D'Esperance, Elizabeth (1855-1919)

Pseudonym of Elizabeth Hope Reed, a nonprofessional medium, the story of whose life and work was recounted by William Oxley in Angelic Revelations (1885) and by Reed in her autobiography Shadow Land (1897). The latter work is particularly important for the account of her own experiences. In his preface, Russian psychical researcher Alexander Aksakof describes the book as the frank but sorrowful story of the author's search for the truth at the mercy of unknown but potent powers.

Born Elizabeth Hope, her earliest recollections included seeing (in the ancient house where the family lived) "strangers" continually passing to and fro, some of whom nodded and smiled as she held up her doll for their inspection. These shadow people were her earliest friends. She did not associate them with ghosts, of which she was told frightful tales by the maid. For her there was nothing supernatural about them, although they shrank from her touch and she could not feel anything if her hand came into contact with them. They for months at a time vanished and on the whole they made her life miserable. Her mother discouraged her telling "stories" of unseen visitors, and the family doctor terrorized her by warning that those who see things that do not exist are usually mad and become dangerous.

A long cruise in 1867 on a boat that her father captained was the brightest recollection of her teens. The sleepwalking that had troubled her earlier was now cured and the shadow people stayed away, but the happiness that was hers for many weeks was finally marred by the terrifying vision of a shadow ship that passed right through their own.

Another unusual experience befell her later at the end of the school term. She had to write an essay on "nature." She could not manage a single thought. The last night came and even then she went to bed in despair, praying in tears and crying until she fell asleep, leaving sheets of paper and some pencils littered across her desk. In the morning she found the sheets covered with her own handwriting, containing an astonishing essay on the subject. The teacher was greatly surprised by the quality of the essay, and when she heard the story she spoke to the rector about it. On examination day, the rector himself read the essay and explained it as a direct answer to prayer.

At age 19, she married and settled at Newcastle-on-Tyne, England. After her marriage the shadow people came back into her life. By chance she heard of Spiritualism and table rap-ping, which she then considered tomfoolery. Challenged by a friend, she sat in a circle of six. The table soon began to vibrate, heave, and answer questions. It even disclosed the unknown whereabouts of her father, which was found afterward to be correct.

More extraordinary phenomena followed. A pair of studs disappeared from before their eyes and from information rapped out by the table they were found in the next room beneath the undisturbed, compacted soil in a flower pot. The wanderings of these studs amazed the circle. Once they were found in a locked Japanese box on a high shelf; another time they dropped from the ceiling into the cup of a guest at coffee time.

An experiment in clairvoyance was crowned with remarkable success. Reed's eyes were covered by a Mr. F. in the dark and she described an incident in his life that occurred 12 years earlier. She recognized him in the vision.

Her interest was now thoroughly aroused. She spoke of the shadow people to friends, and though the idea that she was a medium was at first repugnant to her, she agreed to play the part. It was suggested that she should attempt automatic writing to establish a more efficient means of communication. It soon came about with a tingling, pricking, and aching sensation in her arm, and thereafter the circle reported contact with spirit visitors: "Walter Tracey," a bright, jovial American, "Humnur Stafford," the self-constituted philosopher guide, and "Ninia," a child of seven. The control of each could be distinguished by the sensation in Reed's arm and hand.

The next phase of her development came when she saw a luminous cloud concentrated in the darkness of the room slow-ly evolve into the form of a child. No one else could see the strange apparition that she sketched, but the new development was hailed with delight. People soon began to talk about it in Newcastle and overwhelmed d'Esperance (the name she began to use in her new public life) with requests for the portraits of their dead friends. To better her art she studied for a few months, but as her sketching improved her power of seeing the luminous figures diminished and violent headaches followed the attempts at drawing.

Then T. P. Barkas, an intellectual of Newcastle, joined the circle. One evening he introduced a series of popular lectures on science, illustrated with practical experiments which he intended to deliver. The medium's hand passed remarks through automatic writing that claimed the theories advocated by Barkas were wrong.

This was the beginning of a scientific period of mediumship that lasted for several months. Hammer Stafford described in detail an instrument that proved later to be the telephone, and another by which messages could be forwarded to great distances in the original handwriting. Barkas delivered his lectures and closed them with one titled "Recent Experiments in Psychology: Extraordinary Replies to Questions on Scientific Subjects by a Young Lady of Very Limited Education."

