Fifty Years a Medium – Chapter 4, 10/12 by Estelle Roberts

Discussing it with me after the sitting, the wife was disposed to think a mistake had been made somewhere, though she couldn’t think where. Determined to inquire closer, she decided to write to the foster-mother in Ireland to see if she could throw any light on the strange affair.

It was some weeks before she received a reply to her letter and, reading between the lines, I thought the interval might well have been spent by the writer in wrestling with her conscience as to the propriety of revealing a confidence. She told us that the brother’s existence – he had been reared in some other foster-family,

there was no mention of the real parents – had been kept a closely guarded secret from the moment of his birth. To the best of her knowledge she was now the only survivor of those who had been party to it. How then, would the wife please tell her, had she become aware of these facts which had been jealousy guarded for nearly forty years?

In the circumstances I though it was a fair question, and hardly one to be explained by the convenient “telepathy” theory.
Neither can it explain the following incontrovertible evidence. A lawyer from the Commonwealth was on a world tour, and during an extended stay in this country he heard me at various meetings, including one at the Albert Hall.

He reached the conclusion that I had “planted” people in the audience, incidentally thereby opening up endless demands for blackmail! He decided to prove his theory by having a private sitting with me. His mother who had passed over many years before told him of two children she had with her, both of whom were born and died before his own birth.

He vehemently denied it, insisting that he had been an only child, but his mother was equally as insistent. He was sufficiently intrigued to write to the Registrar of Births and Deaths in his parents’ hometown, some 500 miles from where he was living. To his astonishment, two certificates, one of a boy and the other a girl, were sent to him.

The evidence was accurate; there was no possibility of thought transference because his mother was the only person who knew, and she was dead! He was finally convinced, and published the details in a book he subsequently wrote.

For the first twenty years of his life my son Terence was a ruthless sceptic of anything relating to psychic phenomena. Many times I heard him maintain that I would never succeed in convincing him. I knew that I could easily have done so had I wished, but I preferred that he should come to Spiritualism without any prompting from me.