The Shadow World

Downloads: 100+
First published: 1908
Pages: 196

Read online EPUB Download Save

About this book

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.

About the author

Hamlin Garland

A boyhood on farms in Wisconsin, Iowa and Dakota Territory gave Hamlin Garland the material he worked for fifty years. Born in 1860 near West Salem, Wisconsin, he left for Boston in 1884, read Henry George in the public library, and turned single-tax anger into fiction that refused to make prairie farming look picturesque.