He stated that there is a plane called “Paradise” where “normally respectable” persons go after death and this “plane” is only slightly removed from this earthly sphere. Bad people when they die are transported to a plane considerably lower than that tenanted by respectable ones and they continue to sink lower and lower unless they repent. After a considerable probationary period they are able to climb into “Paradise.” The average length of time they stay in “Paradise” is about forty years after which they float to higher and still higher planes. All mediums have guardian angels to whom they are especially subject, but they can communicate with other Spirits, the “guardian angel” acting as a sort of master-of-ceremonies upon such occasions.
Sir Arthur proclaimed that he once saw his dead mother’s face in the ectoplasm of a medium. This was a few months after her death and he added, “There was not the slightest question about it. That was while I was in Australia. The face seemed as solid as in life. My mother wrote me a letter through the medium signing a pet name,[121] which could not have been known to the medium. There is no question about having been in communication with my son either.”
An account in the New York American, April 5, 1923, says that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle told the reporters that he had recently hurt the ligaments in his right leg from the shin to the thigh, and that his son Kingsley who had died in the War had massaged the limb with beneficial results: “I was sitting with Evan Powell, a very unusual and powerful medium,” he said, “when my son Kingsley appeared, saying ‘it will be alright, Daddy; I will get you fixed up alright,’ and began massaging my leg.”
In an article in the London Magazine, August, 1920, Mr. C. W. Leadbeater, a prominent member of the Theosophical Society and an authority on occult theories, speaking of the apport of Spirits says: “living astrally as they do, the Fourth Dimension is a commonplace fact of their nature, and this makes it quite simple for them to do many little tricks which to us appear wonderful, such as the removal of articles from a locked box or an apport of flowers into a closed room.”
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in his book “Wanderings of a Spiritualist,” devotes seven pages to Charles Bailey, who was known as an “apport medium.” Sir Arthur defends Bailey, notwithstanding that he has been exposed many times.[122] Among the things Bailey claims to have apported are birds, oriental plants, small animals, and a young shark eighteen inches long which he pretended the Spirit guides had brought from India and passed through the walls into the seance room.
Mrs. Johnson of Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, told me personally that the Spirit of her deceased son was very mischievous at times and caused her a great deal of embarrassment. One of his favorite jokes when she was on a journey was to open her travelling bag and allow all her belongings to be strewn about. She also told me that the boy’s Spirit would light the fire for her to get breakfast.
A widow in Brooklyn, N. Y., became a mother and claimed that the Spirit of her husband was the father of the child.
The celebrated Professor Hare, a professor of chemistry in the University of Pennsylvania, graduate of Yale and Harvard, and associated with the Smithsonian Institute of Washington, tells that when travelling with a boy and while in his room, after they had locked up the iron Balled Spiritscope, shaving case, etc., in his carpet bag, in some inscrutable manner all the contents were taken from the bag and fell about him in a shower.
Anna Stuart, a medium of Terre Haute, could produce Spirits that would weigh from practically nothing to more than a hundred pounds, and Spiritualists are expected to believe that one human being can go into a trance and bring forth three or four beings with his own Spirit form. W. T. Stead, one of the most brilliant Spiritualists, now dead, claimed to have seen the Spirit of an Egyptian who left the “earthly life” in the time of Semir-Amide, three thousand years ago. “For several minutes the Spirit was distinctly visible to us munching an apple, but I felt so exhausted by the loss of magnetism and nervous as well that I begged him to leave us. I will never forget his soulful expression.”
Florence Marryat, the daughter of Capt. Marryat, the famous writer of sea stories, has written a number of books on Spiritualism. She wrote one of the best introductions in favor of Spiritualism that I ever read, nevertheless some of the things she claims to have witnessed and lived through are of such a nature that I will only give a brief mention of them without comment, letting the reader form his own opinion. They are taken from her book “There is no Death.”