Mrs. Piper communicates with George Pellew

In Surviving Death Leslie Kean describes more of Mrs. Piper’s communication with the dead: “In the spring of 1892, Dr. Phinuit was gradually superseded by another control, who, whatever his ultimate nature, was at least not fictitious. This was George Pellew, a young man of literary and philosophical interests who had been killed in New York a few weeks previously. He was known to Hodgson, and five years before had had, under a pseudonym, a single sitting with Mrs. Piper.

 

“Pellew first manifested at a sitting to which Hodgson brought a close friend of Pellew’s. Then and thereafter the George Pellew control and communicator (GP) showed a most detailed acquaintance with the affairs of the previously living Pellew. Out of a hundred and fifty sitters who were introduced to him, GP recognized twenty-nine of the thirty who had been known to the living Pellew (the thirtieth, whom he recognized after an initial failure, was a childhood friend who had ‘grown up’ in the interval). He conversed with each of them in an appropriate manner, and showed an intimate knowledge of their concerns, and of his own supposed past relationships with them. Only rarely did GP slip up badly, as he sometimes did when discussing, for instance, the philosophical questions that had so much interested Pellew in life. During the period of GP’s ascendancy, Hodgson became convinced (he had not previously been so) that Mrs. Piper’s controls and communicators were, at least in many cases, what they claimed to be, namely, the surviving spirits of formerly incarnate human beings.

 

“GP remained the principal communicator until early in 1897 (during this period Hodgson continued to keep very full records). He 1905 Hodgson died, and, predictably, he too then became one of Mrs. Piper’s controls. The purported communications from him were discussed in an interesting paper by William James. Mrs. Piper’s trance mediumship ended in 1911, perhaps in consequence of the harsh treatment that she received at the hands of two American psychologists, G. Stanly Hall and Amy Tanner."

 

Leslie Kean, Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017).