After a year, the medium's failing health put an end to the scientific séances. She went to the south of France to recuperate. On her recovery she became filled with the missionary spirit, but in trying to make converts for the new truth of Spiritualism that she had glimpsed, she discovered—to her dismay— that the psychic powers could not be consciously summoned. Her ability to write on scientific subjects appeared to fail, and her clairvoyant faculty became feeble when conscious exhibition was needed.

Yet she achieved one result—the reconciliation between a Professor Friese of Bremen and Johann Zöllner. The alienation had taken place when Zöllner accepted Spiritualism. It was Zöllner who wrote to Friese about her. As a result she spent weeks in the professor's house. One day he publicly declared that he had become a Spiritualist, resigned his chair, and began to write books, later published under the titles Jenseits des Grabens and Stimmen aus der Geister Reich. A visit to Bremen by d'Esperance was followed by a long stay in Sweden. A new line of experiment was tried there. She read letters, written in various languages and enclosed in seven envelopes, the words of which she had to spell out letter by letter. This power also fluctuated, and determined efforts usually resulted in failure.

It was here that she first tried to sit for materialization. In the darkness of the cabinet, she reported, she soon became conscious of a curious disturbance; the air seemed to be agitated as though a bird were fluttering about and at the second attempt she felt as if fine threads were being drawn out of the pores of her skin.

A face was seen by the sitters outside the curtains, but she did not see it from within. So she stood up, feeling her knees strangely weak, put her head out, and above her head she recognized the merry, laughing eyes of "Walter." During a six-week trial Walter learned the art of full materialization.

During his visits she felt strangely listless. Thoughts and impressions swirled like lightning through her brain. She was conscious of the thoughts and feelings of everyone in the room. While d'Esperance was in this state any movement required a great effort, which invariably compelled the materialized forms to retire into the cabinet, as though deprived of power to stand or support themselves.

"Yolande," a young Arab girl of 15, soon made an appearance and remained a constant visitor. She was inquisitive and continually mystified her audience by making things in the room invisible and producing a variety of apports in the form of flowers and plants. It took her about ten to fifteen minutes to build up her body from a cloudy patch on the floor, while the process of melting away usually took place in two to five minutes, the drapery being the last to disappear, in one-half to two minutes.

Yolande's flower apports were very strange. She usually asked in advance for water, sand, and a water carafe. After the water and sand were mixed in the carafe she covered it with a part of her drapery. In a séance held on August 4, 1880, an exotic plant grew up in the carafe. It was an Ixora crocata, 22 inches high, with a thick woody stem that filled the neck of the bottle, the roots firmly planted inside the glass. The natural home of this plant is India. It was produced for William Oxley of Manchester, and it lived for three months in his gardener's care.

Sitters frequently brought fern leaves and asked Yolande to match them. She always complied. Roses were produced from nothing and freely given away. Yolande's last and greatest work was achieved on June 28, 1890, when she apported a seven-foot high golden lily with 11 blossoms. The feat was witnessed by Professors Boutlerof, Fiedler, Aksakof, and others. The power was not sufficient for its dematerialization (Yolande insisted that the plant was borrowed and she had to return it), and she instructed the sitters to keep it in darkness. The lily remained in the house for eight days and then vanished in an instant, filling the room with an overpowering perfume.

Materialization Fraud

Bitter experiences were also in store for d'Esperance. The first befell her in Newcastle in 1880. It came after observations that one of the materialized phantoms, "the French lady," bore a bewildering resemblance to the medium.

A suspicious sitter seized the form of Yolande while the medium was believed sitting inside the cabinet. D'Esperance describes her experience when this occurred:

"All I knew was a horrible excruciating sensation of being doubled up and squeezed together, as I can imagine a hollow gutta percha doll would feel, if it had sensation, when violently embraced by its baby owner. A sense of terror and agonizing pain came over me, as though I was losing hold of life and was falling into some fearful abyss, yet knowing nothing, hearing nothing, except the echo of a scream I heard as at a distance. I felt I was sinking down, I knew not where. I tried to save myself, to grasp at something, but missed it; and then came a blank from which I awakened with a shuddering horror and sense of being bruised to death."

The result of this experience was the outbreak of the earlier hemorrhage of her lungs and a prolonged illness. In Sweden, after her recovery, successful photographic experiments were conducted to obtain portraits of the materialized entities and spirit photographs without a formal séance. These experiments proved to be a drain on her nervous energy, so they were dropped after a while.

