Fifty Years a Medium – Chapter 6, 10/14 by Estelle Roberts

Some years ago The People published a series of articles on Spiritualism. Written by Maurice Barbanell, the series aroused so much interest and correspondence that the Editor invited readers who were bereaved and who had never attended a séance to send him their stories.

From those submitted, the Editor undertook to select a few readers to have sittings under rigid test conditions. Maurice Barbanell had no hand in choosing the readers whose stories suggested they were most in need of psychic help; and neither, of course, had I.

With one of these readers, the story that unfolded was profoundly moving. He was a man named Proctor, brought to my house by a reporter from the The People. His name and all the circumstances surrounding him were deliberately kept from me. The preamble to our séance was no more than a polite comment on the weather.

As soon as the sitting began I became aware of a woman about thirty-five years old who had clearly passed over not long before. She was very distraught and I knew her death had been a tragic one. She almost pounced on me in her urgency to speak to my visitor who, she said, was her husband, she said:

“Darling, I didn’t want to leave you. I can’t remember the end; it was so quick. Have nothing on your conscience, darling; it was not your fault. I was choking and then I just slept and slept and slept. The babies are with me still. The three of us will always be near you, waiting for you. I have wanted so much to tell you these things, to tell you there is no death, but I’ve never been able to reach you. Now that I have done so, I am happy, so happy.”

From the husband I later learned the full details of what had happened. Some eight months before he had returned home to find his wife dead on the floor from an overdose of sleeping tablets. She had first tried to gas herself, but the gas had run out, and so she had resorted to the pills. (The choking sensation to which she had referred in her message must have been the effect of the gas.)

Beside her lay the bodies of their two children; one aged four, the other five months. The poor women had been in a bad state of nerves since the birth of the baby, and though she seemed to be getting better, had suddenly suffered a relapse which ended with this brainstorm. From the way she had almost hurled herself at me in her anxiety to assure her husband that she still lived, there could be no doubt that the sending of this message was as important to her as receiving it was to him.