SPIRIT WORLD SECRETS.

New Zealand Mail, 29 January 1902, Page 17

SPIRIT WORLD SECRETS.

The New York “Herald” prints exclusively the confession of Mrs Leonora E. Piper, a famous spiritual medium of Boston, whose services had been used by the Society for Psychical Research in. its investigations Of the supernatural, i She declares that her trance seances furnish no evidence whatever of the possibility of communication with the other world, and she frankly attributes the bewildering phenomena to telepathy and hypnotism. These statements possess profound significance, for on Mrs j Piper’s so-called “Spirit messages” the ' great English society based its claims to communication with those beyond the grave. Mrs Piper now announces her withdrawal from the society, and says that in the past “I must truthfully say I do not believe that the spirits of . the dead have spoken through me when • I have been in a trance. My state ! was investigated by scientific men at ! Boston and Cambridge, and by the English Psychical Research Society when I was taken to England to be studied. I am not a Spiritualist, and I consider 1 1 have been only an automaton, j “Many curious incidents were con- | nected with the sittings of the Psychical j Research Society. Iney first heard of me in the simplest fashion. I was then living in Boston as a maid-of-all-work. I told the servant of Professor William James, of Harvard, that I went into queer sleeps, in which I said many strange things. Professor Janies at once expressed the wish for me to connect myself with the Psychical Research So- ! ciety. In that way the work began here. When I sat in the chair and leaned my head back I went into a i trance state. The action was attended | with something of a struggle. On ■ coming out I said disconnected things | and then began to speak broken French phrases. I had studied French for two ■ years. I was one of the first studied by ! the Psychical Research Society. Then a literary man who had died—one called Pelham in the reports of the society—- | was impersonated. Friends of his felt ' assured that he talked to them, using my voice, or by automatic writing, while I was in a trance. I never heard of anything being said by myself during a trance which might not have been latent in my mind, or in the mind of the person in charge of the sitting, or in the mind of the person trying to get communication with some one in another state of existence, or of some companion present with such a person, or in the mind of some absent person alive somewhere else in the world.”