The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

by William James Stillman

The most remarkable of the subjects of this character with whom I became acquainted, which was during the later years of this study, was Mrs. H.K. Brown, the wife of our ablest sculptor of that day. Mrs. Brown was, apart from the peculiar powers she possessed, one of the most remarkable women I have ever known, both morally and intellectually, and the peculiar mental powers she manifested were well known to all the large and thoughtful circle of friends which gathered round her. No physical "manifestation" took place in her presence, and we never "sat" as a "circle," but her telepathic and thought-reading powers in ordinary social intercourse were most surprising. She answered readily any questions proposed in the minds of her interlocutors, often even before they were completely formed, and she possessed the power attributed to Zschokke, of reading, or seeing, past events in the lives of those who were placed en rapport with her. Bryant, the poet, assured me that she had recounted to him events in his past life not known to any living person except himself, and I had, myself, the evidence that in her presence there was nothing in my past life beyond her perception. On simple contact with a letter from an unknown person she gave me the most remarkable analysis of the character of the writer, and though this evidence is always open to criticism, the disclosures she made were sometimes surprising. I gave her one day a letter of Ruskin without disclosing the authorship, and in the course of a long analysis she said that the writer was not married, to which I replied that in this she was mistaken, and she rejoined, "Then he ought not to be." At that time Mr. and Mrs. Ruskin were, so far as I knew, living together, and no rumor of their incompatibility had come about.

Mrs. Brown explained the possession of her occult powers by a voice in the manner of Socrates's demon, which, she said, was always present with her, and which she recognized as entirely foreign to her. She repeated what she heard, word for word as the words came, hesitating and sometimes leaving a sentence incomplete, not hearing the sequence. When she asked who was speaking to her, she received only the reply, "We are spirit," and no indication of personality was ever offered. On one occasion, when Mr. and Mrs. Brown were on a fishing trip into the wild parts of New York State, and, returning, were on their way to the railway station, the wheel of their wagon broke and they had to go to a blacksmith on the road to have it repaired. She said to her husband that they would lose the train, to which the voice replied that they would be in time, for the train was late and they would arrive with a minute to spare. And in fact as they drew up at the station the train came in sight and they had a minute to spare. There were many such instances in which Mrs. Brown showed to the circle of her acquaintances, which was large and included many of the most intellectual minds of the artistic and literary world whose centre was New York, the possession of powers "not dreamed of in our philosophy," but, as she carefully avoided notoriety, they never came under public notice. Her husband implicitly and always followed the directions given her through her demon.

In one of the social gatherings which grew out of the study of spiritism was a lady who, like myself, was a convinced believer in the reality of the phenomena, but skeptical as to the value and personal origin of the communications made in the "circles." Her daughter, a child of seven, was in fact a hypnotic clairvoyant of singular lucidity, and my brother, Dr. Jacob Stillman, obtained from the mother permission to have a private séance, only the mother and child, the doctor, and myself being present. I hypnotized the girl Fanny, and when she opened her eyes in the hypnotic state the doctor made the usual tests for coma, exposing the eyes to the sudden glare of a brilliant light, sticking pins into her flesh, and so forth, and pronounced the coma absolute when, as he stuck a pin in her arm, she spoke, saying, "I wouldn't do that, it might hurt Fanny!" I asked if she felt it, and she replied, "She does not feel it now, but she might when she wakes." "But who are you?" I asked. She replied, "Oh, don't you know? I am Dora." The mother informed us that a young playmate of Fanny's, whose name was Dora Greenleaf, had died some months previously, and that the impersonation through Fanny was always in that name.

