Fifty Years a Medium – Chapter 2, 5/14 by Estelle Roberts

It was my turn to be surprised. “But, Arthur, it isn’t empty. I’m sitting here just as I was before.”
“My dear,” he insisted, “you’re not. I tell you the chair is empty.”

I pondered this uncomprehendingly. Quite certainly I had not moved from the chair, and as far as I was concerned no change had taken place in the room since we sat down except for the unexplained appearance of the light overhead.
“You say you can’t see me,” I said, “yet I can’t have gone. Otherwise I shouldn’t be able to answer you as I am doing now.”

“Well, I can’t see you,” he replied, “but I can see the chair you were sitting in. I can even see the holes in the seat.”
“Then tell me how many holes there are.”

He leaned forward and with his forefinger traced the pattern of holes, counting each one as he came to it. He could feel nothing of my body sitting on the chair, nor could I feel the touch of his hand.

A few minutes later the golden glow overhead was extinguished as mysteriously as it had appeared, and we were left sitting face to face in the darkness. Arthur got up and put on a light, turning quickly as he did so to see if I really was still there. Then he came over and stood by me. “Let me have a look at that chair, my dear,” he said. I stood up and together we counted the holes patterned in its seat. They totalled precisely the number Arthur had counted not five minutes earlier.

Some years later a similar happening, though working in reverse, when a psychic photographer exposed his camera on me. The photographer could clearly see me sitting on the chair, but when the photograph was developed, only the chair was to be seen in the picture. I had somehow been “eliminated.”

In 1922 my son, Terry, was born, and when he was a year old the whole family had a narrow escape from disaster. One evening I had been to the Spiritualist church to listen to Mrs. S. D. Kent, a medium whom I had always wanted to meet. After the meeting Mrs. Kent walked home with me. When we arrived we found Arthur giving a chest of drawers a much-needed coat of white paint.

As we entered the sitting room Mrs. Kent looked around and asked, “Why are you painting it white when all else in the room is black?” Neither Arthur nor I had the least idea what she meant by this question, and she could not explain her words. As far as I could see there was nothing black in the room, but as Mrs. Kent offered no further comment, I thought it best to let the matter drop.