddenly been made available, had the cripple
seized upon it? What else may we conclude?
Why should the boy's spirit-soul have “stayed there" in
the old rectory long afterwards? There we meet with enigma.
Nevertheless, my pastor friend was hardly the type to
fabricate the episode, and his sister corroborated this account in
every particular. The harp when thus uncovered, continued so to
play at intervals till my friend gave up the parish to become a
chaplain in the first World War. . . .

206
 Chapter XIII

DYING WITHOUT WISDOM

.
HE CATHOLIC, being brought up theo-
logically to the idea of Purgatory, of masses
being necessary for the souls of the dead or
for the “peace" of such souls---has difficulty in
either accrediting or accepting what modern
psychics are turning up as to the facts of survival. Suppose we
take a moment to examine this ancient tenet of the Roman
Catholic Church and find out, if we may, where it originated. Let
us see if there be any substantial basis for the ritual of the
requiem mass for the "repose of the souls" of fathers, mothers,
aunts, or uncles, who may have died in that faith.
The doctrine of Purgatory is based upon the assumption
of "purging" the soul from sin, so that it may ascend into realms
of supposed heavenly bliss. According to Roman Catholic faith,
it is a state of suffering in which the souls of those who die in
venial sin, or of those who still owe some debt of temporal
punishment for mortal transgression, are rendered fit for the
higher octaves of eternal consciousness. It is believed that such
souls continue to be members of the Church of Christ; that they
are helped by the suffrages of the living---that is, by prayers,

207
alms, and other good works, and more especially by the sacrifice
of the Mass---and that, although delayed until “the last farthing is
paid," their salvation is assured.
Catholics support this doctrine chiefly by reference to the
Mosaic belief in the efficacy of prayer for the dead, the tradition
of the early Christians, and the authority of the Church.
Many points about Purgatory, on which the Church has
no definition, have been subjects of much speculation among
Catholics. Purgatory, for example, is usually thought of as having
some position in space, and as being distinct from the
theological heaven and hell; but any theory as to its exact
location, latitude and longitude, such as underlies Dante's
description, must be regarded as imaginative.
Nevertheless, the whole concept of Purgatory could not
have sprung from human whimsy. Something that is basic in
discarnate conditions must have first given rise to the original
concept. The adept in posthumous research therefore comes
upon some interesting fundamentals of spiritual evolution. . . .

IT SEEMS to be a fact, from all that we can learn by

communication with those in the discarnate state, that any soul
goes forth from its bodily mechanism with just about the same
concepts of consciousness that it has evolved upon earth---that
is, in mortality. It is not yet adjusted to its bodiless status.
It discovers itself “living in pure thought," to use a somewhat
conventional phrase. In such state, it exists “in its own evolved
complexes." Life to it, in other words, is the sum-total of what it
has come to accept and believe sentimentally and ethically.

208
It finds that Thought is more or less a creative power unto itself,
just as Mrs. Hardwicke “thought" the idea of the living
sparrow hawk on Dr. Hardwicke's mantel. If such thought-world
be provincial, petty and evil, because of the ignorance or
circumscriptions of a given person in his current mentality, he is
going to find himself living in a sort of hell indeed. How to get
out of it?
That is probably where the primitive church hatched its
idea of Purgatory, or that mental condition immediately after
discarnation when the spirit-soul is in turmoil because its own
thought-universe is disclosed to be in such a mess.
Suppose, for instance, that a person were suddenly
withdrawn from active life and confined, while still in the physical
body, in a cell or dungeon in inky blackness where even the
sense of touch encountered naught but smooth walls and no
means of egress. After the first hours of utter despair wore off, all
the thinking of such a person would perforce be turned inward on
himself, if his environment offered no distractions or diversions to
his senses. He would suddenly find himself alive “with" his own
mind quite as much as alive “in" his own mind. If such minds are
a mad turmoil and tumult of rages, vengeances, petty notions
and sterile concepts, even resultant madness will be no relief.
They must face the fact of their own limitations and either “sort
themselves out" or get help from somewhere to acquire new and
better ideas about consciousness and factual existence. The
adept psychical researcher seems to learn through various types
of communication, that external help from relatives and intimates
whom the spirit-soul has left behind, actually begins to profit and
elevate the unfortunate from his handicapped and purblind

209
condition. The mass of good will thought-force that comes from a
great group of survivors, gathered in a room for a prayer meeting
or a mass, seems to be some sort of literal essence that the
discarnate and confused one can utilize to obtain light and
explanation of his condition

THERE seem to be seven octaves, or “planes," to which

the spirit-souls of our discarnate intimates go gradually after
quitting their bodies---seven planes at least with which we of the
mortal octave appear to have deliberate contact. The top one is
apparently the “Seventh Heaven" referred to in the Bible. The
lowest or first octave or plane would seem to be the black, earth-
bound condition, that is simply mortality without the body. In
between are the various gradations that the spirit-soul finally
“makes" according to his moral or ethical evolution at the time of
his latest demise.
Incidentally, the observation is thrown in here for what it
may be worth to some, that the great rank and file of humanity,
on demise usually gravitate to the third or fourth plane, according
to their self-awareness and spiritual development, and reside in it
till the time comes for further evolvement, unto complete
discarnation, and, in due course, further trips around the
reincarnational cycle. . . .
But the person who “goes out" of the body, professing
not to believe in existence after mortal demise, seems to exist in
a sort of self-induced coma, a deliberate and willful refusal to
accredit that survival is a fact and available if the spirit will only
take advantage of it.
For instance, the great rank and file of the Mosaic race,

210
not accrediting the wonders of immortality and discarnation,
usually discover themselves in this tumultuous “blackness" from
which getting out is long and tortuous. I call to mind some
experiments being made just now in some of our penal
institutions with methylene blue and its results on human
consciousness.
Out in California recently, the legislature changed the
penal law. It declared that men legally condemned to death
should no longer be electrocuted but executed by being confined
in an air-tight chamber and breathing the fumes of sodium-
cyanide eggs, dropped into acid. Lethal vapor rises from such
mixture in thin ribbons of fog. Taking it into the lungs, the
condemned man immediately feels consciousness slipping.
Insofar as his own sensations are concerned, he simply falls
asleep. And he never wakes up! How does anyone know?
Because persons who have accidentally inhaled sodium-cyanide
fumes and experienced the same physical sensations as these
men not allowed to awaken, have been revived to tell the tale.
But here is the uncanny thing making death by these
fumes of interest to psychical students generally---
The first two men to be put to death by the State of
California in its new gas chamber were Albert Kissel and Robert
Cannon. The report of the executions had it that Cannon was so
anxious to get the ordeal over with, that he leaned as close as
possible to the acid bucket and inhaled deeply. He gasped, and
the shock jerked back his head---as the head reacts when the
nostrils accidentally get too strong a whiff of ammonia or
smelling-salts. His eyes closed, he coughed, and thereafter was
quiet. Five minutes later, the physicians pronounced him dead.
But according to medical science-and whether we choose to

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believe it or not---had a belated reprieve come for Kissel or
Cannon within five to fifteen minutes after their being
pronounced dead, both could have been brought back to life.
For among the official witnesses of these first executions
by gas in San Quentin Prison was San Francisco's Director of
Public Health, Dr. J. C. Greiger. And upon Dr. Greiger's person
was a phial of liquid that could have made these two condemned
felons living men again.
The substance which could have worked the seeming
miracle-and which Dr. Grieger had succeeded in developing and
using on human beings who had been victims of cyanide
fumes---was, and is, a dye known as Methylene Blue. It is an
antidote for both cyanide and carbon-monoxide poisoning. A
young man by the name of Charles Riley was a medical student
who swallowed a large dose of cyanide because his fiancee had
jilted him for another man. He was rushed to San Francisco's
Emergency Hospital, and upon arrival his body showed no signs
of life. He was, to all tests and appearance, as dead as he ever
would be. Without the antidote handy, he would have been so
pronounced and his body turned over to the nearest undertaker
for embalming.
Dr. Greiger injected a solution of a new preparation,
Methylene Blue, and within fifteen minutues the would be suicide
was breathing almost normally.
“This case was unique for two reasons," Dr. Greiger said
later. “It was the first of its type in medical annals. Likewise, and
even more startling, is the fact that apparently young Riley
seemed to remember his experience."
Charles Riley said, fully recovered: “I took about fifteen
grains of potassium cyanide in forty ounces of water. I had no

212
sensation except a numbness which started at the bodily
extremities, and spread slowly throughout my physical system.
There was no muscular rigidity in going under. . . .
“Even while supposedly dead, I had a distinct sensation
of floating. There was none of the common blackness
recognized as death. I felt as if I were coming out into the light---
into a vast, glowing place of cool sunshine---like entering a new
and mysterious world. It was, I believe, simply another state of
consciousness, different from anything that I had ever
experienced before. My excursion into this strange realm was
brief. I didn't feel tragic about it, only tremendously surprised and
happy to find myself still conscious. I don't call it a psychical or
mystical experience. There was nothing obscure about it. I don't
remember details, there wasn't time enough, but I do remember
a definite feeling of release, something like emerging from a dim
room into sudden brightness."
The incident is noteworthy, not so much for the physical
miracle accomplished by the antidote drug, but from the
reactions mentally and spiritually on the consciousness of men
thus released from their physical encasements and--brought
back!
Significant in regard to the whole of it, however, is the
account advanced by two Hebrew persons who had taken to
suicide by the monoxide route. Their names are withheld for
obvious reasons.
Each of these persons reported, when the Methylene
Blue antidote had been applied and it had brought him back to
life, that he had not been conscious of any higher-octave
environment. He had simply been in a great blackness till the
antidote restored him to physical normality.

213
 Accepting this fact, he goes out into “the unobstructed
universe" with this fixation inhibiting him, and in consequence,
finds himself in thick, unreasoning darkness. It takes him a long,
long time to fight through that darkness to the light of personal
self-awareness. He has, in a manner of speaking, “hypnotized
himself" into accepting that there is no life beyond the grave, and
when he sheds his physical self, being introduced to the world of
Thought, he lets his self-hypnosis have full sway.
He is “dead" and there is “no device nor wisdom in the
grave whither thou goest," so therefore he finds himself without
such device or wisdom.
He has bogged himself in his own Luciferian inhibitions,
and in that dilemma he stays.
The average Christian, on the other hand, fully and
joyously believing in “eternal life", finds himself introduced
at once into it. It truly is a matter of his own aggressive
expectations. That which one thinks, is! You can think yourself
into conscious existence on the Other Side, just as the Israelite
thinks himself into inky blackness or nihility on the Other Side.
Believe in survival and you enjoy survival. Let ignorant or
malicious prelates convince you that you are going to roam
about in coma till the crack o' doom, and the chances are that
you are going to roam about in such coma.
Death, as the modem American regards it, seems to be
naught else than an hypnosis!
Refuse to believe in it, and it doesn't afflict you. Believe
in it and dread it, and you know it in all its nightmare sterilities . . .
until you work yourself out of your self-imposed darkness. . . .

214
 Chapter XIV

THE DEPARTED DO RETURN

HERE has been, of course, more deception,

charlatanry, and downright humbuggery
practiced in the name of Spiritism in seeking
to convince grieving people that their loved
ones are alive and under certain conditions
can be restored to them for a bit, than any
other form of flim-flam that human rascality can devise. People
who are attracted by Spiritism at all, seem to be sharply divided
into two classes: the utterly credulous and gullible who are
poignantly over-ready to rationalize the faintest forms of
supernaturality---and mind you, I said “forms" of supernaturality
and not substance---and the die-hard skeptics who start out on
the premise that every mediumistic person is a fraud, that there
are no such things as communicating or manifesting spirits.
Very, very finely drawn and qualified is the group of
persons between these two whose members have become
convinced without emotionalism either way that both
communication and manifestation are facts and who pursue their
unique avocation on the theory that while there are probably

215
more fraudulent mediums than honest ones, people with the
true mediumistic attribute should by no means be made to pay
for the wiles of the renegades. Because anyone who would try
to hoax a grieving mortal soul on this side, for gain of any sort,
is just that---a renegade---and nothing less.
The field of the explorers into Spiritsim presents the
picture of the proverbial sandwich, with the austere and
unconvincible skeptics on the top, the credulous on the bottom,
and in between, the meat of the balanced, restrained,
discriminating investigators who approach each new seance
from the standpoint of, “Let's find out what this new medium can
do that adds to our store of wisdom in these matters. If the
person is fraudulent, sooner or later his hocus-pocus will find him
out. "
Condemning the medium in advance, however, is
entering the seance room with a closed mind and merely inhibits
our own education and enlightenment.
Besides, after exploring in the psychical field over a
matter of years, the rational and unbiased investigator develops
a sort of instinct as to the presence of fraud. Truly great
mediums, worthy to be termed such, do not fiddle around with
self-banging tambourines, mysterious raps coming from the
wainscoting or the levitation of tables that hang themselves upon
the chandeliers.
What value would such childish antics have to a group of
scientific men who may have reason to concede that the so-
called “dead" do return to life but who are far more interested in
finding out what truly motivates the phenomena at the sitting of a
capable, sincere and utterly bona fide medium ?

216
 Mind you, I don't say that the mediums whose work is
confined to such phenomena are thereby frauds. Far from it.
I mean that the dispassionate investigator is mainly interested
in those mediums whose capabilities extend to the tangible
materializing of those who have made the Passing out of flesh,
in such manner that the latter can be identified.
The confirmed skeptic screeches at once: “There has
never been such an identification made, and whosoever says
there has been, is a fraud himself."
However, to close this volume of my own supernatural
experiences, I want to embark on the series of great adventures
I have had since 1939 with one medium of outstanding and bona
fide talents, who has become an institution in the national
Soulcraft work.
To write promiscuously of my contact with this or that
medium's work over ten years of psychical observation, and
chart what results were gotten here or not gotten there, would be
unfair to my mediumistic friends in general. It would make it
appear that I was disparaging certain mediums and ballyhooing
others. And I am neither disparaging nor ballyhooing in this
volume. I am setting down the highlights of the altogether weird
experiences that have come to me since 1928, convincing me
that not only is death a misnomer but that there is just as much
radiant activity---although in a higher frequency of matter---
among our so-called “departed" friends, as there ever is in this
frequency we call the physical.
I am telling you how it has been with me. Like my Seven
Minutes in Eternity experience, I don't ask you to accredit it if you
choose not to do so.

217
 I believe the “dead" are alive and functioning, and under
certain conditions may function again on this plane, because of
such phenomena as I first saw, heard, and touched in a
Manhattan seance room of a Sunday night of the year in
question.
First, to paint in a bit of background. . . .

I HAD a close friend, executive in a New York publishing

house, who from time to time had donated sizable sums of
money that my metaphysical writings might be distributed and
help others as he had been helped by them. This man,
incidentally, was not a Spiritualist.
In the early part of the 1939 winter he had gone to visit
relatives in Toronto, Ontario. Meeting there an elderly gentleman
of recognized clairaudient powers, he was disconcerted to be
advised---
“Both your father and mother are anxious to get in
audible touch with you. They want you to go to an address in a
city in southern Florida and inform whomsoever answers the
doorbell that you have come to make contact with your mother.
They will understand and take charge of you."
It was my publisher-friend's confidence in the integrity of
his informant that started him off on the odd adventure. He
motored down to Miami, not informing me of his trip and
determined to discover how he could receive word in Miami from
a maternal parent who had died in Canada in 1923.
It was to be the beginning of the greatest psychical
experience of his life, incidentally my own as well. He found the
address given him in Toronto, without difficulty, and performed
as directed.

218
 THREE days later I got a lengthy letter from my friend.
He was utterly stupefied with what had happened to him. At an
afternoon private seance he had every reason to believe that he
had talked long and audibly with his deceased father and a
brother, discussing matters that had only been known to him and
to them when they had been alive.
Among the things which his father had referred to in the
direct voice were my friend's contributions to my own work and
how happy it had made all his relatives in the Higher Octaves.
References had been constant throughout to family
incidents, episodes and vicissitudes which none but the bona
fide spirit of his dad could have known---and the same thing went
for the mother.
The ensuing Sunday night, my friend had attended a
seance in the medium's small “church" where she had gone into
a complete trance.
Suddenly out from the cabinet had walked his mother---a
portly woman of some seventy---odd years when he had last
seen her in life. She was dressed in a quaint beaded blouse
waist and skirt that he recalled having purchased for her in
Manhattan the last time she had gone there on a visit before
her Passing. My friend---and henceforth in what is described
I shall call him George---had once been a pattern-maker and
designer of women's wear, so he had more than the usual male
eye for a peculiar blouse when he saw it again. With his mother
standing before him in the outfit exactly as he had known her in
life, he exclaimed at the dress.
“Yes, my son," said his mother whimsically, “Iput it on---
or so you might call it---purposely so you'd have no difficulty in
recognizing me."

219
 IF IT could be said the medium was tricking all this,
then it has to be admitted that she was a particularly clever
trickster, with a knowledge of George's family life and affairs that
paralleled his own. . . .
For ten minutes his fully materialized mother had talked
with him, especially about the settlement of her estate among a
brood of a dozen children, and how each one had taken his
share of her bequest, what he had done with the money and how
he should be helped at the current moment. Not a name was
miscalled. There was no fumbling for cues by the mother.
Next his sister emerged from the same cabinet. She
even wore the same style spectacles that had helped her vision
in life. My friend asked her if she still had need of glasses in
her higher-octave existence. “Oh no,” she answered, “I just wore
a pair of these things because you mightn't recognize me
without." She then discussed likewise the most intimate details of
the family life in Toronto when they had been boys and girls. The
thing that impressed George most about his sister's identity was
a characteristic little motion made with her right hand when
talking, impressing a point or gaining attention. Every little trick of
speech which had distinguished her in the body was evidenced
as she gave him counsel in regard to helping another sister and
her husband who were in business difficulties of some sort up in
Canada because of the war.

