The Shadow World

For sixteen or seventeen years Hamlin Garland sat in darkened parlors with mediums, notebook in hand, and this 1908 volume is the record he made of it. He built it from notes written straight after each sitting and from his reports to the American Psychical Society, where he was once a director. Raps and coded tappings, tables lifting off the floor, voices through a tin trumpet, automatic writing and trance impersonations are all set down, with invented names standing in for real people. The sittings play out in private libraries and sitting rooms where a skeptical chemist and assorted believers argue over what they have just watched. Garland ties the medium with silk thread, marks the chair legs in chalk, concedes that the dim light weakens his evidence, and finishes by suspecting living minds rather than returning spirits.