10. William Thomas Stead And Julia Ames
William Thomas Stead was a pioneering journalist who crusaded against the 1876 Turkish atrocities. He also tackled London's horrible housing problem and shocked his readers by exposing the extent of child prostitution in the city. Stead was also an enthusiastic spiritualist from the age of 20.
From 1897 onward, Stead published a number of messages from a dead US Methodist journalist and reformer named Julia Ames. The collection was called After Death, Or, Letters from Julia: A Personal Narrative. He insisted that communications from Julia did not proceed from his conscious mind.
Any doubts that Stead may have had about psychic phenomena faded away when his eldest son, Willie, died in December 1907 at age 33. Almost every week during the next year, he received what he believed were messages from his dead son. Two years later, he founded Julia's Bureau, an office "to enable those who had lost their dead [ . . . ] to get in touch with them again." Julia was considered the guiding force behind the bureau's work.
In 1912, Stead went down with the Titanic. Survivors reported that he was of "the most beautiful composure," as he adopted "a prayerful attitude . . . of profound meditation."
9. Cora Scott And Adin Augustus Ballou
In the 1850s, no medium was as renowned as Cora L.V. Scott. The press was fascinated with her, describing her hair as "flaxen ringlets falling over her shoulders." A photograph that was widely circulated at the time shows Scott with her flowing pre-Raphaelite locks and youthful gaze.
Cora's father was described as an independent free thinker who was interested in utopian societal reform. He once visited Adin Ballou, a minister who practiced Christian Socialism. Inspired by Ballou's community of Hopedale, Cora's father bought his own land in 1851, hoping to build a similar colony. However, his plans were put on hold when his daughter began to show potential as a medium.
Her first and most notable spirit guide was Adin Ballou's dead son, Adin Augustus Ballou. Cora's first contact with the deceased Ballou occurred when she was 11. She was living at Hopedale when she went into a trance, and Ballou began to speak through her.
The younger Ballou had been the spiritual heir of his father's religious community, and his death was a devastating loss. Through Cora, he could now continue his ministry. The spirit of Ballou also communicated through a "writing medium" named Elizabeth Alice Reed and through yet another woman named Mary Bowers.
The elder Ballou was so convinced by these communications that he wrote a book about spirit phenomena. Cora went on to continue her career as a medium and channeled many other spirits, including Abraham Lincoln and a young Indian maiden named Ouina.
8. W.B. Yeats, Geraldine Cummins & George
The Irish poet W.B. Yeats once visited a perceptive medium named Geraldine Cummins. Cummins was one of spiritualism's most respected mediums at the time. Among other things, she was a "speech-making suffragette," a cause that led to "being stoned through the streets of my native city by the sweated women factory workers whose cause I so ardently espoused."
During World War I, Cummins had a premonition of the death of her brother, Harry. He had been serving with the Fifth Gurkhas in Gallipoli. In her dream, Harry was running ahead of Cummins on an open plain. Then she heard a voice saying, "You will never see Harry again." She awoke trembling with emotion. Three weeks later, Harry was killed in an attack against the Turks on an open plain in broad daylight.
Cummins was in her twenties when she was introduced to W.B. Yeats, who was interested in psychic matters. At the time, Cummins summoned a spirit guide named George. George would borrow her hand and arm to produce automatic writing. During the session Cummins had with Yeats, George wrote about people who lived in an ancient castle. Cummins asked if Yeats wanted her to move ahead with the session. Yeats was fascinated by what George was writing. "That's the plot of my current book," he quietly said.
