I am glad to be here, and if I can obtain the appropriate conditions I will show my identity.
DICK FOSTER.
“This was a puzzling thing, and I should like for some one to explain how it was done, if there was not communication with some invisible intelligence. In regard to Foster’s name it should be said that the medium had not seen nor heard it, and that his hand flew over the paper very fast while he wrote the backward message. So far as I could see, Dr. Schlesinger was quite deaf and near-sighted. He was an old man of heavy weight and clumsy fingers. His manner was that of a devout believer in the genuineness of his theory. If any one can explain to me how these things were done, he will interest me far more than Dr. Schlesinger did, and it should be said that my attention to what he did was held without interruption from the start. There were several other like tests wherein he read for me other names by a process equally startling, making one feel that he had marvelous powers.
“R. E. Bunker, M. D.”
WHAT MR. BONNET SAW.
Theodore F. Bonnet, who was a reporter for the Daily Report at the time of the seance at the Mayor’s office, was a guest of the author during the seance. Mr. Bonnet, who is now editor and owner of Town Talk, an influential weekly newspaper, wrote the following account of what he saw and handed it to the author just after the seance:—
“After witnessing the efforts of Dr. Schlesinger as a medium, one cannot but be impressed by his marvelous powers of divination. They are impossible of explanation on any hypothesis calculated to reduce his work to the vulgar plane of legerdemain. Yet the manifestations, as he is pleased to call his marvelous, puzzling and apparently supernatural revelations concerning matters with which he could not become familiar under ordinary circumstances, are after all, unsatisfactory to the person engaged in testing his power. I must give him credit, however, for having startled me by one message. I had written on small slips of paper, which were then carefully folded—all this an hour or more before the meeting. One of the names was Joseph Touhill, an Oakland burglar, who had been killed by a policeman who caught him robbing a saloon. I had known Touhill, and had been quite friendly with him in late years, but had never suspected that he was of the Jekyll and Hyde species. The medium did not at once direct me to the piece of paper on which Touhill’s name was written, but afterwards he suddenly said: ‘The spirit of the man with whom you wish to communicate is here now.’
EDITOR THEODORE F. BONNET.
“I signified my willingness to hear from the spirit, whereupon the Doctor said, ‘Old boy, I’m not quite as dead as you think.’ Then he mentioned the name of Joseph Touhill. Now, this circumstance deeply impressed me, because the language was so characteristic of the dead burglar, it having been customary with him to address me as ‘Old boy.’ Mind-reading will have to be rejected as an explanation, because the Doctor subsequently read a name that was on a pellet that I had not opened, and knew nothing about until I subsequently read it. I picked up the pellet from the desk where I had put it with a number of others, and handed it to Mayor Ellert, who, without examining it, deposited it in his vest-pocket. Then came rappings on the table, and the medium said: ‘Behind you stands the spirit of the man whose name is on that paper. He was an eminent person, and he died far away from here. He is waving a flag over your head, and on it is written the name of Victor Hugo.’