Fifty Years a Medium – Chapter 14, 1/8 by Estelle Roberts

CHAPTER FOURTEEN,
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY

In the pages you have read I have tried to give a picture of the life of a practicing medium. For reasons I have already explained – because I have no recollection of what transpired during trance séance, and because I deliberately try to erase from my mind after sittings for clairvoyance or psychometry and personal messages I have relayed –

comparatively little of what I have written is founded only on memory. I am fortunate, however, in possessing, a vast number of newspaper reports, magazine articles, and bundles of private correspondence, dealing in details with my many psychic experiences and cases. I have drawn on these in writing this book.

It was not easy to decide which cases to include and which to omit. My first thought was to select only the most remarkable instances, wherever and whenever they occurred. It was, I suppose, a natural inclination. Then I was reminded that Spiritualism in the view of the general public is, to say the least, a subject of controversy, and that the inquiring layman, and more particularly the stubborn sceptic,

would be satisfied with little less than positive proof of every claim I made. On reflection it seemed to me that this demand for proof was not unreasonable. After all, why should I expect anyone to accept unchallenged my personal assurances, however honestly and sincerely they may be offered?

I therefore gave preference in my selection to those cases where the facts have been vouched for by people drawn from all professions, occupations and varying strata of society – a cross- section, in fact, of humanity. For this reason many of the episodes described owe their inclusion as much to the names and integrity of the witnesses as to anything particularly out of the ordinary in the phenomena that occurred.

Similarly I have introduced a number of striking incidents where the details were described in the national and psychic press at the time of their happening, many of them subsequently finding their way into other author’s books. In some cases I have used these accounts only in part. In others I have reproduced them exactly as they were printed, because the written testimony of the independent witness is not lightly to be discarded.

It is on this note of the independent witness that I propose to close these pages. Some years ago a book was published entitled ‘Why I Believe in Red Cloud’. It comprised a series of brief essays by people from all walks of life. One of its chapters was written by Dr. A. G. Thompson, M.B., B.Ch. I reproduce part of it here, not because it makes an impassioned appeal,

but because its reasoned and thoughtful phrases present the case for Spiritualism with both clarity and reverence. It also serves a further purpose in that it gives “the other side of the story” – not of Spiritualism as seen through the eyes of a medium, but as seen by a watchful member of one of my own circles. Here is Dr. Thompson’s account: