Mediums Rare by Richard Matheson Read Free Book Online Page A

happening?”
    Everyone in the circle, except for the elderly man, stared at her in silence.
    He was reading the piece of paper she had handed to him.
    After a while, he looked up, an expression of awe on his face.
    Rising, he moved to her and took both her hands in his.
    “Young woman, I have been a Spiritualist for over thirty years,” he told her, “but the message you have just given me is the most remarkable I have ever received. It gives me fresh courage to go on, for I know that my boy lives.”
    The man was Judge Frost of Cambridge, a noted jurist who had, for years, been seeking comfort for the loss of his only son.
    The message Mrs. Piper had dashed off, unaware that she was doing so, was so filled with details only the Judge knew about that he was convinced of its authenticity.
    In this manner, Mrs. Piper’s psychic power was discovered.

    When Gladys Osborne was twenty-four, she married Frederick Leonard, an actor.
    One winter, during a poor engagement with a theatrical company that was visiting suburban theatres, she shared a dressing room with two sisters interested in Spiritualism.
    The three of them had sat around a small table twenty-six times now, an hour every day between the matinee and evening performance.
    Nothing whatsoever had happened.
    One of the sisters, Nellie, became disheartened during their twenty-seventh sitting and decided to give it up. “Nothing’s going to happen,” she said. “There’s nothing to it. Tables don’t move unless somebody moves them.”
    Leaving the table, she sat at the other end of the room with a book and started to read.
    Florence and Gladys remained at the table.
    Two minutes later, it began to tilt up and down.
    “Oh, my,” said Nellie, returning quickly. She did not attempt to seat herself at the table, believing that her negative influence had prevented it from moving.
    Instead, she picked up a pad and pencil and waited while Florence addressed whatever force she assumed was moving the table, asking it to tilt once for the letter A, two of the letter B and so on.
    “My name is Feda.” Nellie spoke aloud the first message after it had come through. “I am an ancestress of Gladys. I have been watching over her since she was born, waiting for her to develop her psychic power so I can put her into a trance and give messages through her.”
    Gladys and the two sisters stared at each other in wordless amazement.
    It was the beginning of Mrs. Leonard’s six decades of mediumship.

    A typical sitting (one of hundreds) by Mrs. Piper went as follows: Sitting on an armchair in front of a table on which three pillows are placed, she carries on a casual conversation with the sitters.
    More or less consciously, she slows her breathing and begins to look sleepy, her eyes becoming fixed and staring.
    Soon the eyes become rigid, the breathing slows even more and, within five or six minutes, her head falls forward on a pillow, her pulse rate and breathing dropped well below normal.
    Soon she sits up and her spirit control—at one point a so-called French physician named Dr. Phiniut—takes over the sitting.

    “I get the name Sarah,” Dr. Phiniut says.
    The sitter does not recall the name.
    “Is there something wrong with your mother’s foot?” asks Phiniut.
    The sitter recalls some dropsical trouble her mother has with her foot.
    Later, she remembers an aunt named Sarah.
    Dr. Phiniut tells another sitter that “Agnes” will be ill that year. The month is March.
    In the fall, Agnes becomes ill for the first time since childhood, spending a week in bed.
    Phiniut also predicts the death of the sitter’s uncle who is, at that time, in good health as far as the sitter knows.
    Two weeks later, the uncle dies.
    A Mrs. Pitman is told by Dr. Phiniut that she will have stomach trouble in Paris and it will be taken care of by a “sandy-complexioned” gentleman.
    A short time later, Mrs. Pitman, traveling in Paris, is taken ill with stomach trouble and attended by a