GEORGE was so flabbergasted at such a demonstration

that he wrote he was coming north to get me at Indianapolis and
motor me through to New York, where the same medium was
due to visit in a couple of weeks.

220
 “I want you to witness this medium's work and tell me
what you think of it," he wrote. “I found out after the seances that
she scarcely knows who you are. I think I can arrange to slip you
into her Sunday night sitting without any publicity, and let's see
what happens. If any of your relatives ‘come through' who know
as much about your affairs as my ‘relatives' knew about mine,
then we've just got to accept that the claim of nobody's ever
having returned to earth from beyond the grave is purest
tommyrot."
Well, more of my political persecution in Carolina was
afoot and I was required to go down to Buncombe County that
next week for a court hearing. So George came to Indianapolis
and got me, drove me to Asheville, and when the ordeal there
was over, took me up to New York through Virginia.

THE MEDIUM was Bertie Lilly Candler.

She was a handsome woman of some forty years, with a
head of lovely auburn hair and sincere blue eyes. Later I was to
learn that she had been raised in the Methodist denomination in
Atlanta, Ga., and had begun to exercise her phenomenal powers
following the death of her brother Howard, after she had married
and started living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was accompanied in
this New York visit by her husband Edward, who superintended
her seance work. My friend George had cleverly arranged the
day before I saw the phenomena I am about to describe, that he
was to arrive “with a friend" at the borrowed studio where Miss
Candler---as she is professionally known---was to go into her
trance, and that we were to be slipped into reserved chairs after
the other spectators had assembled and just before the lights

221
were dimmed, that any possible notoriety attendant upon
myself might in nowise embarrass either medium or hostess.
Twenty persons were gathered at 8:15 when George
and I pushed the bell of an apartment on the twelfth floor of a
residence skyscraper overlooking the Hudson River. We were
admitted just as the hostess was requesting a group of women
present to accompany the medium into an adjacent room while
she divested herself of her usual clothes and donned her seance
robe---a plain gown of olive satin. This to forestall any later
charge of fraud, or of taking into the cabinet with her anything
that might be extraneous to unassisted phenomena.
The room in which the sitting was being held was about
twelve feet wide by twenty feet long. The length of it ran east and
west in the building. At the western end was a small angular
platform, containing a rostrum and a studio piano, raised fifteen
inches from the main flooring. This flooring was carpeted with
what appeared to be a heavy dark green Brussels rug.
We entered from the public corridor through the main
door in the room's southeastern corner. The room had only one
other door, farther west in the southern wall, opening into a little
hallway off which were chamber, bathroom, and kitchenette.
These details are important in what followed. The cabinet
consisted of a collapsible wooden framework with heavy red
velours drapes on brass hooks. It made a little compartment
about five feet square and seven feet high, inside which was
nothing but a plain wooden chair turned sideways to the
audience. Several people examined this cabinet beforehand,
finding it absolutely empty of anything but the chair. At the right
of the cabinet outside was a chair where the medium's husband

222
usually sat throughout his wife's seances. He personally greeted
and interrogated the materialized people as they emerged, and
made certain that no sitter who was called close to the cabinet,
crossed between the materialization and the medium, thus
interfering with, or cutting off, the ectoplasmic cord. To the left of
the cabinet outside was a small table holding a portable victrola
with a pile of sacred records, subsequently played between
manifestations. At the northern corner of the platform opposite
the cabinet was a small spotlight with a ruby lens, focused on the
front curtains. This illumination, after the eyes became
accustomed to it, was sufficient to reflect throughout the whole
room and show all the sitters in silhouette. At least nobody could
move in the room without its being discernible.
After a time Miss Candler came from the chamber in the
satin robe, nodded to acquaintances in the room who had been
at some of her sittings before, and went into the cabinet. Before
the floor lamps were switched off and the ruby spotlight turned
on, she sat herself on the chair, gathered the robe about her
feet, lifted a corner of the front drape and called out naively to
everyone, “Good night!"
Unique to add, Miss Candler's little Pomeranian trotted
after her into the cabinet and stretched near her feet. I had it
whispered to me that the pet always did that, and slept soundly
throughout the whole proceeding.
It certainly was there asleep, and had to be awakened,
after the floor lamps were snapped on at the end of the seance.
Inasmuch as some twenty-five entities were to materialize in the
ensuing three hours, of all ages and both sexes, it hardly seems
possible that a dumb animal---especially a dog---would have

223
slept soundly while they passed in and out of that cabinet, had
they been mortal actors putting over any hoax. . . . One of them,
at least, would have stepped on it!

WITH the floor lamps snapped off and the red light
turned on, the woman who owned the apartment and acted as
hostess---and who was herself one of New York's most famous
trumpet mediums---requested that we open the proceedings by
reciting the Lord's Prayer in unison. That finished, our hostess
put on the first record. It was, "Nearer, My God to Thee." The
record contained three verses. When it was finished, we waited.
Nothing happened.
Our hostess put on another hymn, “Abide With Me."
When its three verses had finished in turn, a period of electric
silence followed. Suddenly it was cut by a voice. It was a girl's
voice, possibly fourteen to sixteen years old. It came from behind
the drapes.
“Hello, everybody!" it rang out, clear as a bell. “I'm
Silverleaf! "
Now I had heard about Silverleaf from George. She was
not so much Miss Candler's “control," as her mediumistic
companion. Usually Miss Candler's brother, Howard---at whose
decease, as aforesaid, she had truly begun her mediumistic
work---acted as her control. But Howard did not seem to be with
her this night. Silverleaf took charge of the sitting.
She had not only talked with George in Florida but had
materialized at all of Miss Candler's seances which George had
attended. He had come to know her rather intimately during the
fortnight spent in the South.

224
 He had described her to me as an attractive young
Indian girl, who usually appeared with a band of jewels around
her head, two heavy braids down her breast over an Indian
jacket, and a skirt of a billowy white material resembling poplin.
On one occasion George had playfully challenged her as
to whether her braids were real. She had taken one of them and
brushed it across his nose and face. She called him Uncle Jo-
Jo. Many of those present had been at Miss Candler's sittings
before and met Silver leaf. They responded to her greeting. “I'm
coming out in a minute," Silverleaf went on. “Medie," meaning
the medium, ttisn't quite asleep yet. Hello, Uncle Jo-Jo!"
“Hello, Silverleaf," called back George. ”Do you know
who I've got with me?"
“Sure I know who you've got with you," she said with a
rippling laugh. “You've got Uncle Billy with you. Hello, Uncle
Billy!"
“Hello, Silverleaf," I returned, having been at trumpet
sittings before and not feeling inhibited at carrying on my end of
such conversations.
Thereupon Silverleaf began to callout and greet other
sit- ters personally. She never missed the correct name. Finally
she called to our hostess, “put on another hymn, Nora, then I
guess we'll be about ready."
The hostess put on “Lead Kindly Light."
Now understand me, what I am about to relate I
saw with my own eyes, I heard with my own ears, and
I touched with my own hands. There is no second-
hand information to any of it. And I had my friend George
for witness as to the accuracy of what I am reporting.
When the final verse of "Lead, Kindly Light" had died away, the

225
front of the drapes moved in the ruby lamp's focused
illumination. Out of the cabinet stepped an Indian girl of about
sixteen years, with long braids down each side of a dark pretty
face, her shoulders covered by a beaded jacket, and a flowing
white skirt billowing down from her belt. She came out without
the slightest hesitancy and with a child's delighted cry of, “Well,
here I am!"
A chorus of greetings met her. Somehow it seemed,
despite my clandestine presence there, that I had to be singled
out for attention, though my last name never was spoken in the
three hours that followed.
The room was then deathly silent. You could have heard
the proverbial pin drop.
Silverleaf came tripping over to where George and I sat,
about midway between the two doors along the southern wall.
She stood before us. Just what was expected of me, I wasn't
sure. George said, 'I wanted Uncle Billy to meet you in person,
Silverleaf."
"I told you I knew all about Uncle Billy," repeated
Silverleaf. "See, I've got on the same dress tonight that I had on
down in Florida, Uncle Jo-Jo."
The voice of Mrs. Candler's husband interrupted us from
across the room. “Get up, William," he suggested. “Come back
nearer to the cabinet here."
I arose. To my astonishment, Silverleaf put her hand on
my forearm and held me as she backed before me toward the
cabinet. It felt as the hand of any 16-year-old girl would feel.
There was nothing waxen or ethereal about it. It was no paper-
mache hand.
What on earth we talked about when I got in correct
position facing her in front of the cabinet, where I did not obstruct

226
the beam from the ruby lamp, I don't for the life of me recall. If I
did I would set it down. But I remember George calling out to the
girl, “Smoosh Uncle Billy's face with one of your braids,
Silverleaf, just to show him they're real, the same as you did
mine down in Florida."
With a naive little chuckle, Silverleaf caught up her right-
hand braid and brushed it playfully across my features. I had
expected to feel coarse Indian hair. Instead it was soft as silk
and delicately perfumed with lotus. I say that I smelled that
beautiful scent and yet I couldn't have done it with nostrils alone,
for unknown to many of my friends I lost my sense of smell
during a siege of typhoid in Vermont in 1921. Later I had it
explained to me that while the “smell buds" in my nostrils were
destroyed, the nerves of smell back to the brain centers were
not, and it had been these that caught the supernatural perfume.
Then came another startling incident. I thought that Silverleaf
had done with me and started back to my chair. To my
astonishment, it seemed that she hadn't done with me, because
I sensed her running after me, I felt her hand in the crook of my
right elbow, and she playfully whirled me around to face her.
I weigh 154 pounds. No ethereal “phantom" grabs hold of a 154-
pound man and has strength enough to turn him completely
about. As I recall, it was some trivial promise about listening at
times for her voice in my clairaudient ear, so that having thus
met her I could identify her, that caused the whirligig. Anyhow,
I got back to my seat and Silver-leaf turned her attention to the
rest of the sitters.
She stood in the center of the group, half-way down the
room, and addressed practically every person there in turn,
calling each one' by his or her first name and asking after
personal affairs or suggesting times when they had met before.

227
She seemed to take particular delight in her costume and
showed it off with the savoir faire of the professional manikin.
Her poise was adorable. Finally she said that she had to go back
into the cabinet and help “build up the ray" for others. I asked
“What ray?" “The materializing ray," she answered. What she
alluded to was, that to obtain such results in actuality, this was
what took place: As the medium sank into deeper and deeper
trance, her body began to release its ectoplasmic content, which
poured out through its orifices into a sort of pool in the cabinet
before her. This is one of the chief reasons for the cabinet at all,
that such exhibition does not frighten or disgust the spectator.
Into this flood of released ectoplasm, the more tenuous Light
Body of the materializing entity steps and concentrates---with
the help of “guides" like Silverleaf who are in the cabinet
discarnate---on what his or her physical appearance was in
mortality. This concentration acts as a sort of magnetic ray that
begins to draw up the ectoplasm around the discarnate Light-
Body like mercury filling up the glass stem of a thermometer.
When the Light-Body, or pattern-self, is completely
substantialized, the materialization is accomplished and the
discarnate entity can leave the cabinet, to all intents a normal
human being.
Don't say, “It can't be done!" It can be done, and is done
in a thousand bona fide seance rooms on five continents year
after year. It is the operating of a law just as natural as the
growth of a blood clot in a woman's womb into a perfectly formed
human being, within the first twenty-five days after conception,
though too minute to be recognized for what it is. One is no more
a mystery than the other.

228
 WHEN Silverleaf had withdrawn into the cabinet, our
hostess put on a fresh sacred record. As its final verse died
away, the front drapes rippled and parted. Another young girl
stepped through---a white girl. She was dressed in a pretty lace
frock with a sort of bridal net falling from her hair. Edward got her
identity and called out to her father and mother who were seated
on George's left. They arose and hastened forward.
The mother gave a sharp cry, “lt's really you, dear!"
Recognition was instantaneous. Gertrude, it seemed, had caught
a chill at her high school graduation dance, taken to bed, and
Passed Over of quick pneumonia. This, apparently, was the first
time that the parents had seen her in materialization. The
reunion was poignant. I had noticed the careworn father and
mother seated beyond George just before the lights went off.
The father had something like a fold of cardboard in his hands
and I had thought it a pad of paper for taking notes. Presently I
was to find out what it was.
They talked swiftly, eagerly, of events that had taken
place in the family since the girl's passing. She gave them what
she could of her own experiences in the octave above the
mortal. Then still in the ruby light, the father opened the
cardboard folder.
“I brought this along just in case we actually saw you
tonight," he explained. And he handed it to her. The whole thing
was played out not four feet from me and I could hear plainly
every word that passed.
The girl took the folder, opened it herself, and held it
down against her skirt in order to get the ruby light-beam upon it.
“Why, it's me in my graduation dress!" she cried.

229
 “Yes, dear," the mother said. “You remember it was
taken the day you went to the dance, but you left us before the
photographer delivered it."
“And there's another picture in here," Gertrude said. She
looked at it closely. “Why, it's Tommy!" I gathered that Tommy
was a younger brother.
Somehow that recognition of the picture hit me as being
a more accurate proof of identity of a departed soul than even
the things that subsequently happened to myself.
Gertrude handed back the photographs. Suddenly, with
a surge of emotion, she threw both arms around her father and
mother. The three of them embraced there---like the three
normal persons which they were---loath to give each other up.
Could that father and mother ever conceive thereafter
that their beloved daughter was dead, or that she had
“perished?" What Mosaic numskull was it who had written back
over the years, “The dead know not anything," and “There is no
device nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest?" Rubbish!

230
 Chapter XV

PROOF OVERWHELMING

HE BREAKAWAY had to come between

Gertrude and her parents. Seeing her
withdraw and go backward into the cabinet
was not unlike having her die a second death
to them, I suppose, in that she could not walk
out of the meeting with them. When the
drapes had fallen before her figure, we were brought back to
realities by another bit of sacred music coming from the victrola.
Who would emerge from the cabinet next? We had not long to
wait.
The curtains parted, the form of an elderly lady stepped
through. She paused a moment and then stepped back. The
drapes fell before her figure.
A second time she opened the drapes. This time she
stepped through and at least six feet out into the room. She cried
with a husky Irish brogue: “Dennis!"
Mind you these voices were not spookish whispers,
unless their possessors did not particularly want the whole
roomful to hear what they were saying to their intimates.
An Irish traffic policeman who was present, but not in
uniform, sprang up with an exclamation. Apparently this was his
mother.

231
 “Dennis, me son, me son!" she cried. What they said
privately up close together I could not hear, for the woman
dropped her voice a few moments. Then louder we heard her
say, “Oh why do ye have to be all the time standing down under
thim terrible elevated tracks with the trolley cars going past ye,
and thim trucks nearly hitting ye? A dozen toimes a day, me bye,
ye give your mither the conniption fits that they're going to take
your toes off."
“Are you there with me, mother?" the copper asked
incredulously.
“AIl the toime I'm with ye, to keep ye from harm. But ye
scare the wits from ye mither a dozen toimes an hour. Why don't
ye give up the job, Dennis, and git a dacent job at man's
wages?"
“Somebody has to do that sort of thing, mother," Dennis
argued.
“Yis, I suppose so. But do ye take care of yourself. And I
know there's going to be a new wedding ring on your finger in
the spring. May ye be happy, me son!"

"THAT'S pretty realistic," I whispered to George in the

ruby dark, as a new hymn played sweetly.
“Look!" George cried presently. Out from the curtains
had stepped a tall foreign-looking cleric in vestments that
seemed to me to be of the Greek Catholic church as I had seen
them in Siberian mosques in 1918. He wanted his sister Mischa.
A stocky Slav girl sprang up and came forward. After the
usual emotional greetings, they began talking about family
affairs, with references to papa and mama and other relatives
and their troubles, which the brother contended he was daily

232
helping to iron out. We thought it was to be just another of those
domestic visits which mean nothing to a stranger excepting the
humanness of the problems. Suddenly, however, the Russian
said, “Do you recall, Mischa, how we once played and sang
together at the piano?"
Indeed, Mischa did.
"Would you play an accompaniment for me," the brother
asked wistfully, "and let me sing with you again?"
Mischa acted embarrassed. She didn't enthuse. "Some
other night, brother," she begged.
“Oh, all right---nichivo!" the man said, the tone of
disappointment bitter in his voice.
The audience broke out in a storm of protestations.
“Play, Mischa, play!" they insisted.
The brother, in retreat toward the cabinet, seemed to
pause and wait.
“What do you want me to play?" she asked him.
“Would you play The Rosary?"
Mischa went to the piano on the dais. That she was an
expert musician was evident the instant her fingers touched the
keys. She sounded off on the proper chord. Then, to my
stupefaction at least, the brother who had remortalized himself
for this epochal evening by courtesy of the gracious Florida
woman asleep inside that cabinet, cleared his throat and started
in with the words. He sang the three verses without slip or falter,
though sometimes not quite making the true tone on the high
notes. There he was, within five feet of me, doing that thing, his
voice having quite as much volume as any man's in that room.
My eyes had grown quite accustomed to the red light by this
time. His figure between me and the opposite wall was as

233
opaque as any figure within reach of my vision. It was perfectly
made. I could see the man's chest rise and fall. His accent, not
pure English, often flatted on the words. But singing the song
seemed to mean a lot to him. When the solo was over, he
thanked his sister like a grateful little boy. The approval of the
audience, of course, was noisy.
“lt's quite like old times," he murmured to Mischa as he
finally backed toward the cabinet. A moment later, he had
disappeared from our sight.
“What do you think of that?" asked George.
“lf I hadn't heard it with my own ears, I wouldn't have
believed it," I replied.
The victrola hymn had started up again.

