Leonora Piper, one of the best psychic mediums ever convinces even the most ardent skeptic

One of the most notable mediums who ever lived was Boston’s Leonora Piper (1857-1950). She used a “control” – in this case, a being from the other side called Dr. Phinuit – who acted as a kind of MC for a tremendous amount of information and messages from those who had crossed over. In one case, a couple called Sutton (strangers to Mrs. Piper) wanted to contact their deceased daughter who had just crossed over. Through Mrs. Piper, the little girl chattered on about her brother and sister and named her favorite dolls. This left the Suttons with absolutely no doubt that they were talking to their daughter.

Britain’s Society for Psychical Research sent their top investigator, a Richard Hodgson, to expose Mrs. Piper as a fraud. He had her followed and used every trick in the book to trap her, but in the end, he had to admit, “I can’t prove anything at all. I can’t prove fraud, I can’t prove cheating, I can’t prove trickery.”When a friend of Hodgson, a George Pellew, died, the friend took over the role of her control, and Hodgson asked his friend literally thousands of questions, every one of which he answered correctly through Mrs. Piper. The initially skeptic Hodgson was so impressed, he reported to the Society, “I cannot profess to have any doubt but that the chief communicators to whom I have referred are veritably the personalities they claim to be, that they have survived the change we call death, and they have directly communicated with us whom we call living, through Mrs. Piper’s entranced organism.”

Even more amazing was the fact that upon Hodgson’s own death, he in turn took over from George Pellew as the control, and relayed much information about the afterlife, all of it on file in the Society’s archives.

There we have it. When the eminent Society’s most thorough, hard-bitten, skeptical bulldog of an investigator throws up his hands and says, “We survive death,” it doesn’t get any more real than that.

"Leonora Piper" is excerpted from Living with Soul" by Tony Stubbs