UNCANNY GIFT.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIII, 13 May 1922, Page 7

UNCANNY GIFT.

GIRL WITH THE PSYCHIC EYE. ASTOUNDS AND PUZZLES SCIENTIST. Miss Eugenie Dennis, of Kansas, has been showing marvellous psychic powers. A high school girl still in her teens, just a regular girl, she has done things that seem uncanny. Here is one instance fully vouched for.

persons—one a high school girl and the other a prominent club woman active in civic affairs—were seated at opposite sides of a drawing-room table. The latter had come to ask of the other if she could tell what had become of a diamond set ring which the club woman had lost the day before. She did not explain to the school girl how she had lost the ring or where she had been during the afternoon—she merely »,sked for the information.

The schoolgirl was silent a moment. Suddenly her body grew tense, her lips quivered, her eyes seemed to be gazing into space. Others were in the room listening; they, too, became rigid—as if aware of being in the presence of the unreal. The schoolgirl spoke-— eyes still staring as if into ethereal nothingness: ‘‘You made two visits yesterday to the homes of friends to whom you owed social calls. Then you went to your home. In the last house you visited you lost your ring. Go there at once. Lose no time, for the man servant in that house will begin going over the carpets in the southwest bedroom on the second floor in half an hour from now with a vacuum cleaning machine. If you enter the room before the man with the vacuum cleaning machine you will find your ring entangled in the fringe of a rug in the south-east corner of the room. You were in that room just before you left the house yesterday afternoon.” For a moment the club woman could

not speak, and then, her astonishment overcome, she exclaimed: “It is uncanny—l can’t believe my ears! 1 made two visits yesterday—just as she says; I stopped a minute in the southwest bedroom of the second house at which I called—just long enough to use a bit of powder. How could she know ?” It was agreed by all present the girl could not have known. She had not seen the woman before, and no one in the room had known of the club woman’s social activities the previous day. The woman hurried to her car and drove at once to the “second home she had visited.” She excitedly esplr.ned her mission of the day before to her hostess. Together the two went to the “south-west bedroom” and there, two feet from the wall in the “south-west

corner,” just where the fringe <f the rug lay in little tangles, sparkled the stone of the lost ring. While the two women looked awestricken at each other the houseman came to the door and asked if madams were ready for him to use the vacuum-cleaning machine in that room!

That is only one of the many things this mere child has done to mystify and astonish the people of her own town, Atchison, Kansas, and the people of Omaha, where she has been for a few weeks. Everything she does is astonishing, whether uncanny or regular. She is known to be a mystery worker, a most profound and naive delver into the realm of the unknown, and so it is a cause for astonishment to see her as she is—a natural, unassuming, fairly studious schoolgirl, 17 years old and a member of the junior class of the Atchison High School. One quality which has assisted in giving conviction to those of Atchison and Omaha who are convinced that she is something supernatural is her reticience to claim wide, spiritual powers. In her “seances” Eugenie Dennis sits in a rocking chair in the full and usual light of day and talks of things which are unseen to the inhabitants of-- a tangible world much as if she might be talking of a movie.

To know her as a perfectly normal girl, pretty and interested in things conventional, and then to suddenly discover that she has some gift of seeing beyond the sight of others, is bound to be astonishing. Miss Dennis began to startle her immediate friends a year ago. It is told of her, with considerable amusement, that it was a young suitor who first spread the rumor that Eugenie “could talk of spirits.” He told it of himself that he was taking her for a motor ride when he proposed that they park the car in a shaded spot at the edge of town where he might steal a kiss. But before the kiss had materialised: she suddenly became tense —so the young man reported next day to a wondering audience of his chums—and appeared to “act. strangely.” She lifted her arms upward, as if she would embrace the stars, and her lips tremblingly, repeated words she seemed to hear —words her boy companion heard only as they drifted fiom her lips: “A man —hurt—an automobile —

quick—if they do not—hurry he will die —send a message—to the hospital—quick.” There were other words —the uncanniness of them and the situation in which he found himself unnerved the boy. He grasped Eugenie by ‘■her arm and shook her —sunddenly she collapsed. When she revived her first words were, “Did they send to the hosp tal for the doctor?” Then, her full consciousness returned, she begged her companion to drive quickly into town—t<j the beginning of one of the avenues where the street car line came to an end. “Drive fast,’ she cried, “there has been an accident —a man may be dying.” The boy, awed, drove fast, following the girl’s directions. When they reached the avenue Eugenie had described they saw two shattered automobiles at the intersection of the street. One driver had been careless and had turned at too high a speed. The other had crashed into him.

Mr David Abbott, who is a master of legerdemain, and who made it his boast that he could do any “stunt” that any of the so-called spirit mediums could do, was commissioned by the American Society for Psychical Research of New York to investigate the

‘ ‘power’ ’ of the Atchison schoolgirl. So he took her into his home, where she stayed under constant scrutiny for several weeks. Her investigator is a man who is up to all the tricks of the gentry who deal in affairs mysterious. He had in the past exposed many who were promulgating claims to prophetic and psychic powers. Hence he undertook to prove that seventeen-year-old Eugenie Dennis, of Atchison, was under some sort of misapprehension. But the first day he had her under observation and began to talk to her he vaguely sensed that Eugenie was not like the ordinary pres* agented, falsely modest members of the mysterious cult.

The “observations and testings, as Mr Abbott calls his investigation mto the gifts of the Kansas girl, have covered several weeks, and many of the tests have been so spectacular and the demonstrations so awe-inspiringly curious that it was deemed essential to arrange to take Miss Dennis to New York for the further tests which are soon to take place. Abbott, who says he will tel! --a most fascinating story” to the Sotiety for Psychical Research, admits that he is practically convinced Eugenie Dennis has a power which this world knows nothing of; that she has a mind which reaches into some immortal plane of habitation, which reaches out, likewise, into the lower “wave strata and: catches things that have to do with ordinary, hum-drum contemporarj life. On one occasion during one of Abbott’s tests she broke off in a conversation with a lady to describe a murder of a policeman at the very moment taking place in another part of the town. .In Omaha she has located long lost papers: she has recovered lost jewellery; she has told mothers where wandering children might be found. She has repeated a “test conversation, agreed upon years ago between Abobtt and a dying friend, who promised to fulfil the agreement whenever he found a medium of communication. „ Some will believe that it is “spirits that call to the schoolgirl and reveal to her those things hidden to others; the majority will not. Many of those who have witnessed extraordinary demonstrations do not believe that it is aught of the occult or supernatural. They merely admit they have witnessed what they cannot explain, but insist, of course, that there is explanation. But all are agreed that the little schoolgirl is innocent of all pretense. None has discovered grounds for an “expose.” She seems to be above suspicion. _ ip “I do not know how Ido it, &u--genie Dennis says. “It seems to just come to .me. I do not try to know things—to see things far away. I just can’t help myself when the things begin to come.”