In the later materialization séances she invariably observed the rule of sitting before the cabinet and exhibiting herself and the phantom at the same time. Her unique description of double identity dates from these days and reads:

"Now comes another figure, shorter, slenderer, and with out-stretched arms. Somebody rises up at the far end of the circle and comes forward and the two are clasped in each other's arms. Then inarticulate cries of "Anna! Oh, Anna! My child! My loved one!

"Then somebody else gets up and puts her arms round the figure; then sobs, cries and blessings get mixed up. I feel my body swayed to and fro and all gets dark before my eyes. I feel somebody's arms round me although I sit on my chair alone. I feel somebody's heart beating against my breast. I feel that something is happening. No one is near me except the two children. No one is taking any notice of me. All eyes and thoughts seem concentrated on the white slender figure standing there with the arms of the two black-robed women around it.

"It must be my own heart I feel beating so distinctly. Yet those arms round me? Surely never did I feel a touch so plainly. I begin to wonder which is I. Am I the white figure or am I the one in the chair? Are they my hands round the old lady's neck, or are these mine that are lying on the knees of me, or on the knees of the figure if it be not I, on the chair?

"Certainly they are my lips that are being kissed. It is my face that is wet with the tears which these good women are shedding so plentifully. Yet how can it be? It is a horrible feeling, thus losing hold of one's identity. I long to put one of these hands that are lying so helplessly, and touch some one just to know if I am myself or only a dream—if Anna be I, and I am lost as it were, in her identity."

In 1893 at the house of a Professor E. of Christiana, an Egyptian beauty calling herself "Nepenthes," materialized in the midst of the circle and was seen at the same time with the medium. At the sitters' request she dipped her hand into a paraffin wax bucket and left behind a plaster mold of rare beauty, which the modeler said must have been produced by sorcery as it was obviously impossible to extricate the hand from the wax glove without ruining it.

Nepenthes vanished from their presence as she came. She lowered her head, on which a diadem shone, little by little became a luminous cloud, and gradually faded away. Before her disappearance she wrote a message in her own hand in ancient Greek in the pocketbook of one of the sitters. All present were ignorant of ancient Greek letters. The translation read: "I am Nepenthes thy friend; when thy soul is oppressed by too much pain, call on me, Nepenthes, and I will come at once to relieve thy trouble."

From time to time d'Esperance felt greatly troubled. The theories of subliminal consciousness and orthodox religious objections that the phenomena had to do with the devil disturbed her to a growing extent. An out-of-the-body travel experience, however, enlightened her; she realized the great truth behind the phenomenal side of Spiritualism and, fortified in courage, continued her missionary work.

Three times her life was endangered because of injuries received by those who tried to catch her in fraud. The worst experience befell her in Helsingfors in 1893, when an attempt to violate Yolande caused nearly two years of indisposition, turning her hair white and grey.

The outrage followed the most enigmatic phenomenon of her mediumship: the partial dematerialization of her body from the waist down. Aksakof made an investigation and, with the testimonies of those present, published the full story in his book A Case of Partial Dematerialization (1898). This alleged phenomenon occurred on the evening of December 11, 1893, at the house of a Professor Seiling, with some 15 people present at the séance.

Fourteen years later, Hereward Carrington published a lengthy criticism of the case in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research (March 1907), which was answered by James H. Hyslop. Carrington discussed how the incident might have been achieved by trickery. If d'Esperance was using deception, she was never caught.

Materialization mediumship has largely disappeared under the impact of numerous revelations of fraud and the inability of mediums to produce such phenomena as described in relation to d'Esperance under controlled conditions with competent observers. At best, her case must remain open, though there is every reason to believe that she simply was never caught.

In addition to many articles she wrote for the Spiritualist press, d'Esperance wrote two books, Shadow Land (1897) and Northern Lights (1900), the latter a collection of psychic stories and experiences. At the outbreak of the World War I d'Esperance found herself virtually a prisoner in Germany, where she then resided. All her papers were seized, among them the manuscript of a second volume to Shadow Land. It was destroyed, probably along with a quantity of séance reports in shorthand.

Sources:

Aksakof, Alexander. A Case of Partial Dematerialization. N.p., 1898.

Berger, Arthur S., and Joyce Berger. The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

Carrington, Hereward. "An Examination and Analysis of the Evidence for Dematerialization as Demonstrated in Mons. Aksakof's Book." Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Re-search (March 1907).

Oxley, William. Angelic Revelations. 5 vols. N.p., 1885.