A PORTLY German father stepped out from the drapes

and called to his son and his family, sitting directly opposite the
cabinet. The son brought up his new bride to be introduced, a girl
who had never seen the old gentleman in flesh. The
conversation began in German and finished in German---for a
full ten minutes. Not knowing German, I could not follow it. But it
seemed to be all about relatives, for I distinguished several
Christian names, both men and women.
Suddenly, when the German had finished his visit, the
voice of Silverleaf called to the hostess over the drapes, “Put on
the Bells of St. Mary, Nora!"
It took a moment to find the record out of the pile by the
aid of a tiny flashlight. Nora played it once and nothing
happened. But just as it started up a second-time, the drapes
parted and the figure that advanced out of the cabinet was that
of a nun, muttering in what I took to be Latin. She was clad in

234
sharp blacks and whites in headdress and girdle. Her presence
was so impelling that the audience forgot to welcome her
audibly.
Strangely enough, the room happened to be so silent for
an instant that as the Sister trod past me---within at least two feet
of where I was leaning forward---I could hear the scuff of what
seemed to be her naked feet on the nap of the heavy Brussels
rug. That too was pretty convincing evidence in view of what
happened when she later “went out." She moved toward one of
the women at the back of the room and spoke. The woman
started up. What relation she was to the nun I could not make
out. But if I recall correctly, the woman was perplexed over
whether or not she should give up her present work and take
up nursing.
“No," the nun advised against it. “If I were you I would
keep on where you are. You are doing more good to humanity.
On and on they talked about more family complications.
The way in which these good people---striving against time to
cram all their troubles and sorrows into a brief few minutes of
contact---choking hectically over the questions and answers, was
heart-rending.
But the nun kept her poise and terminated the interview.
Back near the cabinet---I should say some three feet in front of it
and yet standing slightly off-center toward the right--she
suddenly raised both arms heavenward. She looked like one of
those Angels of Mercy on the Red Cross posters. I heard a
hoarse whisper: “She's blessing us. Listen!"
It was a Catholic blessing, uttered in Latin. The nun was
talking swiftly, almost parroting her words.

235
 And as she repeated the blessing, I beheld her start to
sink through the floor with a curious twist of her uniformed figure.
I blinked my eyes. I did everything but pinch myself or
jab a pin in my leg. What on earth was I seeing?
The nun's figure sank further. She went down to her
knees, her waist, her shoulders. Finally her head went out of
sight---through the rug! It was like watching a person sink
beneath the surface of water.
Finally we watched the awesome sight of two upraised
arms and hands, still heavy with vestments, thrusting upward
from the carpet. Finally the left hand nearest me vanished. The
right hand lingered as a pool of fluorescence on the rug for ten or
fifteen seconds, and then that too disappeared. No part of her
had gone back into the cabinet. She had dematerialized---
sloughed off her clothing of substantiality---directly before our
eyes! I was to have a second such demonstration before the
night was over.
It was to be my own paternal grandfather!

236
 Chapter XVI

“THE DOOR IS NOW UNLOCKED"

KNEW that I was witnessing a display of

phenomena that might happen, even to expert
researchers, but once in a lifetime---and yet
might be repeated, if one were fortunate, no
later than tomorrow night. Less than an hour
had gone by, and I had already witnessed the
equivalent of manifestations that might compose a whole
evening's seance, and a most satisfying seance at that. The
victrola played on at my right, and in between records, if a
materialization had not appeared, I could hear the suppressed
breathing of the score of persons around me, striving as I was
striving to accredit that they were all seated in Mayor La
Guardia's New York, with the long strings of automobiles flowing
down the Drive below in the beautiful orchestration of Sunday
night traffic, and the problems of the war-torn world to be faced
in the morning. Most of the materializations, I noted, usually
appeared in about the middle of the second playing of any given
hymn on the machine, when Nora would instantly hush the
music. . . .
Suddenly the curtains parted, the music was stopped,
and a figure appeared that puzzled as it disquieted me---not that

237
I recognized it, for it was a stranger and yet a somewhat different
type of entity than had materialized to the present. Edward,
beyond the cabinet, rose to his feet.
“This,” he announce solemnly, “is evidently a personage
from a very high plane of eternity." And he bent toward it with
instinctive solicitude.
The man standing sedately before the drapes was not
tall---in a few moments I was to stand within a foot of him and
find myself looking down slightly into his face. He was dressed in
vestments such as I had never witnessed on any cleric of any
church. A mitre of some sort seemed to be on his head. He
looked eighty years old. A long silvery beard dropped halfway
down his chest. There was a quiet restraint, a poise, a dignity to
him that might be felt merely by surveying him.
“He gives the name of Ari," announced Edward, “and is
here to speak to George."
The friend beside me started up. “lt's my special
protective guardian," he declared in a whisper. “He materialized
twice for me down in Florida."
This then was the spirit whom George had reported to
me as having done something that I considered truly remarkable
in the way of phenomena. One night, in a Florida sitting, he had
called George up and talked with him privately about his life and
affairs. He had seemed so paternal, so kindly, so solicitous, that
George had begun to have a sincere affection for the gentleman.
When he had turned to depart, he had asked George, “Would
you like to have something to remember me by?"
George, of course, had answered affirmatively.
“Have you a pair of scissors or a knife in your pocket?"
George had a pocket knife and produced it.

238
 Ari had twisted up a lock of his beard and held it taut.
“Cut it off," he had directed.
George had told me that while striving to do this, he had
seen the pull of the flesh where the hairs grew out and Ari's
grasp of the lock had been faulty. But he had severed the strand
and received it in his fingers.
"Put it in a locket," Ari had said. "It will be a constant
connection between us."
George, of course, had wondered how that could be, for
he rightly expected that his ethereal guardian would presently
dematerialize. But when the latter had done so, to George's
amazement the lock of hair had not! George had carried it from
the seance and shown it to me in Indianapolis.
This then, was the dignitary who had done this wonder
and I hoped I was going to be able to ask him how he had
performed it.
George, up before the cabinet with Ari, called me to
them. He introduced me. Ari laid his right hand with firm pressure
on my wrist.
I could see him plainly then. I judged his race to be
Persian.
"I'm so glad to be able to introduce my friend to you, Ari,"
George said, to make conversation.
The venerable one laughed pleasantly.
"My son," he returned, “we on This Side know William's
work even better than you do. But it gives me great pleasure that
we meet face to face."
I said, “George has shown me the keepsake you gave
him in Florida. From the scientific angle, I've wondered how
such a thing could be managed. How did the hair lock remain in

239
existence on this side when you returned to the higher octave ?"
Again that poised, easy laugh from the visitor. “It was
meant to remain on your side of life," he responded. “I fixed it so
that it would." He put emphasis on the “would."
What more could be said? Any discussion of the higher-
life processes was impossible at the moment.
I went back to my seat and presently George followed.
Ari had spoken a pleasant word to the guests and stepped
backward behind the drapes.

AS THOUGH purposely to display a diversity of types a

lad of some fifteen years stepped out of the cabinet a moment or
two after the next record had been played. He was clad in
ordinary boy's clothing of this period---trousers and blouse-shirt,
with four-in-hand tie---but seemed to be afflicted with a slight
curvature of the spine.
“Tony!" cried the medium's husband, springing up as
though a bit surprised himself.
Tony greeted Edward. He seemed pleased with himself
that he had contrived it. Edward explained.
“Tony," he said, standing in big-brotherly fashion beside
the youthful visitor, “was formerly a newsboy in Chicago. He
made the Passing a couple of years ago by being struck by a
truck on Evanston Avenue. He drops in to see us at these
meetings quite often. Sometimes he sings for us. Don't you,
Tony?"
“Sure, I sing!" boasted Tony. “But I don't think I'll do it
tonight."

240
 The assembly at once pressed him to favor it. But Tony
had all the embarrassment of a Chicago newshawk suddenly
plunged into a gathering in a drawing-room. No, he wouldn't
sing. He just wanted to say hello to Eddie and then get gone.
“Loads of folks are waiting to get in," he declared.
It was a queer little episode. Tony hadn't come to meet
anybody in the group. He just wanted to be neighborly and that
was that. Having gotten a certain gratification from being thus
noticed, he opened the drapes behind him and his personal
appearance for the evening was over.

WE HAD to wait a long time now. I wondered if the

ectoplasmic force was dwindling. But I presently understood.
A dignified gentleman who must have stood six feet tall,
with a well-shaped bald head, and a gown resembling an
Episcopalian rector's surplice, with stole, over sinewy shoulders
and chest, presently walked out of the cabinet and stood for a
moment regarding us all. The woman at my right cried, “Doctor
Wainwright!"
“Yes," the personage responded gravely, “I am Doctor
Wainwright. I wish to speak to you first, my dear, about your
treatments. Will you please come up here for a short
consultation?"
The lady needed no urging. She joined him, with a
couple of women friends, in front of the cabinet. The assembly
waited.
I gathered from what I overheard of the conversation that
the woman was suffering from an internal trouble with which
mortal physicians could scarcely cope.

241
 At some previous seance this higher-octave physician
had come through to her and promised to assist her doctor in
flesh to bring about an amelioration of her condition, if not her
cure. He made the clairaudient recommendations to her mortal
doctors, I gathered, and they gave the treatments, whether
aware of the source of their prescriptions or not. But the patient
was not cooperating as she should. Hence this personal contact.
He went on explaining something medical for at least five
minutes. Finally he dismissed her, and noted the group. Edward
asked him if he could not speak them all a word of comfort
during the terrible times through which the earth was passing.
“We in the higher spheres of life," Dr. Wainwright
responded after a moment's cogitation, “do not look upon what is
happening now on your plane as ‘war.' Neither should any of you
privileged persons consider it as such. What the earth world is
passing through at present is a stupendous renovation." Dr.
Wainwright spoke measuredly, choosing his words most
carefully.
“The time has come in modern history," he went on in
substance, “for a gigantic housecleaning of all the dark, wicked,
mischief-forces who so shamefully afflict man and his
institutions---especially his political and economic institutions.
They are due to expose themselves presently throughout all
humanity for their blunderings, their greeds, their inabilities to
inspire or direct man in his worldly predicaments and dilemmas.
Before the present sequence is run they will be stripped of their
influence because of their own inadequacies. Great wrongs that
have afflicted the nations for generations are due to be righted.
The earth and its society must come back into a moral balance."
Someone asked how far America would get into the war.

242
 “There will be no such enemy destruction of life and
property in the United States as there has been in countries
abroad," he replied. “At least, those on the plane to which I have
progressed seem not to be aware of it. But you must remember
that we have no more access to the intentions of the Almighty
than you have. We are simply living in a higher and more
delicate world of Matter. We have ways of seeing things begin to
occur in the astral that are presently to mature in event in the
mortal, but it is for a limited time ahead only. This thing I do want
you to remember and to count on, however: All of us in these
higher states of life have positive knowledge of a great leader
who is presently to rise here in North America and by his wise
counsel and direction---gained from the same high sources from
which we get our counsel and direction---straighten out most of
the embroilments in which American humankind finds itself in
these moments. You can plan on the coming of such a leader,
though you must not question me specifically concerning his
identity. He is not so well known now as he is to be shortly.
Probably he will come in result of the terrible blunders and
shortcomings of those who have had the conflict in charge in its
opening phases. He will resuscitate the United States from the
spiritual, more than from the political, angle. And when he
comes, not the least among you will have much difficulty
recognizing him."
The doctor started to back toward the cabinet as he
concluded this message. Then with a grave bow to the thoughtful
assembly, he stepped inside. . . .

243
 NOW FOLLOWED at least an hour of entities of strictly
private significance to other sitters present. The mothers of
several persons, clad in most cases in ethereal flowing robes,
made themselves substantial and discoursed with sons or
daughters quite after the manner I have described. On one
occasion the son of one of the women spectators visited her for
several minutes, expressing his gratitude that he was out of
mortality for the sequence now running on earth.
“I did my share in the first World War," he informed us.
“I'm glad I don't have to go through another such experience
under present conditions."
His mother explained, in introducing him to the group,
that he had been badly wounded in the AEF in 1918, and had
dragged out a miserable existence as a disabled veteran till
death released him some five years bygone. A most poignant
note was introduced on another occasion by the deceased fiancé
of one of the young women present stepping suddenly from
between the drapes, being instantly recognized, and the two of
them embracing after she had left her seat impulsively and
hurried to him.
“Oh, it's so hard to get along with you gone, Harry," the
young woman sobbed. “It's all that I can do to live day after day.
Life seems so bleak, so barren."
With his arms about his erstwhile sweetheart, the young
man patted the pretty bowed back, and sought to soothe her.
“But can't you understand," he argued gently, “that I'm
not ‘gone,' that I'm right close to you day after day, helping you
as I never could help you had I stayed in life with you?"

244
 No, she couldn't, and she said so. So they clung to each
other---and everyone present must have felt a bit embarrassed,
as though violating some sort of privacy by thus looking on.
I couldn't help wondering what the skeptics and
ignoramuses---who contend so raucously that no “dead" person
has ever “come back"---would say, to sit witnessing such a
reunion as this, a young man stepping into mortality for a brief
ten minutes to put his arms around a beloved sweetheart
whom he had been obliged to part with, when he had to go
ahead of her into the more exquisite phases of experiencing
Consciousness. But the evening was getting on.
Between half-past ten and eleven o'clock it was, and
after the victrola records had run out, to be succeeded by a
beautiful rhythmic humming of “Holy Night" on the part of the
sitters, that the curtains trembled, were pulled energetically
open, and a white figure stepped through without the slightest
pause or hesitation, heading straight for my chair.

SOMEHOW I seemed to know telepathically when this

Lady in White walked out, that she had materialized for me and
none other, though I couldn't tell who she was at once. As she
crossed the space of rug, she seemed to loom above me in
unnatural proportions.
Presently I was to see that this effect was supplied by
swathes of chiffon about her head and held together on the
center of her breast.
“Dudley, my son!" she cried raggedly as I got to my feet.
Now there had been only one such woman who had gone on the
other side, who had ever used my middle name in addressing
me as a lad, and that was my maternal grandmother. But could

245
this be my maternal grandmother? She had blue eyes, as my
maternal grandmother had blue eyes. She had something of the
same contours of face. But my mother's mother, Hanna, had
been an elderly woman---some sixty-five or seventy years old---
when making the Passing in 1912. This lady did not look a day
over forty, if that old, and her figure lacked my Grandmother
Goodale's portliness.
On the other hand, I had heard plenty in other seances
of a process in the higher dimensions of certain souls' “growing
back to a norm" of maturity and remaining there until progressing
along to loftier planes of consciousness. Was my grandmother
doing that? Certainly in the ensuing few moments I had small
doubt about its being my grandmother's spirit. I followed her to a
position in front of the cabinet where the ruby spotlight gave
maximum illumination.
“You poor boy,” she crooned, “what a terrible time you
are going through! And all so unfair and unmerited!" Probably
had I known Grandmother in her middle life, I might not have felt
so confused at having a person apparently younger than myself
at the moment---at least in looks---designate herself as my
mother's mother.
Feeling strange in her presence therefore, I scarcely
knew how, or what, to reply. But of this thing I took note.
Her mental or emotional anguish was poignant to
behold. Her distress was so great that it called up a counter-
sympathy. As I struggled for poise, she asked me—“What's the
matter? Can't you see me? Haven't I done what is necessary to
be ‘real' to you? It's the first time I've ever done anything of this
sort, you know."
“I can see you all right, Grandmother," I assured her.

246
 “I can't stay very long. . . it's all so awkward, so different
from anything I've ever been used to. But I had to come to you
tonight to try to cheer and encourage you in the awful ordeal
you're being called to suffer. It's all part of your career, my son.
Fancy talking to you, though, now that you're a man grown, face
to face!" How does one talk to one's grandmother whom one
hasn't seen in substantiality in over thirty years? One thing is
certain. One doesn't feel facetious. . . .
This blue-eyed lady, however, had nothing of the
ethereal about her except for the chiffon head scarf and robes.
She seemed to have considerable difficulty holding the latter
together in front. She kept pulling the folds together with her left
hand while she tried in a sort of affectionate caress to pass her
right hand over my hair and down about my shoulders.
“It's all in one's life work, I suppose," I said tritely.
“But will you remember my words of counsel, son? Will
you surely remember them?"
“Meaning what? What counsel?"
“This counsel---that no matter what predicament you
think that you're in, with the authorities or anyone else, ‘the door
has been unlocked already!' Will you remember that? ‘The door
has been unlocked already.' Promise you'll re- member that."
“I promise," I said.
“Say after me, ‘The door has been unlocked already.’”
“The door has been unlocked already,'" I repeated.
Inasmuch as not a soul in that room but myself and George
knew that I was in any particular sort of trouble, it was on the
whole convincing for a materialized soul to proceed directly to
giving of such solicitude.

247
 “That's all I can say. I've got to go now. ‘The door has
been unlocked already.'" With another caressing gesture at my
head and shoulders, she began to withdraw from me. An instant
later she had vanished behind the curtains.

