Glimpses Of The Next State.Pdf - Spiritualists' National Union

181On June 10, 1911, my guide spoke to me for some thirty or forty minutes. Among otherthings she said: “I came to your cousin here the other day, and spoke to him of his father and hisrelatives in Canada.”Q.: “What name did you give ?”A.: (The spirit here gave one of her earth names.)I wrote to the said cousin, who told me that he had attended a seance with Mrs. Wriedt (in the sameroom) nearly a fortnight before. A spirit came and gave her full name and her sister’s name. Shealluded to her “picture.” He could make nothing of it. (This gentleman was born six years after thedeath of Iola, and had never heard her mentioned in the family.)The names he gave me were all correct, and one of them was the name by which Iola wascalled by his father—one seldom used by the family. There were six names in all.The efforts of bond fide conjurers should never be despised by investigators into spiritism. Ifthey can pick up a fraudulent medium, so much the better for us. Provided they relate truthfullywhat they have seen and how they account for it, they cannot possibly do any injury to genuinepsychics. Unhappily, they cannot all confine their mystification’s to the stage, but carry theirlegitimate deceptions into private life, where they are not legitimate; and they often weaken theirinfluence by committing themselves at the first start to theories of fraud before they have witnessedthe phenomena which are the basis of discussion.When a man comes on a stage and says, “Here, ladies and gentlemen, you see I have nothingon me, and then pulls three or four rabbits out of his coattail pockets, he is performing a perfectlylegitimate action; but if the same man that evening writes a letter to a friend, and says, “I assureyou I know that those mediums you saw are arrant knaves,” and he has not been within fourthousand miles of them, he is simply lying. He cannot know, for he has not been to see; he mayanswer, “So-and-so told me,” but that is no reply to his correspondent, who has witnessed thephenomena under conditions which preclude fraud.The effects of conjurers’ explanations are not all one-sided; they can confirm ourexperiences in a very practical way. I will give an instance which happened to myself. In thesummer of 1909 a report came home that May Bangs had been in the police court at Chicago, andhad denied that pictures were obtained in her house by any occult process. I do not, as a rule,believe anything I read in American newspapers, but this report was in the Progressive Thinker, ajournal devoted to the propagation of spiritism. I knew the editor, and his opinion of the pictureand letter phenomena of the Bangs Sisters— he believed them to be genuine; it was impossible toignore such a report emanating from his office. I confess I was for some months considerablymystified. I entered into a long correspondence with a conjurer who claimed to have discovered thesecret of the production of the precipitated pictures. He must have thought me a very apt pupil, forhe proposed to me one day that I should write a book of what I had seen, with his explanations as to“how the thing was done.” I should think nearly one hundred letters passed between us. He finallyconvinced me that he knew nothing whatever about the subject. Then he reproduced the effect onthe stage—crudely at first, but, after praiseworthy effort, very satisfactorily. The principle Ialready knew. It was found out by a spiritistic friend by means of my own models. The conjurer’s“conditions” were as different to the conditions of the seances of the Bangs Sisters as a locomotiveboiler is different from a teapot. He did his best, but his efforts and explanations settled me in theconviction I have already mentioned.The question of the so-called “confession” of May Bangs was finally clinched by thediscovery that the report in the Progressive Thinker was incorrect; abundant proof came toEngland that the psychic did not deny her gift; and so the matter ended.The point of my story is that it was a conjurer who finally convinced me that my 1909observations with the Bangs Sisters were genuine spirit manifestations. His inability to account,normally, for the phenomena—to my satisfaction—made it possible for me to return to Chicago ina confident frame of mind.I may have to say a word or two about American conjurers before this book is published.This chapter concludes the account of such facts as can be stated publicly, which led to myknowledge that the immortality of man was a reality; that it was possible for us now and here to