Van Gelder Kunz, Dora (1904-1999)

American psychic and leader in the Theosophical Society. She was born on April 28, 1904, in Java, where she grew up on her father's sugar plantation. Here she saw and communed with fairies, unaware that this was a special psychic faculty. At the age of eleven, she left Java for Australia, where she studied with an Anglican priest who also possessed unusual psychic abilities. At the age of twenty-two, she married an American and moved to the United States, where she became president of a corporation concerned with teaching materials, while her husband became head of an educational foundation.

Van Gelder had never been a professional paid medium nor publicized her psychic abilities but instead worked unobtrusively with physicians on difficult cases for diagnostic and healing purposes. She showed a natural ability to see the psychic energy patterns in human beings and their relationship to conditions of health and disease. She also claimed the unusual ability of being able to predict specific illness, sometimes as early as eighteen months in advance.

She said she never lost her ability to commune with fairy life. When she was a young woman she wrote about her fairy experiences. This early manuscript was revised and published as The Real World of Fairies (1977). She stated that fairy life is still apparent, but becoming less evident with the growing pollution of cities and urban life. She even reported seeing fairies in Central Park, New York.

Van Gelder Kunz died on August 25, 1999.

Sources:

Van Gelder, Dora. The Real World of Fairies. Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical Publishing House, 1977.