I WAS so upset in my feelings when I again sought my

chair, that I scarcely gave any attention to the spirit that now
came forth from the cabinet and greeted everyone in the voice of
another child---a second little Indian girl, apparently, some ten to
twelve years old.
She had not come there to meet anyone in particular.
I gathered vaguely that her prime purpose was in displaying a
new dress that enveloped her, somewhat after the pattern of
Silverleaf's. She gave some fanciful and flowery name, but I was
thinking, thinking, thinking. . . The child was obsessed with the
fact that on the following afternoon, on the plane in which she
resided, she was going to a party. . . Had that recent
materialization been that of my grandmother or had it not? If so,
and this was an example of “growing back young," what a lot of
surprises some people were in for, at making the Passing
themselves and greeting their loved ones on the other side, to
find the latter not “lame, halt, blind or aged" as they might have
gone out of flesh, but radiantly mature in the golden summer of
middle existence. Certainly my “grandmother" had called me by
the only name that she would use in addressing me face to face.
The solicitude for me was unquestionable. And her message had
plenty of consolation in it after what I had been through in the
South that past week. “The door is unlocked already!" What
could that mean but that the tide had definitely turned for me,
and that the “out" was ready for me to experience as the days
and weeks rolled onward?

248
 I was still preoccupied with my thoughts in ruby dusk
when I realized that Edward was calling “William!" That meant
me again.
I looked up at the cabinet.
A portly man of some sixty to seventy years was
standing before the curtains. He was clad in modem male
costume and giving his name as Frederick William.
Frederick William had been the name of my father's
father. Why should I be deserving of so much attention this
epochal evening?

"MY SON, my son!" this entity cried thickly as I stood

before him and his right hand reached out and tightened on
my wrist.
“Is it you, Grandfather?" I cried in new perturbation.
Then in the upset one feels in all such situations, I recall
exclaiming, “---but what have you done with your thick gray
whiskers?" My Grandfather Pelley, as long as I had known him,
had worn a patriarchal beard halfway down his chest. This was
my grandfather's figure all right, but his beard was black, and not
nearly so long.
“But, my son" he chuckled, “whiskers have generally
gone out of fashion. All the same I've got some on---can't you
see them?"
No, I couldn't see them, and peered closer into his face.
"You've got something on," I argued banally, “but the
light is so poor, or my eyes aren't accustomed to it, that I can't
tell what it is."
"My son, don't let's waste such important time arguing
over such a matter as whiskers. I haven't worn mine on my
present plane for years."

249
 I wondered what was required of me. How could I ever
ask him the intimate family detail that I wanted to ask him, with
all these strangers present and hanging on every word? Knowing
that many persons with Second Sight had often described him as
being on the platform with me and seeming to counsel me as
I had addressed past audiences, I felt he should be in a position
to approve or condemn my present work. Not thinking how else
to put it, I asked---
“Well, granddad, how am I doing?"
This brought a titter of laughter around the circle. My
grandsire joined in it. His hand, as strong and virile as it ever had
been in life---and he had been a powerful man---continued on my
wrist. “My son, you're doing fine," he said huskily after a moment.
“ln fact, there's times when it seems to your watching relatives
that you're doing too much."
“Too much," I echoed. “How could that be possible?"
“You make so much progress in your work yourself that
you're not allowing the time for the rest of humanity to catch up.
However, they'll do that in time. Be patient. What I particularly
wanted to do tonight was to thank your friend George for the aid
he's been to you in getting your printing works established. The
books that you're printing are doing more good throughout the
land than you'll ever know till you get in our position and see it.
Will you call him up?"
I called to George and he responded.
“This is my paternal grandfather, Frederick William," I
announced---as though he had not been hearkening to every
word spoken by either of us from the first.
George acknowledged the introduction and my
grandfather ran his left hand under George's elbow.

250
 “Just let me thank you, dear fellow," he said, “for
the help you're giving to our grandson." George started to
deprecate it.
“No, no," cried the old gentleman, “you're as much a part
of his lifework as his own wits or pen. And all his relatives are
grateful and are showing it by seeing that the two of you don't
get into serious trouble."
Hardly had my grandfather gotten these words out than
his voice wavered queerly. His shoulders and figure seemed to
sway. The hand on my arm relaxed its clutch and dropped.
Suddenly, weird as it sounds to relate, though it did not
seem as awesome to watch it happen, the old gentleman jack-
knifed at the waist. My instinct was to reach out and catch him,
but as I had been warned against seizing hold of these people
during materializations since it might have serious effect on the
medium, I pulled back a step, and then, before my eyes, I saw
my grandsire begin to sink through the floor precisely as the nun
had done, following her blessing.
He sank through the floor directly at my feet. One
moment he had been standing before me, talking with me like
any normal man. The next he had bent forward and in the
bending, his feet had begun to go through the rug as though it
were the surface of a pool of water. I stood there gaping while he
sank down, down, till only his head was visible between
George's feet and mine. The next moment he was gone!
There was nothing whatsoever to indicate that he had
been there. I was close enough to the phenomena to see
everything in utmost detail.
Somehow I got back to my chair and devoutly wished
that the sitting would end. I was mentally, emotionally and

251
spiritually punch-drunck. I had seen so much that I wanted only
to get out and think! Happily enough, my grandfather's was the
last materialization for the night. From behind the draperies we
heard Silver leaf exclaim: “Oh shucks! The power's getting so
weak that these things fall apart!" It was a queer but practical
way to phrase it. A moment later she added philosophically:
“Nope, I guess we can't go along anymore tonight, even if there
are a lot of folks left who'd like to talk with the rest of you. But I'll
tell you who's here. ."
Thereat the child started calling out names of persons
who hadn't been able to avail themselves of the mediumistic
ectoplasm. She must have called out at least a dozen, every last
one of them absolutely accurate. Twice she called out names of
former women business associates of George's, giving last
names as well as first.
“Uncle Jo-Jo," she said, “you remember Margaret G---,
don't you? She says she gave you a pair of cuff-links and a
stickpin one Christmas. Is that right?"
“It most certainly is," agreed George. “Tell her I had them
stolen from my house when a prowler got in."
“Oh, she knows that," returned Silver leaf, matter-of-
factly. “What became of them doesn't count. Any gift is only in
the giving, anyhow. Uncle Billy!"
“Yes, Silverleaf," I answered.
“A long time ago you had a daughter Harriet, didn't you?
She passed over when she was a teeny girl."
“Two years old," I agreed.
“I know. Well, she's a big grown woman now. About
thirty years old. And she says to tell you, ‘God bless Dad.' "

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 It was the first time in twelve years of psychical research
that I had received trace of my daughter Harriet in the higher
realms of life.
“Well, I guess we've all got to go now. We've had a nice
evening, haven’t we?”
“A wonderful evening, Silverleaf," responded the
audience sincerely.
“Then good night, everybody!"
“Good night, Silverleaf!"
Suddenly the maiden's voice, still clear and lovely,
began to sing---
“Good night, dear one,
Good night, dear one,
Good night, dear one,
We're going to leave you now!"
The tune was the well-known old song, “Good Night, Ladies,"
only when she arrived at the chorus, she altered it thus-

“Merrily we fade away,

Fade away, fade away,
Merrily we fade away,
Over the Sea of Love. . ."
The child's voice trailed off, fainter and fainter, as if receding into
remotest distance. Presently the room was silent. Edward said to
George, “Open the door, George, so that we can get the indirect
light from the bathroom." George opened the door. The electric
illumination was sickly, garish, as it came through the inner
hallway. In a moment someone switched on a floorlamp. Edward
went to the cabinet and tossed back the drapes.

253
 “Wake up, Bertie," he coaxed. “Everything's over. People
are ready to go home."
Miss Candler was plainly to be seen by everyone. She
sat slumped down in the wooden chair, head rolled on one side,
unconscious in slumber. Edward shook her gently. She
shuddered, yawned, sat up.
“It's so frightfully hot in here!" were her first words since
she had bidden us “Good night!" three hours before. “It feels like
I'd been in a forest fire."
Edward stayed beside her till she came fully awake and
then helped her to her feet. Coming from the cabinet, she
paused before my chair.
“How was it?" she asked. “Did you get anything?"
“You're a sweetheart!" I cried impulsively. “We got at
least twenty-five people. It's been the most amazing evening of
phenomena I've ever witnessed in my life." This was no
exaggeration.
“I'm glad," she said. She walked to a vacated chair and
sat down, still rubbing her eyes and yawning.
The woman on my right asked me the time. I looked at
my wrist watch. “Ten minutes past eleven o'clock," I said. Then I
left the room, to get out in cool night air for a minute and light up
a welcome cigar. . . .

254
 Chapter XVII

GRACIOUS LADY

UCH was the coming of Bertie Lilly Candler

into my life. I had long since established the
publishing house that had first been given the
title of Galahad Press, then Pelley Publishers,
then Fellowship Press, to finally level off
under the significant title of Soulcraft Chapels. I had maintained
headquarters in New York City, then Washington, D. C., then
Asheville, N. C., then Noblesville, Indiana. It was a long way
back to that night in Altadena, California, when I had climbed the
stairs to my bungalow bedroom to undergo the experience that
has now become historical as “My Seven Minutes in Eternity".
Water under Time's Bridge indeed! As I draw this revised version
of Why / Believe the Dead Are Alive toward a close that water
has been twenty-six years flowing. . .
Political conditions south of Mason &: Dixon's Line had
grown so intolerable after 1940 that I had transferred
linotype machines, presses and general publishing equipment
up into Hoosierland, buying a property in a wholesome American
small town sixteen miles north of Indianapolis, the State's

255
Capital. Adelaide, my younger daughter, was unmarried in 1940
and we likewise acquired residence in the latter city, driving back
and forth to Noblesville morning and night. It was in the
Indianapolis home, therefore, that Adelaide and I became
hostess and host to Bertie Lilly, and the long series of seances
began, in Noblesville and otherwise, that were to cement the
bonds of fellowship that have made the Candler name a byword
in ten thousand households whereever Soulcraft periodicals and
books have been read. Only one other medium has been thus
informally connected with the Greater Soulcraft program, ranking
anywhere within Bertie Lilly's classification---that was Mary
Beattie, of Chesterfield, Indiana, curiously enough a materializing
adept with whom Bertie Lilly had sat for development in her
younger years. Mary Beattie's husband, after her untimely
demise in 1952, joined Soulcraft as invaluable compositor in its
printing-room. But Bertie Lilly's coming to Indiana in 1941 had
opened a new sequence of personal proofs of the utter fallacy of
death as any permanent tragedy.

IT IS one thing to enter upon strange premises as a

paying spectator, and see what appears to be phenomena occur
before the eyes, realizing that the human vision is the easiest of
the senses to deceive. It is quite another to have the phenomena
projected within one's own home, where one is arbiter of every
condition, where one knows to a certainty there can be no secret
entrances, where certainly none of the fifteen to twenty
materialized types of humanity, either sex and all ages, could
have been present five minutes before the doors were fastened
and the lights turned off. Insinuations as to fraud or deception

256
are unqualifiedly eliminated. Strangely enough, therefore, it was
in the first seance thus held in the Indianapolis home, that my
eldest daughter, Harriet, staged her initial appearance to me in
her recreated “body" . . Inasmuch as Harriet herself has since
grown into a Soulcraft institution, no volume listing my evidence
as to why I believe the dead are alive would be complete without
description of that memorable first seance.
Harriet, my first child, had been born in Springfield,
Mass. in November of 1912. Two years later, in Wilmington,
Vermont, she succumbed to cerebral meningitis. You may recall
my recounting in an earlier chapter how Pauline, my brother-in-
law's bride, had first gotten in touch with her soldier-husband at
Lake Pleasant, Mass., when learning about “the nurse of the
Mohawk Trail." “He's got a violet-eyed little girl with him who's
inseparably attached to him," Pauline had reported. She had not
known Harriet as a baby nor ever seen her in the flesh. But such
description had caused us to pay attention. Harriet had been
noted for her strange violet eyes---not blue, not grey, but an out-
of-this-world violet. Who could “be with" Ernest but our long-lost
baby? He had been a member of our Vermont house-hold all
through her prolonged illness and demise.
It was a May evening of 1941 that Bertie Lilly and
Edward gave us their first seance in our Indianapolis library,
where the George Fisher of previous mention had personally
supervised the sealing of the windows with beaver-board and
created a “cabinet" by stretching two heavy velours drapes
across the southeast comer of the twenty-foot-square room. The

257
Candlers had motored up from Miami; George had driven over
from Darien, Conn. I had invited a choice assortment of guests
and employees to witness the wonders, one of the former being
the chief of the state vigilante police, another a leading attorney
of the State Capital. Some two dozen people had gathered at
eight p.m. in chairs around the north and west walls of the
library. The front door had been locked and doorbell and
telephone disconnected. The general program of the seance
followed the one previously described. The room was illumined
by a red spotlight turned on the front of the velours curtains from
a position atop the bookshelves in the northwest comer.
The first soul-spirit to substantialize was, as usual,
Silverleaf---who greeted each guest by his or her first name,
although almost none of them was known to the medium and
some of them had only been invited on the spur of the moment
within the hour before the affair was called. The second
materialization had been a portly stranger of advanced years
who called lustily to his adult son seated in a back corner, one of
the Miehle pressmen at the Noblesville plant. Charley came forth
from his corner astounded.
It was his father, who had “died" before World War I. He
proved to Charles' satisfaction that he was the parent, not only
by his appearance and voice but by narration of an incident that
had occurred in Minnesota when Charles had been a lad of ten,
and in 1940 he was in his fifties. “Remember how you got some
poison oak on a camping trip we took?" he reminded his son.
“What was the fool thing I tried for it, when we didn't have any
other antidotes? . . No, let me tell you. . It was a mustard plaster
I happened to have along, wasn't it?"

258
 Charles cried afterward, “He was one hundred percent
correct. But no one in God's world but he and I knew anything
about it! I'd never even mentioned the incident to my wife."
What do we want for proof that the “dead" are alive?
Mustard plasters on poisoned oak assailments . . the very
quaintness of the incident gave it validity.
Then, for the first time, I saw my beloved first daughter,
grown to womanhood. . .

THE PRESSMAN'S father had scarcely retired within the

cabinet, after general banter about the son's vicissitudes since
the father's death, when I beheld a great “snowball" of whitish
effluvia beginning to quiver and contort in front of the drapes. It
seemed to be forming and growing not fifteen inches from my left
foot, where I was seated on a low divan to the east of the
curtains. Edward, the sleeping medium's husband, exclaimed,
“Someone's building up right in plain sight for you!"
The “snowball" lost its rotundity and became elongated
vertically. It oscillated, it writhed, it mounted higher and higher.
Reaching a pillar of five feet two or three, it gave a peculiar
shuddering twist. Then even in ruby light I blinked my eyes. A
particularly handsome young woman stood before me, gowned
in white. Her long chestnut hair fell in curls down her back from
under a Juliette cap. She was personable, she was graceful. In a
voice whose chuckle did not cancel its culture, she accosted me,
‘”Well, Daddy, how do you like that?"

259
 I could scarcely speak. “You're. . Harriet?" I managed to
exclaim on my second attempt.
"Uh-huh, . . of course! Are you surprised to meet me for
the first time, full-grown?"
What could I say to her? Unfortunately, the ruby light---
wholly adequate as it was otherwise---did not permit me to
determine the color of her eyes. But she placed warm pulsating
hands on my shoulders. She looked into my face from a distance
of twelve to fifteen inches. Was this actually the beloved child
who had waved me a final and scarcely audible “Bye!" from her
crib in the kitchen that long-ago winter's morning in Wilmington,
Vermont, two hours before the town's physician had rushed her
to Brattleboro Hospital? She chuckled again.
"I know what you're thinking. You've carried the notion
about for years, while I've been growing up on the Higher Side,
that Adelaide might have been my reborn soul, coming along as
she did five or six months after I made that Wilmington passing.
Am I not right?"
Yes, she was right. But I had never mentioned it to
anyone, that I recalled. She tossed her adorable chin.
“Well, I certainly am no one but myself, and Adelaide is
no one but herself. And at last we're together, Daddy, face to
face. Isn't it wonderful?"
Words had no effect in translating the wonderment of it.
The lump in my throat was interfering with speech. And Harriet
pivoted lightly on her toes and swung completely about for me to
view her total figure.
“Don't you remember Aunt Pauline telling you from time
to time she saw me in company with Uncle Ernest?"

260
 Here was family evidence that could not have existed
even in the medium's mind, since up to then my acquaintance
with Bertie Lilly had not been replete enough to rehearse my
past domestic affairs with her. So I asked about Ernest. It was
the beginning of a colloquy on family relationships that
established beyond all doubt that I had met up again in truth with
my long-lost baby girl. It was likewise the beginning of a sixteen-
year intimacy in other and greater matters, during which I have
watched her grow from a vivacious maiden in her middle
twenties to a sedate woman of forty-one. I was to confront her
equally vividly time upon time when visiting Mary Beattie at
Chesterfield and Anderson, Indiana---the same girl, same
Juliette cap and white gown, same characterful profile, same
dainty and cultured voice, same personality in every respect.
That to me is the big test of personality survival, to the
utter demolishment of fraud. No matter what medium I visited for
such sessions, identically the same girl unerringly materialized.
Moreover, time and again she made references to matters we
had discussed or mentioned at earlier sessions when the
medium was some other person.
Remember, this was occurring in my own house and
library, in which no such physically living girl had been contained
when the seance started.
She greeted her younger sister, Adelaide, who was
present, and her brother, William, warning him, incidentally, to
draw in his long legs from where he sat on the rug directly in
front of her so that she wouldn't trip over them. Then she asked
the loan of my handkerchief.

261
 What on earth could she want with that? I stammered
that I had no handkerchief but the honestly soiled one that I had
used all day out at the plant in Noblesville. No matter, I must let
her have it. She was going to do something with it I would
never forget.
I handed across the wobbed square of cloth. Standing in
the rug's center in plain sight of all guests, she pulled it taut
across all four corners. Then grasping it by right and left edges
she started a peculiar motion of seeming to throw it away from
her. She called it “weaving."
Presently we were thunderstruck to note that the fabric
was increasing in size. It was big as a towel. She continued to
give it that outward-throwing motion, till it became so wide that
she could no longer keep it taut between her hands. Rapidly it
was increasing to the size of a bedsheet.
“Harriet, darling, how in the world are you contriving
that?" I wanted to know. “I'm increasing the distances---by the
powers of Thought---between each electron and proton in the
linen atoms," she replied. “lt's the way, too, that we weave
clothing for those of you who come up onto Our Side naked
when they've quitted their physical bodies for good."
She was commencing to pant from the exertion of it. And
the fabric was so sizable and so filmy that it floated and billowed
on the still air of the library where twenty spectators about three
walls were feeling its gossamer edges against their faces.
Suddenly she tossed her clutch of it in air, darted under it, siezed
it in its center, and began doing a ballet dance under it---
unfortunately wiithout music, but no less graceful for that.

262
 Then she retreated to her original position before me,
reversed her efforts, “wove" the gossamer fabric closer and
closer to herself---and we watched it diminish in proportions.
Back to bedsheet and towel size she worked it, back to the
dimensions of a man's everyday handkerchief. Suddenly with a
dexterous flip of her fingers she had seized it by opposite
corners, twisted it and tied a knot in it. Knotted thus, she tossed it
down upon my lap.
Later in the evening when the electric lights were on,
I examined the knotted fabric. It was some sort of fourth
dimensional knot she had tied. The diagonal handkerchief-
corners were inside this knot. Try to tie a knot sometime with the
corners enwrapped inside, and tell me how you did it.
I have that handkerchief and knot preserved to this
moment among my psychical keepsakes, and the diagonal
corners are still hidden inside it.
“We're going to have lots of good times together, you
and I, Daddy, from here on out," she promised before leaving us.
“It's the Beginning of something, wait and see!"
And how truly she spoke!
How many times I have confronted my eldest girl in the
past sixteen years I cannot say accurately. When Mary Beattie
was alive in nearby Anderson, I had only to get into my motorcar
after arranging an appointment, and be with my beautiful child in
half an hour. I am concluding the writing of the revised version of
this book of an afternoon in early September, 1954, and I have
met and conversed with her three times under Mrs. Candler's
sponsorship since the first of this past June. During my political
incarceration at the hands of the Red fellow-travelers in the

263
Administration during World War II, Mrs. Candler paid a visit to
Seattle, Wash. One Sunday afternoon she went into trance on
the platform of Silver Lodge, I am informed, and Harriet thus
materialized, came to the edge of the dais, and talked to two
hundred of my followers in a public address for a matter of
twenty minutes. After expounding to them the exact significance
of my temporary imprisonment and bidding them to be of good
cheer, she disintegrated before their eyes. . .

"THAT is why I had to leave you, Daddy, when I was a

baby, and come out here," she explained to me in a
materialization last October, “to be able to work in association
with you---you on the earth-side and I on the heavenly side---to
demonstrate to a world of bewildered and error-tormented
people that there is no such thing as Death."
And how she is doing it!
Yet always my mind reverts to a winter's morning in early
1914 when they had phoned from the hospital in Brattleboro for
me to come over the twenty miles from Wilmington as fast as I
could travel, if I wanted to see my child again alive. As I urged
my panting horse up the western grade of Hogback Mountain,
alone in the sleigh, I groaned aloud in my anguish, “Oh God,
don't let her die! . . don't let her die!" But I arrived too late.
That was forty-one years bygone, and yet it had been on
Kismet's cards to happen, that the very Soulcraft work in which I
am currently engaged in my sunset years could go forward. I am
still in the mortal role this lazy September afternoon as I write,

264
yet Harriet is back with me and has been sixteen years
continuously back with me. I have her piquant and distinctive
voice on fifteen electronic tape recordings. Never have I gone to
a psychical seance since that first appearance of hers in our
Indianapolis library, that she has failed in coming out and
conversing with me.
Are the dead alive, indeed! . . .

265
 Chapter XVIII

SEEING SHOULD BE BELIEVING

HE SKEPTIC with orthodox reflexes, who

never has witnessed such phenomena, is
puzzled or caustic because he does not know
what happens. How in the name of sound
sense can persons who have vacated mortal
vehicles---and these vehicles been interred in
cemeteries---possibly "come back" in organic equipment and
give every evidence of being alive in former aspects of
personality? Likewise, if this sort of thing is actual, why haven't
more people heard about it? The first is easier to answer than
the second.
As you will have minutely delineated to you if you read
more of the Soulcraft books treating with such paraphysics, the
self-conscious soul of a human being---one hundred percent of
human beings---is an indestructible and imperishable entity.
Mortal life is a series of adventures in going into a physical body,
using it for worldly purposes a given number of years, and
“dying" out of it. But always it is the body that dies, not the
soul-spirit. The soul of man is said in the Higher Realms to be a

266
spermatozoic emanation of God Himself, thus accounting for
sentient life in each and every instance. As I'll relate to you in my
next chapter, I have reason to believe that it was Mary Baker
Eddy, beloved founder of the Christian Science Church, who
made that clear to me. And this indestructible and imperishable
soul comes back again and again in many bodies over vast
numbers of years, in different lands and civilizations, until it
perfects its moral attributes so that nothing is ever to be gained
further by coming back. Thereat it goes on about its higher
cosmic business. However, this happens---
The "thinking" of the soul-spirit is done in the intellectual
mechanism of what is called the Light-Body, or the Pattern Body.
This is the vehicle, operating at a higher frequency of atomic
vibration, that keeps the atoms and molecules of the physical
body in one consistent pattern throughout the earthly sojourn.
Remember, the molecules of every person's physical body are
completely renewed every seven years, but renewal or no, they
always conform to the given design that keeps the physical
organism recognizable from decade to decade. When the life-
course is run, the business of "dying" is merely the process of
this Pattern Body pulling out of the gross atomic body, and
beginning to view life in its higher frequencies of Matter.
Consciousness, I repeat, is carried in the mental equipment of
this Light Body, or Design-Body, else none of us would ever
remember what had happened to us on earth, after we got to
"heaven" . . Very good then. . .
This business of "spirit return", giving it to you in a
nutshell, is merely achieving the stunt of finding something that
will make the Light-Body or Design-Body tangible again in

267
consistencies of Matter peculiar to this physical or material plane
on which we are now living. So-called “Mediums"---like Bertie
Lilly Candler or Mary Beattie or a hundred others---are women
born with an excessive amount of phosphorus and albumin in
their physical systems which under the stresses of trance they
can release and provide for the use of others. Such phosphorus
and albumin in combination is known by the technical name of
Ectoplasm. They release prodigious amounts of it out of the
orifices of their physical bodies and it becomes available for
persons who have entered onto the higher frequencies of
substance-in-Matter to use to infiltrate their Light-Bodies or
Design-Bodies and make them appreciable again to the
frequencies of this earth-plane. There is little that is necromantic
about it---certainly nothing diabolical, unless we want to call all
chemistry diabolical. Calling anything one doesn't understand
“deviltry" is, of course, nothing but the ruse of illiterates. What
these “spirit" people truly do is “coat" themselves with a material
substance provided from the medium, and when the coating is
successfully consummated we say that a given “dead" person
“materializes" .

THEY are emphatically not dead persons, of course,

because there has never been any death. There is only
metamorphosis from one rate of atomic vibration to a higher rate
of atomic vibration. Higher rates of atomic vibration can be aware
of lower rates but rarely the reverse. In other words, people on
the more tenuous octaves of reality can be consciously aware of
what is transpiring on the grosser and lower rates, but when they
manifest it, usually the earth-people have an attack of heebie-

268
jeebies at the "supernatural" . . is there anything particularly
supernatural about your turning your radio to get an orchestra in
Cincinnati on a "low frequency rate" but a statesman talking in
Europe on a short-wave frequency? The analogy is pat.

WE ARE finding now, in this age of radio and nuclear

fission, that we have hoodwinked ourselves by saying that “if you
can't measure it, it has no existence." There are all sorts and
degrees of atomic vibration that you can't measure, and yet one
may not be aware of the other, in that both can operate in the
same spatial area without their phenomena conflicting.
That is what these materialized persons do. They
operate in several spatial areas without their phenomena
conflicting. They have never perished or gone off to the biblical
heaven or hell when their bodies succumbed. They have simply
pulled their soul-consciousness out of their defunct organic
vehicles and operated on a higher velocity of atomic matter.
When we ask them to present themselves to us in the seance
room, we provide them with access to a coating or covering for
their higher light-body atoms that make them recognizable to this
earthly plane. Their Light-Bodies or Pattern-Bodies are just as
real to them as our physical bodies are to us. By coating them
with ectoplasm they become real to us also. But the people
inside them are exactly the same individuals that they were when
their vehicles weighed 150 pounds on this plane, had to eat
three meals a day to “keep their strength up" and get six to eight
hours sleep o' nights or find their nerves misbehaving.

269
 It is a long and somewhat involved technical study, and I
am giving it to you in a nutshell as I can, so that you may
understand that there is little or no hocus-pocus in one of these
seances when honestly conducted by an honest and competent
medium. If you want more technical information about it, get the
Soulcraft books Star Guests or Beyond Grandeur.
Actually it is the mass ignorance of hoi polloi that creates
the phenomenon we call “grief" in this world. Truly informed
people never grieve. Principally they lack anything to grieve
about. Grief is a sign of ignorance---always remember that. If you
know what is transpiring, you find nothing to feel sorry over
or lament.
I am giving it to you as I have had it expounded minutely
unto me. However, this proposition about so few knowing about
what goes on, is another story. . .

IN THE first place, it stands without argument that there

are not enough bona fide and competent mediums to go around.
In the second place, traditional religion---constructed mostly on
allegorical theory---has built up a great superstructure of
theological conjecture about the Afterlife, and protected itself by
announcing that anybody who challenges or disproves it is in
league with the Devil. Naturally the illiterate communicant
doesn't care to become classified as in league with the Devil, so
whenever the phenomena of psychical research manifests itself,
the orthodox communicant runs a mile. It is all very tragic; all
very silly and childish and immature.
An age of Science is undoubtedly slated to put the blitz

270
on the whole of it. But not for a little time yet. Science must pave
the way to make spiritual emancipation creditable. It jolts some
people to be told that if the optic ensemble of the human eye
could accommodate a light wave one tenthousandth of an inch
longer than it does commonly at present, the whole aspect of the
material world would alter. We would see scores of items and
conditions that we do not see at present, whereas another score
of items and conditions would become electrically invisible to us.
Of course, becoming electrically invisible we would doubtless
declare they had ceased to exist.
I am told on reliable scientific authority that if the
common human eye could accommodate rays of ultra-violet
length, the race would suddenly become aware of the complete
nonoccurrence of death.
We should see the Light Bodies of those who have
made the metamorphosis ahead of us, realizing they are often
moving closely about us. It is their invisibility, owing to the
enhanced rate of vibration at which they are moving atomically in
their vehicle-composition, which makes us regard them as
“gone". Their entire world of material reality is similarly
composed of a vibratory frequency swifter than ours. So it is
intangible to us. Not sensing it commonly, we contend it is
ethereal. But we are constantly getting indications that it has a
reality equal to our world of slower atomic frequencies, that we
are visible to those inhabiting it although they are not visible
under ordinary conditions to us. Conversely, they tell us that
there are octaves of reality above theirs that are quite as
incomprehensible to them as theirs is incomprehensible to us.

271
 References to discoveries of Science should not
overlook the possibility that a gaseous chemical now being
experimented with, may crack the enigma of death for the lay
rank-and-file, making all the “invisibles" in a room where such
chemical is released, opaque to mortal sight. It is a sort of
synthetic ectoplasm, I am told. But try to envision what such a
chemical discovery would mean to orthodox theological concepts
of the afterlife. When the “dead" can be located visibly by means
of a peculiar gas released in a room or house, what of the
exaggerated allegorical concepts of the departed dwelling in
some far-off celestial locality populated by the angels and
cherubim, or---without facetiousness---“asleep in Jesus"?
Still another school of scientific thought is considering
the possibility that the ultra-violet vibratory rates of the “dead"
may be slowed down to the rates of our mundane world by the
same variety of resonating magnetic force that is said to
materialize and propel today's Flying Saucers.

YOU note that this narrative is singularly clear of stories

of phenomenal attributes distinguishing others. I have tried to
make it the accounting of what I myself have had attested
through the medium of my own senses. But during the twenty-six
years of affairs which it covers, I most certainly have
encountered plenty of persons whose abnormal eyesight
permitted them to see into realms of the ultra-violet. Those
twenty-six years have been replete with the presences in my
affairs of individuals able to discern at a glance, and describe
most minutely, the Light Bodies or Pattern-Bodies of presences
not discernible to me or the man in the street.

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 In particular do I recall a naval commander in Norfolk,
Va. who attended a week of lectures I gave there---a man of
Scottish birth gifted with Second Sight---who described again
and again personages who were visible to him as being on the
platform with me during my delivered remarks. And those
descriptions were so distinctive that I could identify the
personalities thus invisible to my normal human Vision.
However, to get back to what we term the phenomena of
the materializing seance-room. These graduated people in the
swifter velocities of Time and Space gather into the apartment
where a materializing seance seems to be imminent, and when
the ruby illumination has supplanted the yellow actinic rays of
light, stepped their more tenuous personal selves into the
exuded ectoplasm derived from the medium's physical self.
Forming themselves in the low-rate earthy pattern again by the
direction of their Thought Powers, they walk out to us in their
previous aspects of earthly reality, speak to us in voices that we
recognize, and reminisce with us on activities together when they
were constituted as our present selves. The layman thinks of the
process as Spiritualism. It is only Spiritualism as we identify the
necromantic activity by the religious cult of that name that openly
accredits such phenomena in the religious manner. Those of us
who have approached such wonders along the secular route, as
I myself have done as described in these pages, no more
consider the supernatural aspects of it as Spiritualism than the
Spiritualists consider the super-natural aspects of radio, radar, or
television as Spiritualism. What the Spiritualists seem to do truly

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in practice, is furnish opportunity for hoi polloi to form contact
through mediumistic professionals with relatives who have
moved their habitat into the higher atomic frequencies, and their
"religious" services take on the pattern of Questions-and-An-
swers intercourse with those on the next immediate octaves of
consciousness. Is grandma suffering any more in her higher
vibration, in result of the malady that carried her off? Should
Uncle John sell the house lot on the corner of Main and Third
Street or hold it for a higher price in the autumn? Is the young
man who has started to “go" with Betsy Jane serious in his
attentions? Fancy making a religious ritual of such personal
trivia!
And yet the Spiritualists have come closer to Truth in
appreciating the literalities of the post-mortem state than any
other sect distinguishing the modern religious scene. Soulcraft,
which is coming along behind Spiritualism, considers whatever is
sacred in any vibration of matter on its merits as sacrosanct
regardless of any vibratory phenomena---relegating the
phenomena to a classification of its own, the mechanistic and not
the philosophical.
“Seeing is believing" is the old folklore axiom generally
accepted by the rank and file. Only it isn't. None of the five
senses is more open to deception or delusion than the sense of
vision. But when the unit of consciousness that has materialized,
begins a sequence of reminiscing on experiences it may have
undergone in the mortal body with one or more persons now
present as spectators, what more absolute proof can be
forthcoming of the authentic nature of the soul-spirit? Again and

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again I have known this to be carried to an extent well-nigh
incredible.
For instance, a week ago Saturday night Bertie Lilly
Candler was visiting us when a motorcar drove up with some
friends from Chicago. Prior to such arrival two or three hours
before the seance, Bertie Candler had been unaware of their
existence on this earth. She had by no means spent the
intervening time picking their brains in any respect concerning
their earlier lives or associations. Yet during the course of the
evening's session, the nephew of one of the Chicago men---now
a lad of seventeen, who had graduated into the higher frequency
at the age of four---materialized and carried on a twenty-minute
reunion with his uncle concerning parental relatives up in
Chicago. This lad, whose name was Roger, expressed his dislike
of a portrait of himself that hung beside a living room door in his
parents' house of the present. In the course of their converse he
voluntarily asked his uncle if he recalled how the latter blew
smoke-rings for the small nephew's amusement as a tad, as well
as rode him on his outstretched foot. But the real pay-off was a
query about a small red sweater the uncle had bought for the
boy the Yuletide before the boy “passed", coupled with an
incident on a Chicago beach in winter when the small nephew
had made off with the uncle's fur-lined gloves.
It is going rather far afield to rationalize such memories
by declaring that the medium in trance “picks the spectator's
subconscious mind" for such poignant memories. What shall be
said sustaining this view, when a third person, mutually

275
acquainted with earthly relative and materialized spirit, joins in
the conversation and asks questions, with the spirit giving
answers that are unknown to anyone present, whose accuracy
has to be determined from later investigation? Harriet, on many
occasions has let fall remarks or comments about our family
affairs that could have been in the subconscious minds of no one
present, and the medium could not have been in prior
possession of such bits of information because unaware of the
existence of the parties involved.
As for the authenticity of identities thus manifesting, what
shall be said of Walter Stinson of previous mention in the
sparrow-hawk incident inside a living room, who materialized his
hand and let 72 impressions of its fingerprints be taken, found to
correspond in absolute accuracy with his fingerprints left behind
on the toilet articles he had used just prior to his physical
transition? The Boston Police Department vouched for such
accuracies.
When the living dead can be fingerprinted and found to
be infallibly identified by such scientific means, where does it
leave the orthodox or the skeptics?
It is time we awakened to the terrific potencies in what
we have been discussing for nearly three hundred pages.
The "dead" are very much alive, and we have their
fingerprints to attest it. What more can we demand, in all
common sense?