The physical test being declared conclusive by the doctor, I asked "Dora" to tell me if there was any spirit friend of ours present, to which she replied that there was a lady there who gave her name as "Kate," and whom she described in terms sufficiently correct to indicate a deceased cousin whose name was Catherine, familiarly called Kate in the family, and this was followed by the names and description of other relatives, all correct as far as names and such identification could go; but to this kind of demonstration I could never attach any importance as to personality, which is indeed a point as to which I have found that reliance can rarely be placed on affirmation, and as to which absolute proof can scarcely be given. As in the case of Mrs. Brown, she replied with lucidity and promptness to every interrogation, and I then began a series of mental questions, being sure at least that the child could not draw from the question matter for an indicated reply. She replied promptly to my questions, and from time to time I explained to my brother what had been asked, that he might follow the conversation. After several relatives had been named, I asked if our brother Alfred was there, to which she instantly replied, "There is a gentleman sitting on the corner of the table by you who says his name is Alfred." The opportunity then occurred to me of asking a "test question," which was, "If Alfred is here, will he tell me when he last saw Harvey?" The relevance of this question will appear from the fact that they were together on the steamer whose boiler burst on the Mississippi, killing my brother and causing injury to the cousin such that he committed suicide a month later. The reply was, "He says he does not remember." At this I remarked guardedly to the doctor, "I asked Alfred when he last saw Harvey, and he replies that he doesn't remember, but he must have seen him on board the boat." To this she instantly replied, with an explosive laugh, "He says that if he did it was all blown out of him!" I will only comment on this reply, that it was quite in accordance with the character of my brother to joke on the most serious subjects—he was an inveterate joker.

At this juncture, and while we discussed the strange reply, Fanny exclaimed, "There is a young gentleman coming through the window; he says his name is Harry—no," she added, holding her ear forward in the direction she indicated as if to hear better, "not Harry, Harvey." I then asked, "If Harvey is here, will he tell me if he was with me in Paris, last winter?" She replied, "Yes, he says he was with you in Paris, and that he saw you in the house where you lived with Mrs. Fox—no, not Fox, Coxe—Mrs. Coxe—and he asks if you remember magnetizing Mrs. Coxe at the restaurant?" Mrs. Coxe, as I have said previously, was the lady from Alabama whose acquaintance, as well as that of her husband and their young daughter, I had made when traveling with them through Belgium, on my way to Hungary, and whom Mr. Coxe, when he returned on business to America, left under my protection for the winter. Mrs. Coxe was subject to violent and sudden headaches, which came without warning, and for which during our trip on the Meuse I had once hypnotized her successfully. This led to my being called on subsequently so often that she became an easy subject, and the headaches became less and less frequent and violent. I have before said that it was our custom on Sunday to dine together at some one of the restaurants, and on one of these occasions the headache came on as we sat at the table and I hypnotized her across the table, by simple exertion of my will without passes, and it passed off. The incident was not in my mind, and had, not to cause gossip, never been mentioned by me to any one; my mind was acting at the moment in quite a different direction, and if my thought gave any clue to the answers of Fanny, it would have been in another direction that she would have looked. What was singular and accounted for by no evident circumstance was the manner of the child in listening for the names which she had clearly heard incorrectly—Harry for Harvey, and Fox for Coxe, and after holding her ear forward as would one who heard imperfectly something said to him. No forethought or attempt at deception on the part of a child of seven under the eye of her mother, who was a woman of singular sincerity of character, can be admitted to account for these details in the dialogue, conducted on my part, be it remembered, entirely by mental inquiries.

The evident fatigue of the child put an end to the séance. Neither the mother nor Fanny knew at that time anything of my relatives, our acquaintance being then of recent date, but our intimacy with the family in after years enables me to say that any attempt at deception is out of the question. Fanny died not long after of consumption, as did the mother and two other children, one of whom, an elder sister, had been influenced in the same manner as Miss A., who will be mentioned later, but had never consented to take part in the manifestations, which she regarded with great repugnance. While sitting with us en petit comité, she used sometimes to be seized with a convulsive and involuntary effort of her hand to write, but she always refused to submit to the influence. Fanny in her normal state showed no indications of mediumistic powers, nor did the mother.

