“We are very glad to hear from you, Governor. How about the old pear tree?”
To this a reply was promptly written, but neither of us had the slightest idea what it might be. The young lady took up the paper and commenced to read, but was shocked and greatly confused to find, clearly written, in a hand quite foreign to us both, “It’s a —— —— shame!” the blanks here being filled by the most emphatic expletives, and without the slightest abbreviation.
Another excellent Planchette-writer was Miss V., a friend of the family, who was spending a few days at my house in March, 1889. She was a young German lady of unusual intelligence, vivacity, and good sound sense. She knew of spiritualism only by passing remarks which she might have heard, and had never either seen or heard of Planchette. She was herself a somnambulist, or, rather, a somniloquist, for she never walked in her sleep, but talked with the greatest ease, carrying on long conversations without the slightest memory afterwards of what had been said. She was also an excellent hypnotic subject, and the suggested effects of medicines were much more prompt and certain than the effect of the medicines themselves, when used in the ordinary way.
For experiment one evening I proposed that we should try Planchette. As soon as our fingers were placed upon the instrument, it moved off across the table with the greatest promptness, and at once it replied to questions with unusual appropriateness and intelligence. The astonishment of Miss V. was altogether too profound and too apparent to admit of any suspicion of collusion on her part, and she had seen that the board would not move for me alone, yet she could not be persuaded that when we wrote together there was not some trick, and that I did not move the board voluntarily to produce the writing.
At length a message came concerning one of her own relatives, of whom she was sure that I could have no knowledge whatever, and she was convinced that at all events that message could not have originated with me. Accordingly she became a most valuable and interested partner in the experiments, and the chief medium through whom Planchette gave its communications.
Our sittings continued four or five consecutive evenings, and hundreds of communications and answers to questions were given by different intelligences or personalities, with entirely different modes of expression and different kinds of writing; some were religious, some philosophical, some were anxious to give advice, and some were profane; this last-mentioned phase appearing especially if we were persistent in inquiring too closely into the identity and former condition of the communicating personality.
On one occasion a message was written which was so strange in its appearance that none of us could at first make it out. At length we discovered some familiar negro phrase, and applying this key, we found we had a message of regular plantation negro talk, bearing a very strong resemblance to Uncle Remus’s talk to the little boy, which some of us had just been reading. On asking who the “intelligence” was, it wrote, “Oh, I’se a good ole coon.”
Neither Miss V. nor myself had ever heard such a dialect spoken, nor knew that any sort of person of the negro race was ever called a “coon.”
On another occasion, Miss V. was anxious to know and asked Planchette if a relative of hers, whom she named, was staying in town that night. The answer came, “Yes.” “Where is he stopping?” Answer: “At the H. House.” “What is he doing now?” Answer: “He has just finished his dinner, settled his bill at the cashier’s desk, and is now walking up Broadway with his cousin.” She afterward learned that this information was correct in every particular.
On the last evening of our experiments the force displayed in the writing was something surprising. Miss V. always experienced a certain amount of pain in her arms while writing, as if she were holding the electrodes of a battery through which a mild current was passing. On this occasion the pain was almost unbearable, so that she frequently cried out, and was obliged to remove her hands from the board for relief.