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 Chapter XIX

BEYOND GRANDEUR

ND SO here I am, at approximately sixty-five,

looking back on twenty-six years of this out-of-
this-world career in which I have been living in
two worlds at once. Death as a finality has
gone from my philosophy. I went to sleep that
long-ago night in my Altadena bungalow to
penetrate before morning into a higher reality of Etheria and
return to this physical world and take up the burden of trying to
convince the bereaved and grief-stricken that they are lamenting
needlessly. Their beloved relatives have not “gone" anywhere;
they have merely changed the conditions of their living and
functioning.
But along with such assurance I have cultivated the
capabilities of my Inner Ear to follow the tacit thought-speech of
those in such changed condition, and my converse with them
has become continuous. I took down a 6,OOO-word
communication on my typewriter from Ari, one of my outstanding
mentors, no later then yesterday morning---since I have written
the foregoing chapter of this book. I mention it to refute the
claims of the skeptics that as one ages, his Inner Faculties

277
gradually fall into disuse. The Inner Faculties do nothing of the
sort. They sharpen and strengthen as one is faithful in the
exercise of them. This I know from personal evidence as well.
I have thus recorded from such mentor-speech
something like 11,300 typed pages of higher-life intelligence, all
of it faithfully preserved, indexed, and bound for instant
reference. No question have I ever put to those so
communicating to me without a sensible and rational answer
forthcoming. And this goes equally for questions addressed to
many of my communicators when they have materialized before
me in temporary flesh. There is no evasion, no equivocation.
If they possess the information I desire, I get it forthwith.
So the great Soulcraft Enlightenment has grown up
around such converse.
A million-and-a-half words of treatises on every
conceivable cosmic enigma, three hundred thousand words of
strictly sacred material---long since memorialized in the Golden
Scripts---twelve volumes of Soulscripts for laymen students,
something like twenty-one volumes of my own composition, of
which this book which you are holding in your hand is one, . .
truly a great literature unparalleled in delineations of Mysticism
has come into existence, and I can term it such because outside
of the last twenty-one volumes mentioned I have functioned only
as amanuensis and recorder. There are, in my files, literally
thousands of letters from scholars who have examined
Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Swedenborgianism, Spiritualism
and Christian Science, who unreservedly pronounce the
Soulcraft writings as going far in excess of these in quality,

278
quantity, and profundity. By 1930 I had abandoned all further
work for the popular American periodicals and was devoting my
time the clock around to the zealous compiling of this great mass
of erudition from life's higher octaves.
As I believe I have stated earlier in these chapters, I had
closed my bungalow in California and disposed of it, in March of
1929, moving my effects to Manhattan and taking an apartment
at 56 West 53rd Street---between 5th and 6th Avenues. Here in
three rooms on the second floor of a “brownstone walk-up" I
labored throughout 1930 and 1931, beginning the transcribing of
the ineffable Golden Scripts. In these three rooms too, I had
experienced my first mediumistic experiments. The celebrated
“vacating" medium, George Wehner, author of the book A
Curious Life, made an errand of visiting the little group of
investigators I gathered around me, each Friday night. George
would compose himself, sink into trance, go deliberately out of
his body and leave his organism to be utilized by whomsoever
wished to converse audibly with me from the higher levels of life
and consciousness.
Joseph Conrad was the first of these, as celebrities, who
thus made himself known to me. Accompanying Conrad on one
occasion was Robert Louis Stevenson. These two declared they
were thus honoring me because of our common devotion to the
writing craft. Conrad had told me that he had been interested in
my stories of Vermont small-town life published in the English
magazines before his 1923 demise. However, throughout the
years covered by this narrative, my entertainment of celebrities
has been rare. I have always held reservations on the type of

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psychical operative who seems to form contact out of hand with
all the famous persons of any era, chiefly, I suspect, because
accuracy of identification is so difficult. Perhaps an excessive
modesty on my part has been responsible, but it has seemed to
me that outstanding great souls would have no more reason for
looking me up after their passing than they might have had
before it. I had several times been apprised during the writing of
the heavyweight book on Constitutional matters, Nations-in- Law,
which ran to two volumes, that none other than Abe Lincoln was
aiding me with the diction but I never had physical evidence that
it was so. I had known through Detroit friends that Mr. Henry
Ford, the auto magnate, a profound esoteric scholar during his
lifetime, had retained the exclusive services of an outstanding
medium to enable him to counsel with Mr. Lincoln in the
management of his gargantuan motor empire, and that Lincoln
appeared to Mr. Ford in materialized form constantly. I have
talked with reliable and reputable persons who were present at
some of the sessions. I understand it was because of this
association that the highest priced automobile made by Mr. Ford,
bore the Great Emancipator's name.
So the great sessions of my life---in Manhattan,
Washington, D. C., Asheville, N. C., and Indianapolis---came and
passed with varying degrees of fortune but with sales of these
psychically transcribed books growing to extraordinary
proportions and finding markets all over the world, when in
October of 1953 came the climactic contact in a dramatic and
kaleidoscopic career. The gracious personage identifying herself
as Mary Baker Eddy walked into my life!

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 THIS unexpected, unsolicited, and altogether history-
making advent of the founder of the great Christian Science faith
into my personal affairs came on the 14th of March, 1953, and
no history of why I have ample cause for accepting that the
physically dead are consciously and spiritually alive would be
complete without making the details of record. Remember that in
what I now relate, putting the capstone on these memoirs, I have
a great group of reliable witnesses to substantiate my
statements. More than that, I have continuous rolls of electronic
recording tapes containing the celebrated lady's voice at all
sessions of her materialized appearances. These I have
duplicated exactly and placed the copies in hands of trusted
friends across many States, to assure their preservation. Fifty
years from this present writing, the assertedly literal voice of Mrs.
Eddy on recording tape 44 years after her retirement from the
fleshly vehicle, may be hailed as a major advance in scientific
proof of survival. We shall see.
The materialization of this celebrated woman had been
prefaced by a visit one February evening of my head legal
counsel to the Noblesville publishing plant to consult me on
secular matters. He remained to chat informally about the work
of far-flung enlightenment that Soulcraft was achieving among
the spiritually circumscribed. I had long since collected all the
Master Transcripts of the Elder Brother received up across a
quarter century, and issued them in bible format. They had run to
273 chapters in a volume of 844 pages, which had gone out to
over ten thousand spiritual leaders not only in America but
foreign countries.

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 Attorney George A. Henry of Indianapolis had been my
counsel almost continuously in legal matters since 1935, winning
many important law cases for me. Enjoying an unblemished
reputation among his Indiana colleagues, he had been a zealous
student of Mrs. Eddy's Christian Science writings since his return
from military service with the U. S. forces in World War I.
“I have a strange feeling," Mr. Henry declared, “that you
should give serious consideration to doing a book at an early
date that bridges the gap between Mrs. Eddy's Science & Health
and the Golden Scripts. After all, there is startling polarity
between the tenets of Christian Science and Soulcraft. Christian
Science provides health and physical well-being for the student
of spiritual matters on the earth-side; Soulcraft continues the
instruction in higher octaves upon the ethereal side. Just file my
suggestion away in your mind and see what confirmations you
may get in your clairaudient work with your higher mentors."
I promised to do so, but overburdened with publishing
responsibilities as I was in the early spring of 1953, the chances
of authoring such a volume then seemed remote. In fact, I had
almost dismissed it from my mind when the evening of March 14,
1953 arrived. Shortly before midnight on that date I was working
alone in my writing studio at the plant, when in the eerie silence
of the publishing premises I was distinctly interrupted at my
editorial work on VALOR, by a feminine voice seeming to call me
softly. .
“William!" this semi-audible voice appealed. “Oh,
William!" It seemed to be speaking in a half-whisper from ten or
twelve feet behind me and slightly above my head.

282
 “Yes!" I cried, half-aloud. “Who's speaking?"
“Mary Glover," the answer came at once.
One of the quaint aspects of this extraordinary liaison
was the fact that not until my midnight visitor made passing
reference to the tenets and affairs of the Christian Science
mother-church did I “place" the name Mary Glover. It had been
the first married name of Mary Baker Eddy.
I could “feel" the powerful feminine presence just at my
shoulder after a moment, and it left me fazed with astonishment
and shock. As the charming and cultured accents went along,
repeating Mr. Henry's suggestion about the proposed book, I
cried, “How does it happen that you, who publicly repudiated
Spiritist contacts in your much-emphasized chapter against
Spiritualism in Science & Health, come to me like this and so
address me?"
“I was wrong in that repudiation," the Voice declared,
“and am paying grievously for it. I have found, since gaining to
this Higher Side of Consciousness, that communication between
the planes is unquestionably scientific." I have the same
statement since recorded in her audible voice on electronic tapes
when she materialized in my studio on October 13th, confirming
all of the converse in which we indulged this memorable March
night.
“Would it be permissible," I asked her after a time, “to put
paper in my typewriter and make of permanent record the things
you are telling me, for reading and studying later in the week or
month?"
“By all means," she most graciously assented. And when
I had prepared the paper, she went back to the opening of her
converse and gave me the whole from the beginning.

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 The subject is of such engrossing interest to the millions
of Christ Scientists throughout the earth, that I deem it expedient
to reprint this monograph in the pages now following, to absolve
myself of any charges of capitalizing upon Christian Science in
the efforts which its celebrated founder seems purposefully
making to extend Christian Science as she is able, into Soulcraft.

Mrs. Eddy's Introductory Address:

DEAR BROTHER IN THE FAITH:

T IS excellent that you hear my voice, for I
have much in which to instruct you. We are
both Children in the Spirit. That is, it is the
care of God that we both perform excellently,
you on your earth-plane and I in my heavenly
plane---for compared to yours of the present,
this plane indeed is heavenly.
Now what I want to say to you in this initial paper is this:
We have great common cause as the foundational structure of
our efforts. I do not think you are going to be permitted to go too
far out of season with your economic precepts until the spiritual
foundations have been clarified. You will know this as you
advance.
When I headed the earthly sect of those that today are
recognized as Christian Scientists, I had a very devoted end in
view. I wished to help grief-stricken and blinded humanity out of
its serious faults of perception about eternal matters, especially
as they applied to current affairs of the presiding life. I had no

284
idea that my own teachings were going quite so far as they did
go before I finished.
I have been assiduously employed in our Dear Lord's
work ever since the infancy of my soul, and shall continue to be
so employed. But there are still strictures to be overcome. For
instance, I had been seriously purblind all my mortal days
respecting eternal life, or life beyond and above Mortality.
I “could not see it," to use that term, because my time and
attention were applied solely to aiding persons in the practical---
and usually ailing---circumstance. I am above that restriction
now. I wish I might declare to you, dear Brother in Christ, all that
I now see and know, respecting the true and correct nature of
this so-called After-Life. . you would be astonished if you could
behold but a corner of it.
Now, however, it is not that I wish to superimpose any
form of Spiritism upon so-called Christian Science. What I would
like to see achieved is the extension of Christian Science as an
earth-study of Matter and Materialisms into realms of the
psychically abstruse, if I may use that term. I am not a Spiritist in
the popular sense of the term. I am not a therapeutic religious
teacher, even. I am a contrite and devout woman who wishes to
transfer to my brothers and sisters on the earth-plane an agenda
of what I believe to be true in respect to the eternal survival of
the human spirit for greater and greater performings in flesh and
out of it as the age progresses into the Millennia of Beauty.
Let us seek to work in liaison to such end, will you, please?
I do not ask your fealty. I do not propose to attempt
converting you to any of the doctrines I propounded at divine
instruction while on the earth-plane. I merely wish to
convey to you as a person in the God-Work with myself, that

285
which I should much like to have conveyed to my earthly
disciples in the flesh. If you can find some way to do that, as by
a published book or otherwise, you will earn my deathless
gratitude.

FOR YOU SEE, I made certain errors of concept while in

flesh and doing my teaching.
Privately I conceived of God as a Personage. And Holy
Spirit in the God-sense is all the persons who have ever lived or
ever will live, coagulated into a gesture that exhibits the God
Purpose. It is likewise all the other manifestations of earthly
phenomena that enter into the material or mental scene.
It is the question of a shortage of time “before the Night
cometh" that I want to be specific about, and as articulate as I
can be, in this my first written communication to you.
Shall we proceed? . .
Now you are not going to be shortsuited or let down in
your plans for aiding to bring in the Kingdom, any more than is
necessary to guide you into paths of correct performings for our
Dear Lord. But there are principles you must be aware of, as a
result of transcribing the beloved Golden Speakings of our Loved
One.
First you must be aware, every hour of the day and
night, and all moments in between, that He never for one instant
relaxes in His care or concernment for you and over you. For
always recall that your work is His work, and vice versa. He's
more accurately aware of your need than you are in your own
right. But you must also do this---

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 Acknowledge when matters do not terminate or proceed
as you envision them for what you call Success in your efforts,
that you are being prepared for a colossal task to begin in the
very near future, and obstacles are really being removed from
your path instead of placed in it. I can assure you of this, my
dear brother, as I can affirm nothing else. So be it.
Now as to time. You have literally “all the time there is,"
remember that, remember it. True, worldly events are due to
mature to a set and positive schedule, but not the golden cure for
the hearts of harassed men and women. Those are not matters
of fixed mechanical moments, in turning themselves, or yielding
themselves, to His Grace. Remember, the great commander of
Israel, Moses, never was allowed to do more than glimpse the
Promised Land, and yet He by no means felt sorry for himself in
consequence. He would be on hand in spirit when His people did
enter the Promised Land, so what difference did it truly make to
him whether or not he happened to go there in physical flesh?
You have been called to complete my work, or the work
that stemmed from my pen, in a greater aspect in this generation
than you realize. Because you are given divine keys of
understanding to that which was so abstruse to so many whom I
tried to instruct in the Heavenly pathways. No matter. You will do
it because I recognize that it is on the Cards of Accomplishment
already. Be you aware and positive of this. You can be aware
and positive of much that is of lesser consequence. Why can you
not be equally set as to will-power on this last?
You are not to think I wish my books or autobiographical
material rewritten. . nothing of the sort. I have no desire to see

287
anything I have left behind on the plane of earth disturbed
intellectually. . that is not my point in addressing you..
I WOULD LIKE TO SEE A CONTINUATION OF MY
LOGIC CARRIED TO THE POINT OF MAGNIFICATION OF
THE NEXT IMMEDIATE WORLD or shadow of Consciousness,
so that Christian Science presents a well-rounded picture of the
entire life errand, from the start of the Soul to ultimate
glorification. Use my name and writings as much as you please,
but lift consideration of their import onto the next worthy plane of
intellectual effort and you will not be proceeding far wrongly.
Don't try to tell what I failed to say. Tell what I might have said
had I gained to a broader and loftier perspective of all equations
entering into the Consciousness Exhibit and Performance.
Now I am going to withdraw for a time, but I do wish you
would entertain my suggestions and see what we can make out
of them. I will correct you if you interpret what I tried to express,
incorrectly.
Do the thing you feel motivated to do, as you feel
motivated to do it and rest assured you will not be falling into
much serious error. I shall try to give you as much of my time
and counsel as you may command by your attention to the
principles involved.
And now for the evening, I say temporary farewell to
you. In our Dear Lord's name let us work in unison and see what
matures from the combination of mental effort. .
PEACE, LOVE AND HEALING,
(ETERNITY)

288
 I WAS properly overwhelmed at recording such
converse. Particularly was I overwhelmed at one statement the
lady had just made, that I was “called to complete" her work.
Well did I appreciate what havoc might result in the ranks of
Christian Scientists who had long-since deified the lady and
would tolerate no suggestions that in her worldly writings she
could have “made a mistake." As well imply that Christ Jesus
Himself, in the Sermon on the Mount, could have “made
mistakes." But the phenomena were happening and I could but
bide my time and see whether the whole thing proved up or
contradicted itself.
On October 14, 1953, Mrs. Candler drove up to Indiana
from Miami for another week-end visit with us and gave us a
sitting at 8:30 p.m. Judge my stupefaction when a commanding
and personable materialization issued from behind the drapes,
announced herself audibly as Mary Baker Eddy, and made
reference to the clairaudient converse she had previously had
with me when I transcribed the foregoing. I was not twenty
inches distant from the soul-spirit of the great founder of the
Church of Christ Scientist apparently. The interesting feature of
the materialization to me was, that I had not disclosed to Bertie
Lilly Candler the details of the clairaudient session that had
preceded the materialization by something like seven months.
The alleged Mrs. Eddy's remarks on this substantialized
appearance encompassed the following statements---
“I came to you the other evening, and it was a privilege
to make the contact. . and I would like you to put this in print and

289
I shall bring you many messages. . I was a medium when I was
on the earth-plane. . the people of those days in Boston were not
ready for the truth, and they called it fortune-telling, and so, I
changed the form of the intelligence into the doctrine of Christ
Scientist. But since coming Out Here in transition, I see many
mistakes. After entering into this New World and looking back
upon the space of time upon the mortal plane, I realize many
mistakes. . I should have acquainted my public with the fact that
communication and survival is a fact. Because we live out here,
and it's beautiful in our world. I want the people to know that we
do come back. The Church is doing a great amount of good. It's
reaching a multitude of people. But I want them to know that
communication between the two worlds is scientific! . . proven by
our return. It has to be possible, because if one Man survived the
grave, and returned, as Jesus did, all men do. And I will come
and help you with your manuscript, and we'll have a beautiful
story. . but you have to write the book . . "

THERE was more to her converse on this epochal

evening, but this was the genesis of the book that I did write,
Beyond Grandeur.
I spent many evenings between the 13th of October and
May the 8th in direct mental contact with this superb spirit that I
identified and accepted as Mary Baker Eddy. That great volume,
Beyond Grandeur, was the result of the collaboration between
us. Already it is a bestseller. I finished the typing of it, put it upon
the linotype, and had printed it to page 214, when Bertie Lilly
Candler---totally unaware of what had transpired since her last

290
visit---visited Noblesville again and gave us another seance. Out
of the cabinet in due order of event stepped this superb soul-
spirit that I have accepted as Mary Eddy, and commented as
follows---“I am delighted to come and greet you, my friends! . . "
My partner, Miss Henderson, immediately put the question,
“Do you like the Chief's book?"
To this, the materialized spirit replied---
“It is the message that I gave him." Then turning to me
she said, “I gave you the words," and I interrupted her to ask
directly, “So that is your book?" meaning Beyond Grandeur. She
responded positively, “That is my book!" . .
I said, “Good enough, I just wanted that confirmation.
I didn't know but some of the things I'd said in there had been
contradictory to some of the things you might have preached in
life." Thereupon Mrs. Eddy favored us with the following
homily—
“Probably some of the things would be contradictory to
the things I taught in life, because when you make the change of
Transition called Death, you see things as from a different
picture and at a different angle. Then we change our viewpoints
and our teachings in many ways. I was a medium in earth-life as
I have told you many times before. And I want the world to know
that I have had to return to give to the people of the world the
message of glad tidings of survival, that we live Out Here, and
that I denied the great psychic force that worked through me to
prove to humanity that man survived the grave and to stand on
truth. . I denied the truth that was in my soul. And I have had to
work it out, and that is why I have returned to bring a message to
the people.