During the investigation, we heard of a remarkable case in the circle of our own acquaintance which had been kept from public knowledge as far as possible by the aversion to publicity of the father of the subject, my brother's chief foreman. She was a girl of fourteen, of a timid and nervous organization, who had suffered great annoyance by the persistence of the rappings about her wherever she might be; at first in her bedroom, but finally to her great dismay in the class-rooms of the primary public school of New York, in which she held the position of assistant teacher and where she conducted the recitations. The rappings caused such fright amongst the school children that she was menaced with dismissal if they did not cease. She implored the agency which was responsible for the sounds to leave her alone at school and do what seemed best to it at home, and the rappings did actually cease at school. As her father was a man well-to-do in circumstances and annoyed by the occurrence, he silenced the gossip about the matter as well as he could, and gave an inflexible denial to the request for a séance which came from friends who by chance heard of it. My brother Paul, who was a fellow-foreman in the iron works, got permission, however, for a séance at which he and I only were to be present with the girl. The phenomena were so strange that I got permission for a repetition at which only my brother Jacob and myself were present, and we preserved the notes of what passed.

Miss A., as I shall call her, told us in detail the development of the case. After having been for some time troubled by the rappings she began to feel involuntary motions in her right hand which increased to constantly recurring violent exercise of the muscles, when it occurred to her from the character of the motions that the hand wanted a pencil to write and she laid paper and a pencil on the table. Her hand then took possession of the pencil and began to scrawl aimlessly over the paper until, after the interval of many days, the agency seemed to have sufficient control over the muscles to form legible letters. This was a source of amusement to her, and, at the time we made our entry into the investigation, the hand wrote legibly and neatly in reply to mental, i.e. unspoken, questions, she having no control of the muscles so long as the "influence," which was the name she applied to whatever it might be, chose to use it. She knew what was written only when the writing was finished and she read it, as we did; and the writing was, as we found by experiment, quite as regular and well formed when her eyes were bandaged as when she was looking at her work. As a further test of the involuntary character of this we not only tried her with her eyes bandaged, but by my brother talking with her from one side of the table, while she was writing in reply to my mental questions on the other; she talked with him on one subject at the same moment in which she wrote to me on another.

In what was given under these circumstances she wrote for us the replies in conversations with what purported to be the spirits of three deceased relatives, the wife of my brother, my brother Alfred, and cousin Harvey, who had for several years been my most intimate and beloved friend; and the handwriting of the three series of communication was a better imitation of their writing than I, knowing it, could have produced. That of my sister-in-law I was not so familiar with, though my brother recognized it as that of his wife, but that of our brother was a perfect reproduction down to the smallest accidents, and that which was given as the responses of my cousin equally so, and executed with a rapidity of which I was incapable—a large scrawling hand, that of our brother being of a character entirely opposed, slowly and laboriously formed, with occasional omissions of the last line of a final n, quite common in his writing. The girl had never known either of these relatives. One of the questions I asked when conversing with Harvey was, "Will you tell me how you died?" to which the only reply was a fixed stare on the part of Miss A., though every other question was answered, by pantomime, affirmative or negative signs, or writing, and always in writing when it was insisted on. Miss A.'s pantomimic powers in this state exceeded anything I have ever seen in professional pantomime, and she employed them largely.

At the conclusion of the questions and replies with Harvey, I asked if he had seen old Turner, the landscape painter, since his death, which had taken place not very long before. The reply was "Yes," and I then asked what he was doing, the reply being a pantomime of painting. I then asked if Harvey could bring Turner there, to which the reply was, "I do not know; I will go and see," upon which Miss A. said, "This influence is going away—it is gone;" and after a short pause added, "There is another influence coming, in that direction," pointing over her left shoulder. "I don't like it," and she shuddered slightly, but presently sat up in her chair with a most extraordinary personation of the old painter in manner, in the look out from under the brow and the pose of the head. It was as if the ghost of Turner, as I had seen him at Griffiths's, sat in the chair, and it made my flesh creep to the very tips of my fingers, as if a spirit sat before me. Miss A. exclaimed, "This influence has taken complete possession of me, as none of the others did. I am obliged to do what it wants me to." I asked if Turner would write his name for me, to which she replied by a sharp, decided negative sign. I then asked if he would give me some advice about my painting, remembering Turner's kindly invitation and manner when I saw him. This proposition was met by the same decided negative, accompanied by the fixed and sardonic stare which the girl had put on at the coming of the new influence. This disconcerted me, and I then explained to my brother what had been going on, as, the questions being mental, he had no clue to the pantomime. I said that as an influence which purported to be Turner was present, and refused to answer any questions, I supposed there was nothing more to be done.