On the evening of the day after the murder in Torrington Road, the second sitting was scheduled to take place—which it did. Most of the newspaper reports of this meeting spoke of it as being unsatisfactory in the extreme, though one or two contended that it would be only fair to the medium to suspend judgment until the next one, as there appeared to be some unexplained obstacle in her way, and she should be given a chance to overcome it. It seems that after Mrs. Belden had gone into trance, instead of being, as on the first occasion, immediately controlled by energetic spirits who spoke volubly (through her) and caused sounds of knockings and chilly draughts and inexplicable moving of furniture, she was suddenly plunged by some mysterious influence, into the most overpowering grief, begging piteously that some one would help her. On questioning by members of the committee, it developed that they were speaking to the spirit of a woman named Cynthia. That is to say, the medium herself had disappeared into trance, and the spirit of this Cynthia woman was speaking through Mrs. Belden’s terrestrial machinery. “Cynthia—I’m Cynthia!” the medium kept calling out in a voice entirely different from her own, and with tears running down her cheeks. “Yes—Cynthia! Oh, won’t somebody help me! Though you don’t know me, for God’s sake help me! Isn’t there somebody here who can do _something_?” And the medium sobbed and moaned and rocked back and forth, and her very face was changed. All the questions that were put to her by the members of the committee seemed to get them no further. The Cynthia spirit was apparently crazed with grief or anxiety, and held her place for nearly an hour, begging for help, yet leaving those present without information as to what the trouble was, further than the little that could be gathered from her incoherent cries of: “Oh—they’ve made a terrible mistake! Don’t you see—a terrible, frightful mistake!” “Mistake about what, madam?” would come in a sharp incisive voice from an investigator. “About him—about him. He’s my son—my son—my son! Don’t you understand?—and he’s in such trouble—oh, _such_ trouble! It’s all wrong—all wrong! Can’t somebody go and tell them it’s all a mistake! Oh, please somebody tell them!” And thus it went on, the grief-stricken spirit of Cynthia hysterically begging for assistance and imploring them to tell somebody that something wasn’t so, yet seemingly unable to furnish information as to what persons she wished to have told, or to let them know who she was herself. And although, after some little time of this, the members of the committee urgently requested Cynthia’s spirit to leave the medium so that the spirits of others who were better able to communicate might take her place, she couldn’t be persuaded to do so.