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 “There is good in all religions. But we will not have the
religions, we will have the Truth of the Word of Wisdom that will
lead mankind out of darkness into light. Truth will stand forever.
Truth will release your soul from cares and burdens. It will give
you a great understanding of the principles and laws of life. It will
lead you into the great things that are spiritual. When you have
found the Kingdom, all else will be added unto you."
I said, “I know. Many of those passages in Beyond
Grandeur, I'm very happy to hear that you approve of. I
wondered if they were correct."
“Yes," Mary said, “they are correct! . . And I want the
people who read from page to page and from cover to cover to
know it has been my message that has been sent through you,
the teacher, to give to mankind upon the earth-plane." Such was
the spoken and audible dialogue of her second visit with me. The
third occurred on the 13th of July---

"GOOD evening, friends!" she announced herself. .

“Mary Baker Eddy! . . A privilege to come to greet you, my
children. (To WDP) My beloved William! . . for I will be Mary
Baker Eddy to you, and you William to me. I want to thank you
for the great work which you have finished---or not finished---
which we are going on with, because we have a great work to
do. Our work is never finished, and if I could have gone on while
in flesh, and the peoples of the world had understood the great
Truth of immortality of the soul, I would not have had to come
back like this. My work was not finished. The things that I denied,
I have to pick up the threads and give the truth. "

292
 I said, “And now, Mary, how are we going to convince
the public of this fact?"
“It makes no difference," she replied, “whether we
convince them or not. Did the Christ convince all peoples when
He was in earth-life?"
“Well, He has, in the last two thousand years convinced
an awful lot of them," I argued.
“He has convinced many souls," she agreed
conditionally, “but has not reached all mankind."
“No, He hasn't reached all mankind."
“Neither will our work reach into the hearts of all people,
but it will fall upon the souls of many."
“I was just wondering about the messages you gave us
the other night---how are we going to get that across to the
people that you want to reach? If you have any suggestions that
would help, I would love to hear you tell me what I ought to do."
“I want to say this to you. . within their souls there will be
an arousing. . and a desire will be created within their beings, so
that they will wish to read between the lines of the book, and
from one to another the seeds will be planted in their
consciousness, and one by one as sheep they will find their fold
and their leader."
“Well, in other words, it is a proposal of just going along
and letting them discover it."
“They will discover it."
“You think they will?"
“Positively! They're already speaking of it."
“They are?"

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 “Oh, positively! Many of them are very much aroused
and confused. Could it be possible? And then they realize and
know what the communications of their being with the higher
forces have meant to them in the silence and meditation of their
souls and light breaks on them. There is something beyond that
comes forth to help them." Then she turned her specific attention
to Attorney Henry who was present and listening. To him she
said, “I want to thank you, my brother, for giving the power of
thought and word to my beloved William, of whom I speak, and
who has found my message sent through into the pages that you
inspired him and helped him and told him to go on with. Would
you understand that?"
George understood, and so indicated. Mary continued---
“Because it has been wonderful. And to you. . you know
the truth of Divine Love, don't you?"
I interrupted, “In other words, Mary, were you the one
who inspired the idea for Beyond Grandeur in George's mind?"
“l did. You must remember this: through the Divine Mind
of the Christ there is always a channel open that we can work
through. We reach the channel that is opened to bring forth the
message. We must have a channel, a clear channel, to work
through, and you (WDP) were the only one whom I could find on
the mortal plane with a high state of consciousness that I could
reach through, that you could hear my voice, that I could tune in
with you and bring forth the message to the peoples of the
world.”
I said, “That's quite a compliment, . . thank you." After
moment's reference to a recent Christian Science visitor from
Boston, I asked, “Do you want us to communicate with any of the
heads of the Mother Church?"

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 “I will impress him," Mary answered concerning the
visitor. “You can tell him that I was here. And through the Divine
Love and through communication between the two worlds, we
continue to live out here and we do not die. And we continue our
work in the ethereal form, out upon the high planes of expression
to reach back and help others. I was inspired when I was on the
earh-plane. I was a medium. The people of those times were not
ready for the truth and they would persecute and condemn, and I
went into the study and I came forth with Christ Scientist,
Christian Science, the development of the soul and mind.
Because the soul and mind are part of God, the Christ
Consciousness, isn't it right?"
A physician who was present, interrupted to ask, “Will
you help me, Mrs. Eddy?"
She responded, “I shall help all the peoples of the world.
All peoples of the world are my brothers and my sisters."
My partner in the Soulcraft work, sitting at my left,
inquired, “Mrs. Eddy, would you see or talk a moment with the
doctor's wife?"
“I would be happy to see your friends," the Superior
Lady answered. Then a moment later she addressed the wife,
“You, my child, are in the state of consciousness of not
understanding the great laws of communication between the two
worlds. You do not appear to know, and understand the great
laws of life as your companion. But in the future, and through the
reading-matter and the meditations of your soul, you will realize
the spark of divinity within you and that we move on, out of one
house into another. The mortal flesh falls but the spirit rises and
goes on, and I come in my ethereal form to bless all of you at

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this time. Blessings of the Divine Christ of love upon all of you!"
She paused. Half a dozen persons were then summoned up to
meet the famous visitor, and she overlooked none of them.
Finally turning to me, she said---
“You have a great work to do, William."
I said, “But what I most wish is your cue as to whether
I'm doing it right."
Thereupon she gave voice to this: “You know, we should
pick up the threads that were left broken when I came to This
Side of Life, and we should have a school, a teaching of the
fundamental truths of the immortality of the soul of man and the
development therein. We will not take from our Church of Christ
Scientist, but we will only add to it, because of life eternal. "
One of the ladies standing close by, said, “Mr. D---'s
aunt is a practitioner in California, Mrs. Eddy," referring to a man-
friend on her left.
“Oh, that is very splendid," the Supernal Lady said. “She
is probably doing great work."
“Yes," said the first speaker, “in a State Mental Hospital,
Mrs. Eddy."
"Healing?" Mary suggested.
“Yes."
“You know, my children of earth, there's healing of the
body and healing of the mind, through the Christ Light of our
Lord. . May the blessing of Divine Love that is ever present be
with you, and I will go on and help all of you. . Good evening! . . "
Orthodox critics who rant purblindly about such
appearances being of Satan, should be present and hear the
great sanctity in which such blessings are uttered. Truly have I

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heard more devoutness, more piety, more solicitude and sacred
compassion evidenced by such higher callers at these sessions
than I have heard in any churches. Christ Himself once remarked
to similar critics on the absurdity of Satan's house being thus
divided against itself by such pronouncements.
Then on August 27th of this year of 1954, Mary came to
us a fourth time and said in the same reverent and somewhat
melancholy tone---

"MARY BAKER EDDY!"..

I said, “Good evening, Mary!"
“Again it's a privilege to stand among you. . I want to
speak to him," indicating my attorney who was again present,
“Henry."
I said, “Oh, George! . . Mrs. Eddy would like to talk to
you.”
George arose from his chair and came up within twenty
inches of the figure robed in bejeweled white. He stood stiffly
owing to a foot injury he had suffered many years ago. “This is
Mary Baker Eddy," she repeated. “I come with my blessing. And
through the Divine Mind of the Christ may His healing inflow and
come and make you well."
Then turning back to me, she went on, “you must always
remember, in Science & Health, it is Mind over Matter. But I have
changed many of my theories and beliefs since the Transition
called death. Because I have found many things that I left
undone. Now you are picking up---and have to tuck in---the
threads for me because I need a channel to work through. And
you were my inspiration and my channel that I chose to work

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through. And we have other work that we're going to do. We'll go
on with Science & Health, and our Church. But our people are
going to be quite confused in trying to understand the great laws
of Spirit through the Divine Consciousness and the Light and
illumination of the Divine Christ. I want you to go on. I want to
help all your helpers to find the great consciousness of
understanding of Truth, of immortality of the soul of man,
because we only move on and out . . out here into the Land of
the Living where there is no more parting, and the light of Spirit
to guide you on your way. Bless you, my people! We must tie the
threads and weave the links of chains together that they may
never more be broken. Because links of the Golden Chain of
Love and Wisdom will guide the human race into the New Age
and into the New Time of the Great Spirit of the Risen Christ . .
I want you all to work together for the great cause which we
represent from this side of life, through the channel which I have
come to work through. I want you to go on and lay your plans,
and let us build our temple, and let us have our school and our
lessons of life to help others, that the Light may shine on the
weary peaks of the world that life is eternal and that God is a
loving God. Through the Divine Mind of the Christ may He bless
you all . . Good-night!"

THUS the four materialized appearances of this

Supernal Spirit Lady who has made herself known to me as I
have described. Nothing that has occurred in Soulcraft since its
inception surpasses it.

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 Remember that almost nightly from October to May,
I conversed with her by the Inner Voice and heard her respond to
me through the Inner Ear. Before I had thus formed this platonic
attachment, I had assumed her to be a some-what autocratic
lady pedant with a trace of aloofness for other denominations,
given almost to what I might call religious snobbery. In those
evenings of writing Beyond Grandeur in her company, I
discovered her compassionate, magnetic, super-intelligent and
altogether charming. Small wonder, I frequently remarked to
friends, that during her life in this earth-world she had acquired
three husbands. Supposedly eighty-nine or thereabouts when
she passed on in 1910, she has since grown back toward her
prime---or is in the process of growing back. She appears to be
in her fifties at present, easily recognizable for her likeness to the
celebrated portrait painted of her by a grateful Howard Chandler
Christie for her healing of him before her Transition. But what an
irony that the anti-spiritualistic instruction she gave to her
communicants throughout her life now works to sustain a barrier
between them and herself in these years of the overwhelming
success of the Church of Christ Scientist. The tragedy of her
postmortem years is this self-imposed insulation from them. She
declares that she “knew better" when she wrote as she did, but
that she wrote earnestly enough in her desire to keep her people
from indulgence in promiscuous seances with nonspiritual
discarnate entities.
It is as dear an instance of the karma that is so
prominently delineated in Soulcraft as anything that has come
beneath my observation.

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 How long it can maintain---this alienation---presents an
intriguing problem. I have covenanted to do all that lies within my
power to aid her to rectify it, and we shall note what it brings
forth.
But this is not a volume about Karma; it is a volume
reviewing my outstanding experiences of the past two and a half
decades that have resulted in my conviction that Death as a
reality is utter fallacy. . make of it what you will. At any rate, in
any ideological controversy with Christian-Science orthodoxy,
I would seem to have the founder of that mighty institution in
my corner, as I am in hers.
The outcome may be history-making.
We shall see.

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 Chapter XX

“TILL WE MEET AGAIN---”

O I say, what about it?

Is there evidence that the “dead" are alive, or
is there not? Of course you can reply that the
evidence as I have described it in this book
appears convincing, but after all it is my
evidence and not yours. Had the same things happened to you
that I contend have happened to me, then the doubt might be in
my mind and not in yours. Nine out of ten people declare, “Let
me sit in on one of those materializing sessions, and see, and
talk with, someone I have known in life, and I'll believe." The odd
thing I confront a hundred times a year is the fact that precisely
such sight and speech occurs and yet those people by no means
believe. It must have been some sort of trick or illusion, they will
tell you, or if it were not trickery or illusion, then it was possibly a
demonstration by the Devil himself. You would be astonished to
realize what numbers of otherwise rational and normal people
are more ready to accredit the existence and demonstration of

301
the Devil than they stand ready to accredit the existence and
demonstration of their beloved relatives and friends indicating
their existence on the higher planes of life. Again and again
I have sought to explain to my own satisfaction what can be
operating in the mental processes of such doubters, or rather,
accreditors of Satan? I have come to the conclusion that they by
no means believe in Satan literally, but that karmic complexes
are operating that they can by no means ignore.
Reluctantly I am compelled to decide that insufferable
human vanity lies at the bottom of much of it.
People don't care to admit that something important has
been going on of which they have been kept in woeful ignorance.
The same chagrin assails them as afflicted the Scotsman who
was persuaded to bet a shilling on a horse race and to his
stupefaction won two pounds. “ln the devil's name," cried Sandy,
“how lang has this been hoppening?" Then again there is the
chagrin arising from realization that some previous teacher or
mentor, in whom they had every cause to repose confidence,
may have instructed them wrongly. This apparently is Mrs.
Eddy's predicament as being such previous teacher or mentor.
I had it illustrated the day following one of the sessions I have
lately set down, when a life-long Christian Scientist who had
been present got me into a comer and asked in a whisper---
“Please tell me what it was that I witnessed last night?"
I asked, “You mean the Eddy manifestation?"
He qualified, “I saw a woman's figure substantial enough
in your study. The features resembled Mrs. Eddy's as we have
come to know them from paintings of her in life. The voice that
came from the figure declared it was Mary Eddy speaking and

302
talked penitently and devoutly. But Mrs. Eddy told us without
reservations in Science & Health that there is no such thing as
spirit-return, so what was I looking at and hearing?"
“Didn't you hear her say plainly enough that she erred in
earth-life in writing that there was no spirit-return or
communication ?"
“Yes, I heard it. But if I concede that Mary Eddy erred in
a single statement anywhere in Science & Health, I've got to
concede she might have erred in a hundred statements? And I
can't do that."
“Why can't you do that?"
“Unless I accept that Mary Eddy was infallible in all the
statements about Mind and Matter that she uttered in earth-life,
I might as well throw all Science overboard. Who am I to
say which of her earthly statements were true and which were
in error?"
“It wouldn't occur to you, would it, that plain self-chagrin
might be working in you? . . that you hate to acknowledge you
listened to a teacher who wasn't divinely infallible?"
“But Truth has to be infallible or it isn't Truth."
“Granted. But can't you grasp that your deification of
Mrs. Eddy, as being synonymous with Truth, is your weakness,
not hers? The lady herself is big enough in character to admit
she made a blunder in that one item of spirit-return or
communication. She is evidently---somewhat pathetically---
rectifying it. Shouldn't we honor her for that integrity and not
damn a great book of hers otherwise because on Page 70 she
wrote some inaccurate pronouncements? Are you yourself a
congenital liar and not to be trusted in any of your statements

303
because you gave your business partner some incorrect
information about the stock market last week that lost him five
thousand dollars?"
“I am not Mary Baker Eddy," returned my friend stiffishly.
“I'm merely a follower of hers who took the entire volume of her
principles for granted. If I've got to throw the chapter on
Spiritualism and Animal Magnetism out of Science & Health, I've
got to toss away the whole book---because I'm incapable of
judging what otherwise might be more 'mistakes' . . ."
“Then your own discretions and discriminations don't
enter into it?"
“I’m not capable of having any---not in religious matters."
“Why do you imagine you were given a mind?"
“I wasn't given a mind to argue something of which I'm
humanly ignorant. So I say to you, what was it I saw with my
eyes and heard with my ears last night? I certainly did see and
hear something, but Mary Eddy herself said there was no such
thing. So where does that leave me?"
“It leaves you," I answered, "in the somewhat
incongruous position of believing statements she made in print in
earth-life but doubting the statements she made vocally in
ethereal life."
“I’m not persuaded it was Mrs. Eddy who made the vocal
statements."
“Very good, who was it?"
“I don't know. It could be someone impersonating her,
couldn't it?"
“To what purpose?"
“To destroy Christian Science."

