It is time for another installment of the intermittently-appearing "Spookiest Years" series on this blog, in which I discuss reports of the paranormal appearing during particular years, with an emphasis on quoting original source materials. This time I focus on the year 1851. In 1851 the newspaper The Spirit Messenger continued to published reports of dramatic events at seances. Page 174 of the January 4, 1851 edition reports spooky events at seances in Boston, including raps seeming to answer questions. The January 25, 1851 edition on page reports this:
Around page 198 of an 1853 book we have a discussion of someone who seemed to have been mysteriously moved in 1851 to write down a record of someone's death, a death they had never learned of from their senses. The book reproduces the letter below:
" Fitchburg, Mass., Feb. 22, 1852.
Mr. Charles Partridge :
Dear Sir: In reply to your letter of inquiry concerning Mr. Hooper's statement to you, I will say that, on or about the 20th of March last, Mr. Hooper told me that he had, for a number of days, been impelled to write, ' Your father, Thomas Hooper, is dead' and that, on inquiry of the Agency which influenced him to write this, when his father died ? he was further impressed to write, 'March 13th.' He also told me that, ' he thought he was wrongly impressed, because he had but a short time before received a letter from England, where his father lived, and at the time the letter was written, his father was in his usual health.'
A few weeks after Mr. Hooper made these statements to me, he showed me a letter from a sister in England, informing him that his father died ' the 13th of March.' Of the genuineness of the letter from his sister, I will also add, there can be no question. These are the simple facts in relation to this case, as I know them...
" Yours respectfully, Charles Woodhouse."
A very similar account involving a different person (a Mr. Pecard of Lockport, NY) is told on page 200 of an 1851 book by Joel Tiffany, who earned a living as an official state reporter for the State of New York. We are told that Pecard was told in a seance that his daughter had died; and that upon returning from Rochester to Lockport, he learned that this had had happened. After opening the book with much philosophical speculation, the author tells us this:
"Thus during the winter past, I have frequently been present when sounds were produced, in answer to mental, oral, and written questions, entirely disconnected with any apparent physical agency. These sounds have been produced when there were no persons present but myself to hear them, and produced on objects directly under my inspection, so that I could positively know no physical agency was employed in their production. These sounds were frequently so heavy, that is, the concussion was so great, as to cause the table, chair, sofa, or whatever they were produced upon, to vibrate so distinctly as not only to be felt, but also to be seen. While sitting in a room with others, although entirely physically detached from all present, when I could positively know no person or physical agency was connected with the chair upon which I was sitting, sounds, clear, distinct and heavy, have been produced upon my chair, causing it to vibrate, and by placing my hand upon the place where the sounds were being produced, have received the concussion on my hand, and even had communications spelled out upon the back of my hand ; and this in open daylight, and when I was in the full possession of all my physical senses. I have not unfrequently sat by a table under circumstances when I could positively know that no person, either through machinery or otherwise, was in contact with it, when every part of the table was clearly within view, in open daylight, and have heard sounds produced upon the table with so much violence, as to cause ink stands, books and pencils lying upon it, to bound up from the table with much force.
During the same period of time I have witnessed the manifestation of physical power, other than the production of sounds, without any sensible or perceptible physical agency. One class of phenomena very common is the imparting an unnatural weight to material objects. Of this class I have witnessed the holding down of tables with so much force, that they could not be raised from the floor by any application of a power ten times greater than would be required to raise their natural weight ; and I have tested the genuineness of these phenomenal in such a manner as to leave no chance for mistake or doubt."
On a later page the author recalls seeing a stand mysteriously move in a way that seemed to answer his questions, according to some code. We read this:
"I then arose, set my chair back and requested the spirit to answer my questions by moving the stand for an affirmative, and letting it remain at rest for a negative answer. To this it assented by moving the stand ; during the time, no person was standing within reach of it, and there was no machinery or other physical agency whatever connected with it. This I know, and the same can be attested to by all others present. I then commenced asking questions, which were all properly and correctly answered by moving the stand. This continued for the space of twenty or thirty minutes, during which time the stand in reply to every question requiring an affirmative answer was moved from four to six inches."
Later the author reports witnessing dramatic physical manifestations in Pittsburgh, seeing a heavy mahogany table being mysteriously lifted up and shaken violently. He also reports seeing in some other place a levitation and ringing of an untouched heavy bell. On another page he reports seeing this:
"All these preliminaries being settled, the bell commenced ringing, the accordion was played, the violin fingered like a guitar, a small toy whip, which happened to be lying under the table at the time, was brandished about from one end of the table to the other, (some twelve feet), and a communication given by alphabet, and all these going on at the same time — after this, the large bell which had frequently moved up and down the table, came gradually up the foot and leg of Dr. W. (who was a member of the circle), until it came to the side of the knee and there it remained suspended without any physical agency, for some moments, until every member of the circle had an opportunity of examining it in that position."
Later the author gives an account very difficult to account for by any method of trickery:
"Again, that the agencies can read our thoughts, may be inferred from the fact, that they can answer mental questions with the same facility they can oral or written ones. I have often mentally questioned these agencies in such a manner as to require affirmative and negative answers promiscuously, through a long series of questions ; and which upon the sense of chance guessing, would render it absolutely impossible for any person to answer correctly. And yet these questions have each received their appropriate answer, rendering it as certain as certain can be, that whatever influence made the sounds in answer to my questions, that influence was dictated by an intelligence which was familiar with my thoughts. Again, I have witnessed answer after answer given by alphabet, when the questions were propounded mentally, from written ones, and that too, under circumstances which precluded all possibility of the medium's knowing any thing of the nature of the questions propounded, and in such cases, the answers given were most astonishingly appropriate and correct."
On pages 236 to 239 the author gives a ringing denunciation of slavery.
It was not until 1853 that Judge John Edmonds published his two-volume work describing accounts of witnessing paranormal phenomena. But he makes it clear that he took very careful records, and his recollections are not based only on memories, but dated notes taken earlier. In the book he says this about an 1851 event:
"On the 23d of April, 1851, I was one of a party of nine who sat around a center-table, on which a lamp with glass pendants, was burning, and another lamp was burning on the mantlepiece. And there, in plain sight of us all, that table was lifted at least a foot from the floor, and shaken backward and forward as easy as I could shake a goblet in my hands. Some of the party tried to stop it by the exercise of their strength, but in vain, so we all drew back from the table, and by the light of those two burning lamps, we saw that heavy mahogany table susi)ended in the air."
1851 saw the publication of the book Letters to a Candid Inquirer, on Animal Magnetism, which you can read online here. The author was William Gregory (1803-1858), a professor of chemistry at the University of Edinburgh (founded in 1582, and the sixth oldest English university). Some of the many very spooky accounts in the book are discussed in my post here.
We get a good chronicle of the mysterious events occurring in New York State and New England between 1848 to 1851 in the first half of the 1852 book by John C. Bywater entitled The Mystery Solved, or a Bible Expose of the Spirit Rappings, Showing That They Are Not Caused by the Spirits of the Dead, But by Evil Demons or Devils. The second half of the book (attempting a "demons did it" explanation) is pretty worthless, but the first half of the book provides some careful documentation of the mysterious events occurring between 1848 and 1852, helping to show the lack of any credible natural explanation for such events.
The events described above (involving such as table levitations and tables standing on two legs at a 45 degree angle) were dramatic, but far more dramatic things were reported in the following years, with things seeming to get more and more spectacular as the years passed, as I will discuss in later installments of this intermittently-appearing "Spookiest Years" series. For two earlier installments of this series, see my posts here and here.
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