And yet once again, and in spite of the conditions which we regarded as
utterly hopeless, the figure of a man appeared in less than ten minutes,
materialized from head to foot, as he proved to us by showing us his
lower limbs. He left the side of the sensitive, walked out into the room
and stood between us, talking to us in a deep rich voice for nearly
three minutes. As he stood beside us we could hear the sensitive, twelve
feet away, moving uneasily on his chair and groaning slightly.
Five minutes after he disappeared the same (alleged) recently deceased
member of the royal family walked out to us and held a short private
conversation with my companion, and sent another message to his mother,
Queen --.
EXPERIMENT NO. 3
Place--_West Hampstead, London, N. W. Sensitive B, female, aged about
49._
Persons of middle age or older who happened to be in England a few years
ago at the time that two lawsuits were brought against a celebrated
conjurer by the clever young man who had succeeded in exposing one of
his most mystifying tricks, will well remember the sensation caused by
the giving of both verdicts against the conjurer; and the young man--to
whom I shall refer as Mr. X--at once became famous as the man who had
beaten one of the cleverest conjurers of the day.
A friend of mine, who had been present on several occasions when Sir
William Crookes's sensitive--Florrie Cook (Mrs. Corner), referred to
above as Sensitive B--had produced materializations in gaslight at my
house in London, asked her to visit his house at West Hampstead one
evening to meet several friends of his, and to see if it were possible
for any entity to materialize in my friend's own drawing-room.
She at once accepted his invitation to sit there under strict test
conditions; and, talking the matter over with some of his friends a day
or two before the one chosen for the experiment, he told me that they
had arranged to have the sensitive securely tied to her chair, to have
strong iron rings fastened to the floor-boards, through which ropes
would be passed, these ropes to be securely fastened to the sensitive's
legs; all knots of every size and kind to be sealed, so as to prevent
any attempt on her part to leave her chair and to masquerade as a
materialized entity.
One of his friends happened to know the celebrated Mr. X--, and, as he
had so recently succeeded in beating so notable a conjurer, he was
invited to be present and to take entire charge of the tying up, the
binding and sealing arrangements, in order to render the escape of the
sensitive from her chair an impossibility.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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