Michael Tymn
maintains a great blog on the subject of survival of death (http://whitecrowbooks.com/michaeltymn),
and in a post titled 11-Year-Old Medium Shocks Unitarian Minister, he tells the
story of Unitarian minister, Dr. Horace Westwood. Born in Yorkshire, England in
1884, Westwood emigrated to Canada in 1904. In 1949, he wrote the book, There Is
a Psychic World, telling the story of how he used a Ouija board and had
excellent mediumship results with his wife’s cousin, Anna, who lived with them.
Westwood used
all kinds of tricks to test Anna and her source – blindfolding, scrambling the
letters, etc., but they performed flawlessly. Among the messages was one from Charlotte,
a child whose parents Westwood knew. She had been in the adjoining ward of the
hospital Dr Westwood was in for surgery in 1913, and crossed over aged six,
before he left the hospital.
Charlotte gave
her name and they discussed their shared hospital experiences, as well as the
circumstances of her death. She revealed an intimate knowledge of her parents’
family life, both while she was on Earth, and then on the Soul Plane. She
wanted Westwood to contact her mother, to let her know Charlotte was still
alive, and ‘always near and so happy over baby brother.’ This proved that
source of communication was not Anna’s
subconscious mind because she didn’t even know about the brother.
Mrs. Summers
called Westwood and requested that Anna be brought to their home. Through Anna,
Charlotte answered all her mother’s questions, giving detailed information
entirely beyond anything Anna could possibly have known. Bottom line: The
parents were convinced that they had talked with their crossed-over daughter
who was still very much alive.
Switching to
automatic writing, Anna brought in messages from two controls: ‘Ruth’ and ‘Ralph,’
who said they had worked in Washington, D.C as typists for the U.S. Government,
and died together about two years earlier in their late twenties. They turned Anna
into an expert typist while they channeled through her; when not channeling, Anna
was a ‘hunt and peck’ typist.
Again, Westwood
tested Anna by blindfolding her, and again, she typed flawlessly. One evening,
Westwood asked Ruth to play the piano through Anna, who had little musical talent.
Ruth told him she would bring a gifted pianist friend named Kate. The following
evening, the blindfolded Anna sat at the piano, and Westwood later said, “As
long as I shall live, I shall never forget that night. [Anna/Kate] began with a
slow melody, the like of which I had never heard before, for it was solemn in
its majesty and almost unearthly in its beauty. As I watched the child play,
the bodily action and the finger technique were entirely different from Anna’s
own.”
At another
sitting, a number of family friends had gathered, and Ruth asked each person to
write a question on a piece of paper, leave it unsigned, fold the paper and put
it into a container. Anna took out the pieces of paper one by one, and in each
case, Ruth identified the writer and answered the questions. In two or three
cases, the answer was, “I don’t know.” For one of the guests, Anna/Ruth mentioned
his ‘well-stocked cellar,’ a no-no during prohibition. Of course, Anna herself
could not possibly have known of the guest’s alcohol stash.
One night, Ruth
and Ralph brought in a nameless spirit who told the group to call him ‘X.’
Westwood was blown away when X began discussing philosophical matters, some of
which were beyond Westwood’s grasp, and light-years beyond Anna’s. “The general
point of view was that the underlying, in fact the all-permeating reality was
consciousness, and that the universe by and large was designed for ‘being’ and
‘beings in an infinite series of gradations,’” Westwood said, admitting that
his intelligence was no match for X.
Westwood then did
his own ‘book test.’ He blindfolded Anna and walked backward into the adjoining
library. With his back to the bookcase, he selected a book at random. Without
looking at the book, he opened it at random and placed it face-down on a table.
He asked X to write the first 10 -12 words on the right page. X complied
flawlessly – the text was perfect.
On Christmas
Day, 1918, a young girl named Virginia, a member of Westwood’s congregation, crossed
over due to a tobogganing accident. Two days later, Ruth communicated that
Virginia was there, even though still dazed.
“The first
symptom was that of bewilderment bordering on fear,” Westwood wrote. “In fact,
the first words that came through were, ‘Where am I? I want my mother.’ I told
her there was no need to be afraid, and that she was in the study of the
church. Virginia then settled down and asked how her mother and baby brother
were. Neither I nor Anna knew that she had a baby brother.” Westwood asked
other questions of Virginia and later confirmed the responses as fact with
Virginia’s aunt.
While Westwood
claimed to have no interest in survival, he wrote, “I was forced to believe in
it after my experiences with Anna, who lost her powers after about three years,
upon the departure of Ruth and Ralph.”
Cases such as this
one quoted by Michael Tymn provide much evidential material that the pseudo-skeptics
would have a hard time dismissing.
I heartily
recommend visiting Michael’s blog and reading the posts and archives, for he
includes case-studies I hadn’t encountered anywhere else.
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