304
 "Don't be ridiculous, man. How could the elimination of
those two chapters in Science & Health ‘destroy' Christian
Science in its profounder and more constructive
recommendations of the powers of Mind over Matter?"
My visitor couldn't, or wouldn't, reply. The fact was, his
intellect had been sealed up across a number of years against
accrediting anything as reality that couldn't be measured, and he
didn't propose to unseal it at fifty-six.
Sealed intellects! . . Why is Religion the only field in
which the intellect must be sealed and such sealing adulated?
Supposing the scientist manifested the same sealed intellect,
or the astronomer?
Why go on with it?

LlFE insurance statistics inform us that a person “dies"

physically in the United States every eight seconds day and night
the clock around. Each bids final adieu to the physical vehicle
that has permitted him such characteristic expression since the
doctor spanked the breath of life into his infantile organism and
he issued forth into a consciousness of worldly reality afresh. He
carries in his soul-self his load of earthly memories---not to
mention sense of identity---his spiritual attainments and even the
design-pattern of his physical appearance. If he did not carry his
thinking apparatus in his soul-self, even the pentecostal plan of
Salvation advocated theologically would have no meaning, since
eternal rewards or punishments would then have no significance
to him. Why reward or punish a soul for something that is utterly
oblivious to his mental ensemble? If you concede the
continuation of the personality in the pentecostal salvation

305
program, you're forced to acknowledge it in areas of
consciousness to which the soul-self does arouse in likelier
orientations of Truth.
My own conclusions and convictions after twenty-six
years of exploring and experimenting in octaves higher than the
mortal have it that thinking and reasoning---which entails all the
phenomena of remembering---are strictly attributes of the spirit
personality, and the bodily brain has little to do with it at all. The
bodily brain has been responsible, true enough, for conveying
sense-impressions of the material world to that spirit intellect, but
the Design-Body is the real repository for them of permanence.
If this were not true, the 17-year-old boy, Roger, who
materialized in my studio a week ago Friday night could not have
carried on a running conversation with his Uncle Lawrence about
events in the family in Chicago that occurred back in 1937. “Do
you remember the little red sweater with the turtleneck you
bought me, Uncle Lawrence, that I was so proud of?" . . these
were voluntary interrogations on Roger's part and his uncle as
readily acknowledged them. As for the Light-Body or Design-
Body being the exact prototype in a higher atomic frequency of
the physical self, how about Walter Stinson offering seventy-two
replicas of his hand containing his accurate fingerprints, as his
toilet articles showed them to have been in mortality? I claim that
people who still find objections and challenges to such evidence
are putting themselves in the category with my Christian
Scientist friend---or the aforementioned Scotsman---whose self-
chagrin is apparent in their demand, “How long has this been
going on?" But to return to this matter of the personality

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discovering itself emerged from the chrysalis of the physical
vehicle. .

OBVIOUSLY it ascends into a sort of “double

consciousness"---of the higher ethereal reality where there are
landscapes and architectural structures and forms of society not
unlike those it has left in this lower and slower world---and of the
coarser or grosser atomic ensemble that we term the mortal
exhibit. Having gained to the higher condition, the soul-self
discovers it can, by a sort of manipulation of its vibrations,
manifest on both levels at once. Or rather, it makes the discovery
that the mortal world seems to be the shadow or replica of the
ethereal world. It is, certainly, more conscious of the operations
of life on this lower and slower plane than we upon this lower
and slower plane are commonly conscious of the existence of
those on the higher. Understand me in all this, I'm not attempting
to rationalize all conditions of the after-life in this closing chapter.
I'm merely conveying to you what obviously happens to the
graduating soul as I've learned about it from twenty-six years of
aggressive contact. If you want the whole agenda of the
sensations of "dying" and the orientation following discarnation,
you can get it in a score of other books you'll find I've written on
the subject. But here is one interesting feature of your
metamorphosis. . when this Light-Body, Design-Body, Pattern-
Body---call it what you will---disengages from the long-time
physical self, it seems to go into the ethereal world stark naked.
Harriet has described in detail how relatives, guardians or
helpers are at hand to take it in charge and convey it to what
they call The Rose-Room of Rest. There they permit it to nap for

307
a time and recover its strength and poise. During this interval the
relatives, guardians and helpers, "weave" out of higher atomic
stuffs by the operations of Thought the fabrics in which the
personality will subsequently be clothed in the interests,
apparently, of common decency. On only one occasion have
I ever beheld a soul-spirit materialize in a nude appearance on
this side, and that seemed to be because the tulle-stuffs of which
the “clothing" was composed were so tenuous as to seem almost
transparent, disclosing the feminine charms beneath. But
assuming the Thought-Weaving provides garments for the
transitioning spirit, the next occasion is an awakening in truth to
the fact that the transition has been made by sometimes
conveying the soul-spirit back into the earthly condition and
permitting it to be present at the burial service over its lifeless
day. I recall upon an occasion of the materialization of Harry
Martin, my former executive associate in Asheville, that he
laughingly criticized the laudatory remarks I spoke over his bier
as I preached his funeral sermon. “It was an awfully funny
experience," Harry attested, “listening to you pronouncing all that
malarky over my effigy lying in a box surrounded by flowers,
whereas the real me was right there in the funeral parlor,
practically beside you, conscious of ‘two worlds at once', the
world from which I had come and the world which I had suddenly
gained." On another occasion in a town near Seattle, Mr. Samuel
Labbe of Portland, a former associate of mine in the Northwest,
was reported to me as communicating during a public Bertie Lilly
Candler seance and saying the same to a group of a hundred
listening and watching people. At still a third occasion in
Manhattan in 1945, my little 83-year-old mother succeeded in

308
“getting through" and thanking my son-in-law, Melford Pearson,
for the help he contributed to her burial services when I had been
unable to attend.
Such data would fill a volume unto itself. However, while
the lowering of the personal “vibrations" down onto the
frequencies of the medium's ectoplasm may produce a condition
where the soul-self may manifest its identity on this physical
plane of earth, by no means does it follow that these are strictly
one-way trips. There are occasions beyond listing where living
persons on This Side have made incursions onto the higher
ethereal strata without physical death resulting. . .

LOOKING back over all the adventures, explorings, and

contacts I have succeeded in negotiating the past two-and-a-half
decades, I can appreciate now that such was exactly the thing
I described purblindly in the now celebrated narrative, My Seven
Minutes in Eternity. I left my 38-year- old physical self lying on
the bed in an upper room of my bungalow on Mount Curve Drive
in Altadena, California, on the night of May 29, 1928, and spent
something like four hours interviewing former friends and
associates whose similar bodies I had seen buried in cemeteries.
You remember, if you read that article in The American at the
time, that I was shameless in describing my "physical" condition
in the first half of the experience as being nude. It was not only
because no one was present in the first sequence except two
men-friends, Albert Boyden and William Derieux, that I felt no
embarrassment. My physical condition was simply not an item in
my thinking at the moment. This corresponded perfectly with

309
what Harriet recounted to us the other evening about the
RoseRoom of Rest. Later, in the second half of the Seven-
Minute experience, when a large assortment of mixed company
entered the now-famous patio to greet me, I no longer sensed
myself as naked. From somewhere I had acquired a sort of
Greek chiton to cover me, although I had always supposed it had
materialized in the aftermath of my sampling a pool of oddly
clear water in the southeastern comer of the beauteous place.
Now I'm not so certain that I hadn't "woven" my own chiton
garment by powers of thought subconsciously, not desiring to
confront lady friends in my birthday suit. The point is immaterial.
The fact remains that we do vacate our earthly mortal
vehicles upon occasion and penetrate the higher areas, just as
those in the higher areas do upon occasion descend into our
“shadow world" and give tacit evidence of their personality
survival. I got over 30,000 letters of attestments from
AMERICAN MAGAZINE readers, not only congratulating me for
writing so candid and revealing an article, but describing similar
experiences in their own rights which they had been diffident
about confiding to their intimates.
I took heart at those. If 30,000 other persons had under-
gone a similar discarnation at some time or other in their lives,
then my own experience after all was not so bizarre nor so
peculiar. But more significant than these have been the numbers
of persons I likewise have encountered who have attained some
degree of proficiency of ascending from one octave of
consciousness into the higher, voluntarily and deliberately. But

310
the attainment of such adeptship belongs in a realm of mystical
accomplishment outside the data of this book. .

ONE OTHER matter I do wish to touch upon briefly,

however, before writing Finis to this manuscript. . the queries
that long-since have come to me about confronting so-called
Dwellers on the Threshold in making the passing from the
physical to the ethereal.
Judging from what I've been able to compile upon the
subject, yes, there's a sort of Astral Purgatory next above the
strict physical conditions of earth, where those of low, brutal,
purblind soul-expression find themselves blundering in a sort of
semi-gloom, unable to discover where they are or how to
escape. It seems to be from such Low Astral that Helena
Blavatsky compiled her data in which she made such reference
to Dwellers on the Threshold---in Theosophy. In this condition
the low-grade and non-developed spirit finds itself confronting
Thought Forms and astral husks that may not be too pleasant to
contemplate. But it's more or less a self-elected condition. It is by
no means obligatory for the high-quality and altruistic spirit of the
enlightened Christian who accredits that he has no more to be
fearful of in the After-life than he had in contemplating the facts
and factors of physical birth.
Howard Candler, Bertie Lilly's brother, who made the
Passing when he was twenty-three, gave us a lengthy lecture on
this condition of non-developed souls at a recent Noblesville
seance, from which I quote---

311
 I said to Howard, “May I ask a question? . . Isn't it true
that on this plane we have conditions of conflict between
temperaments, but do profit by experience if we have progress to
make. . whereas, when you have no conflicting conditions, you
won't profit?"
“Correct," Howard answered in strong and emphatic
accents, “you won't profit. Because you must have the mistakes
and conflicts to profit. They are lessons in your life."
I said, “That' s just what I mean. You, on the higher
levels then, would seem not to be getting such character-
increments in a state of society where all is tranquil and without
dissension. Of the two, would not the earth-state be preferable?"
“But you must remember, my brother of earth, we have
the lower planes here, where there is much conflict, where men
who have passed have not been prepared for that passing,
where souls have been ushered out in war and disasters, and
the criminals, and the murderers. They have their place of
abode, and many of them come back to the earth and are
hovering around it, to seek avenues to get through to destroy
because they are not educated. These are what we call
Uneducated Souls."
“What I mean is, aren't we developing our own
characters by combating those conditions?"
“Positively you are, because if a child never fell down it
would never try to get up and move on. If you sat constantly in a
chair and never exercised the will to go forward, but just sat
there, you would become an invalid. Because you must have
that push-power of the mind and the spirit, for the body and the
soul to go forward. Every experience is a teacher for you, and it's

312
for every man upon the earth-plane to realize and understand
and know it's a blessed experience he's going through. And too,
another thing, is not to run away from anything. Because it will
follow you wherever you go, and you'll run into something more
unpleasant than what you were trying to combat. You cannot
hide from a single thing. You must work it out because it's in your
path. Stars come and stars go, the sun shines and the rain falls;
it falls on the just and the unjust. Yet God never changes. He is
just in all things. But the mortal mind in sin and confusion has
made the mortal world that in which you live at the present time."
“Don't we know it!"
“Our world is beautiful. Try to realize our great
seminaries, our great colleges, . . we have the Great Teachers,
the archangels, . . we have our fountains and our lakes. We have
all the things, my friends of earth, that you have---"
“Howard," I interrupted, “do those interpenetrate the
atomic structures of this world or are they higher in Etheria?"
“They're very high in Etheria," he replied. “The atomic
powers do not interfere with us. Now some will say that they
frighten us. We do not become frightened because the Spirit in
which we move is not fearful or frightened."
“Then you don't have any disruptions from the atom
bomb explosions?"
“Positively not. But those who are living in what you
would call Purgatory, what the Catholic would call the Dark
Zones, from which they have not evolved, they become
frightened because they can hear the explosions. And when the
souls from here go out on what you call missionary work, and
illuminate their Soul Light to find and help those people, you will

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see the undeveloped falling with their faces to the earth, or they
run down into the Dark Waters to bathe themselves and hide
from us because they are afraid of the missionaries, like many of
the people on your earth-plane that missionaries would go out to
teach and to help. Even in your great schools of philosophy,
many people criticize and are afraid of them and want to shun
them, isn't it true? So it is over here. They are afraid and they run
to escape the light and illumination of the angels and all the
spirits that go to save them as prey from a tiger. Because they
do not want to be helped. They have revenge in their hearts
because they were so undeveloped when they made the
transition called Death. They were so engrossed in sin and evil
while in flesh that when they make the Transition called Death it
is enveloped in their soul consciousness. They have carried this
with them in their Thought out here and it has an effective
reaction upon them, and they are afraid. I'm happy to greet you,
friends. It's a glorious privilege to have been here. And may God
bless each one of you. I shall voice to you again from time to
time with my blessing. I will withdraw and leave way for others.
Howard Candler."

THE ORTHODOX Christian cries, of course, “But if what

you say be true, then what becomes of our current theology---in
fact, our whole Christian religion? The church teaches us that
there is only One Man who has ever enjoyed actual resurrection
and that has been Jesus the Christ. All the rest of the people
who have died since Calvary are “sleep in Jesus' and “know not
anything until Judgment Day.' How reconcile the two?"

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 Truth and Error can never be reconciled. And there is
not a shred of logic in expecting that they should be.
However, it isn't that the church has the facts of survival
wrong; the church has simply been the espouser of a hypothesis
that has been gravely warped, misrepresented and, in cases,
wickedly or stupidly prostituted. Christ himself was the greatest
psychic who ever trod this earth. He was great as a clairvoyant,
great as a clairaudient, great as a psycho-metric, great as a
divine medium. But clerics who knew naught of these marvels
behind mortality, or branded them as evil because they feared
disclosures from them, edited or censored out the facts of the
early Christian “mysteries" that pertained to all of these
phenomena, to suit their own inhibited or fearsome notions.
Today as “sacred" teaching, we get the doctrines that
they--and they alone---have pronounced “infallible," simply
because numbers of such clerics have gathered in council from
time to time and legislated according to their bigotries instead of
the basic life-facts they have gone to no trouble to explore.

ANYHOW, I have written this initial book to tell you

exactly how it has been with me in arriving at a constant daily
psychology that Death is a misnomer, that mortal life is merely
experience in a classroom of earth where our bodies are the
garments that clothe us while we enact the role of students.
I am appalled neither by death itself as a fact of Cosmos
nor as a possibility for myself at any hour of the day.

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 I was, in a manner of speaking, allotted something like
26,280 days in this earthly tenure to bring myself to maturity, do
a certain work, and achieve a certain result. Something like
22,542 of those days I have expended to the moment. How shall
I account for the 3,738 days that I have reason to believe are
left?
Getting back among my friends in the higher octaves will
be like the award that a trip around the globe might be, with all
expenses paid, and somebody along to arrange tickets and
luggage.
However, the divine Father has been infinite in His
compassion for most of us who may not have arrived at my
convictions concerning survival, in that He has instituted a most
beautiful process for easing each transition. We do not all make
the Passing at once!
As the years roll by, and we grow older and maturer, the
relatives, intimates and dear ones who have been with us in
many beloved adventures in the body, drop one by one along the
wayside. We attend funerals---over their tired husks and weep
many tears that we shall not know such adventures with them
more.
But one by one they are simply moving along ahead of
us into the Radiant Summerland, until finally there are more of
them on That Side than on This. Going to them is but a transport
of reunion. We would rather be with the lovely horde of them in
realms of beauty than to continue to plod, stumble and endure in
this world of sorrows, disappointments and ordeals. So comes
the moment when our own life-equations are balanced, and the

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Hour Tranquil when we lay us down to the peace that passes
understanding. .
Need there be anything morbid about it? Should we
consider it phenomenal or carnal, either?
Well, anyhow, we do know that when we descended to
this mortal realm as babes, there were loving hearts ready to
welcome us, and loving hands ready to receive us and minister
to us. If we have found that to be so in the earthly venture, shall
it not be doubly so in the venture that is to come? Will not equally
loving voices cry forth their greetings as we are caught sight of in
the throng moving in through heaven's gate, and arms be thrown
about us that mean the end of separation?
I, for one, believe that it shall happen.
Incidentally forgive my mentioning that if, when I come to
such moment of entry, there be not a flag-patch of wagging dog-
tails, and barks of excited welcome as all the dog souls I have
ever loved leap upon me in hysterical greeting, I shall count my
life as poorly lived indeed and heaven not the place that I fondly
anticipate. But that is whim-digression. . To me there are no
dead, even before the day of such reunion is reached. I have
seen the Broad Highroad, and the Grand Progression on it. I
have already talked and walked with those who have witnessed
the Bright Scene from a thousand dazzling vantage-points. And
this is my encyclical---We are truly all gods, advancing together
from embryo, and he who would shrink from the realities of
Cosmos, performs but a shrinking from the divinity that is
himself! Suppose we leave it there. .
The Present Moment Always Endures!

FINIS

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SO YOU ARRIVE AT THE END OF THE VOLUME NAMED
WHY I BELIEVE THE DEAD ARE ALIVE WRITTEN BY
WILLIAM DUDLEY PELLEY FOR THE SOULCRAFT
AUDIENCE AND DONE INTO A BOOK BY SOULCRAFT
CHAPELS WHOSE ADDRESS IN OCTOBER OF NINETEEN
HUNDRED AND FIFTYFOUR IS POST OFFICE BOX ONE
HUNDRED AND NINETYTWO, IN THE CITY OF NOBLESVllLE,
STATE OF INDIANA, IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,
PLANET EARTH, SOLAR SYSTEM, OMNIVERSE OF GOD

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