33 Facts About Leonora Piper

Leonora Piper was a famous American trance medium in the area of Spiritualism.

Leonora Piper grew up in Nashua, New Hampshire, where, according to her parents, she first displayed psychic abilities as a child.

Leonora Piper made a fortune from her seances whilst being tested by psychical researchers, she was receiving around $1000 a year for her mediumship services.

Leonora Piper was a trance medium but in her later seances preferred automatic writing.

Leonora Piper died on July 3,1950, at her home from bronchopneumonia.

Leonora Piper advocated a "third way" as a sort of agnosticism for cases where things were not yet explained and held out for the possibility of belief.

James was convinced that Leonora Piper knew things she could only have discovered by supernatural means.

James Hyslop wrote of his seance sittings with Leonora Piper and suggested they could only be explained by spirits or telepathy.

Richard Hodgson was one of the very few psychical researchers that believed Leonora Piper was in contact with spirits.

The American psychologist Morton Prince who knew Hodgson well commented that the mediumship of Leonora Piper had "wrecked" his mind.

Leonora Piper received these messages when alone in the evening.

Leonora Piper claimed beautiful creatures live inside Venus and the Sun is populated by "dreadful looking creatures" which he described as monkeys that live in caves made out of sand and mud.

Andrew Lang wrote that when alive George Pellew was a scholar and metaphysician but the Pellew control of Leonora Piper had forgotten his Greek and philosophy and when asked for proof of his identity was incoherent or wholly mistaken.

Leonora Piper described their daughter, gave her nickname and told how she had died of a throat infection, she gave the nicknames of the little girl's brother and sister.

John G Taylor suggested that the information Piper gave could naturally be explained if she had read an obituary notice in the local newspaper.

Leonora Piper's control told Hodgson he would get married, have two children and have a long life but Hodgson died a few months later, unmarried and childless.

Mrs Leonora Piper pretends to be controlled by the actual disembodied Richard Hodgson.

In 1901, Leonora Piper spoke to the New York Herald who published her remarks in an article called "Mrs Leonora Piper's Plain Statement".

In contrast to the extravagant claims made by the vast majority of mediums, Mrs Leonora Piper herself was not convinced that the information obtained through her came from discarnate sources or that her 'controls' were, in fact, the spirits they purported to be.

Leonora Piper stayed at the house of Oliver Lodge and his family for a fortnight.

Lodge believed that Leonora Piper had obtained this information supernaturally the psychiatrist Charles Arthur Mercier revealed that Leonora Piper could have easily examined the possessions of the Lodge family and seen the locket as she was staying with them and Lodge's wife had sometimes worn it.

Leonora Piper never has revealed one scrap of useful knowledge.

Chapman Cohen noted that the controls of Leonora Piper were obviously fictitious as it was claimed she communicated with the fictional character Adam Bede from George Eliot's novel.

William James held seances with Leonora Piper and was impressed by some of the details he was given.

Horace Howard Furness attended a seance with Leonora Piper and concluded that the she had feigned her trances.

Lund suggested that Leonora Piper was not unconscious during the seance and that she had used clever guess work and other mentalist tricks.

Irish anatomist Alexander Macalister attended a seance sitting wrote that apart from one common guess Leonora Piper got nothing correct and that her trance mediumship was a poor imposture.

Gardner reports that when Phinuit made a mistake he would claim deafness and leave, and that Leonora Piper was unable to discern between real and fictitious information given to her.

Joseph McCabe has suggested that Richard Hodgson who investigated Leonora Piper was caught in an act of deception.

Rinn suggested that Leonora Piper was a practitioner of muscle reading.

Leonora Piper had set a trap for Piper by inventing the fictitious name "Esther Horton" which Piper's alleged trance control accepted as a real person.

Leonora Piper was not invited to any other seances with Piper.

Magician Henry Gordon has written that Leonora Piper "was exposed as a fraud" and she utilized the same methods as other mental mediums.