CIVIL WAR GENERAL COMMUNICATES FROM BEYOND

 In Forty Years of Psychic Research, published in 1936, Hamlin Garland tells of his many investigations of mediums  While he felt certain that he had ruled out fraud in many cases, he was reluctant to subscribe to the spirit theory and, concomitantly, to life after death. He still clung to his earlier theory that mediumistic phenomena were somehow unwittingly produced by the subconscious of the mediums.  When communication was supposedly coming from a discarnate soul, he wondered if the medium had telepathic powers and was unconsciously tapping into the memories of the person sitting with the medium. When there were physical manifestations, he wondered if the medium had produced it through some kind of subconscious telekinetic powers. He ended Forty Years by saying that he could come to no conclusions as to the cause or origin of the phenomena as he simply could not comprehend a “fourth dimension.”

Garland had joined the American Psychical Society (APS) in 1891.  As a student of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, Garland took pride in his agnosticism and skepticism.  He was surprised and amused that he would be asked to participate in investigations of what he referred to as the “dark side of the moon.”  But after it was pointed out to him that the organization wanted young, open-minded skeptics as their investigators to offset what might be seen as credulity among some of the older investigators, Garland consented.

 During his lifetime (1860-1940), Garland authored 52 books, including a biography of Ulysses S. Grant.  He won the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for A Daughter of the Middle Border. A friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, poet Walt Whitman, and author Henry James, he was intimately involved with major literary, social, and artistic movements in American culture.  In 1926, the University of Wisconsin awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. He was later awarded honorary doctorates by Beloit College, Northwestern University and the University of Southern California, the latter’s Doheny Memorial Library now housing the Hamlin Garland Collection.  The Hamlin Garland Society exists today to disseminate information on Garland’s literary works and his early home in West Salem, Wisconsin is a national historic landmark and museum.  He had a keen mind and was not someone to be easily duped.   

On November 10, 1893, Garland arranged a séance at the Boston home of Professor Amos Dolbear, a fellow APS investigator.  Dolbear was head of the department of astronomy and physics at Tufts College and had been credited with inventing the static telephone and an electric gyroscope used to demonstrate the earth’s rotation. Only Garland, Dolbear, Dolbear’s wife, and the medium, Mary Curryer Smith, were present. (Out of privacy concerns, Garland assigned her the pseudonym “Mrs. Smiley” in his books.)  Smith was a direct-voice medium.  Such mediums use a megaphone or “trumpet” to amplify the voices of the spirits. Often the trumpet, held by invisible hands, floats around the room and stops in front of the sitter for whom the message is intended. Voices much different than the medium’s are usually heard, occasionally in languages unknown to the medium. When Garland first learned of this phenomenon, he suspected that it was all a hoax carried out by means of ventriloquism. However, many years of testing and examining such mediums convinced him that they, at least many of them, were for real.

Garland had discovered Smith while lecturing in Santa Barbara, Calif.   He was so impressed by her that he arranged for the APS to pay her expenses to Boston so that she could be tested.  As darkness was required, Garland, in order to rule out fraud, tied Smith to her chair, binding both her arms and her ankles with strong tape.  He also draped newspaper over her knees and tacked the edges to the floor so that any movement could be detected by the crackle.  While Garland kept a hand on one of the medium’s wrists, Professor Dolbear kept his hand on the other wrist.  An hour or so passed without result, and Dolbear was prepared to call it a night, feeling that the safeguards against fraud had stifled the medium.  However, Garland was accustomed to waiting as long as four hours for phenomena to manifest and convinced Dolbear to wait a little longer. Soon thereafter, books from Dolbear’s library began whizzing over their heads and landing on the table in front of them.  Some two dozen books were stacked by shadowy hands.  There was enough light for Garland to see the hands.  He recorded that they were clearly those of a man and much larger than the medium’s. A spirit named “Wilbur” began speaking through the medium’s megaphone or “cone,” which floated around the room. 

     Garland recorded that the cone rose high in the air when Wilbur identified himself as Jefferson Wilbur Thompson, a brigadier general in the Confederate army who died in Jefferson City after the Civil War.  He said he was one of the medium’s “guides.”  According to Garland, he spoke in a manly voice and as clearly as if he were a living human being.  Wilbur carried on for two hours, keeping the sitters laughing with frequent “wise-cracking.” During all of the activity, Garland monitored the medium’s position and noted that she remained in a “deathly trance.”

After the books had been stacked on the table, Mrs. Dolbear asked Wilbur if he could bring the small candy box on the shelf above the books.  Professor Dolbear called her request “preposterous,” but a moment later the box was laid upon the table.  Garland asked Wilbur to write his name in one of the books on the table.   When the phenomena stopped and the lights were turned on, one of the books was found to have Wilbur’s signature.

Before the lights were turned on, however, Mrs. Dolbear appeared to fall into a trance and become clairvoyant. She said that she could see forms moving about the room and then the voice of a deceased relative began speaking to her.   According to Garland, the conversation went on for some time.

As Garland apparently assumed that “Wilbur” was a secondary personality of the medium and was using subconscious telekinetic powers to move the books and the cone, he did not concern himself with attempting to confirm the existence of Jefferson Wilbur Thompson.  A recent Google search on the Internet revealed that there was a Brigadier General Meriwether Jefferson Thompson in the Confederate army and that he died in 1876.  Another site mentions that “General Jefferson Thompson” surrendered to General Granville Dodge in Arkansas.  The name “Wilbur” is not mentioned in either case, but this could very well have been a nickname, especially for someone who did not care for the name Meriwether.

  Garland ended his 1936 book with a somewhat guarded statement. “I concede the possibility of their (spirits’) persistence, especially when their voices carry, movingly, characteristic tones and their messages are startlingly intimate,” he wrote. “At such times, they seem souls of the dead veritably reimbodied.  They jest with me about their occupations.  They laugh at my doubts, quite in character.  They touch me with their hands.”   – Michael E. Tymn