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Author: Michael Prescott
Michael Tymn is probably today's foremost authority on European and North American mediumship of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – a subject matter that he covers in a blog and in several books, including his most recent: Resurrecting Leonora Piper.
As the title indicates, the book's purpose is to rekindle interest in Mrs. Leonora Piper, the turn-of-the-century Boston medium who became the principal subject of investigation by psychical researchers in America for over 20 years. Unassuming, sensible, and decidedly "normal" in all outward respects, Mrs. Piper was happily married and had two daughters. She took a small annual stipend from the researchers for the use of her time, but could have earned far more had she been interested in exploiting her talents for commercial gain. She sought no publicity and downplayed her abilities on the rare occasions when she consented to any media coverage. In a newspaper story she once speculated that the communications might be coming to her via mental telepathy from the living, a statement maliciously characterized as a "confession" by debunkers (most of whom, naturally, don't believe in telepathy either, so it's hard to see how the so-called "confession" does them any good).
Resurrecting Leonora Piper is an excellent summary of Piper's best cases, largely passing over the weaker sessions and the misfires. As Tymn puts it, he is acting like Piper's attorney, laying out the evidence in the light most favorable to his client. "If it is seen as an apologia for Mrs. Piper," he writes at the end, "so be it." In his view, the book is a necessary corrective to debunking accounts that overemphasize problematic sessions while downplaying or ignoring the more evidential ones.
Tymn's book makes it abundantly clear why early psychical researchers devoted so much time and effort to Piper, and why for many of them she (along with Gladys Osborne Leonard in England) was the "white crow" whose abilities established the reality of supernormal perception, whatever its ultimate source (spirits or ESP).........continues
Copyright©Michael Prescott
Reproduced courtesy of Michael Prescott
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