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John W. Edmonds
1816-1874
JOHN W. Edmonds may
have been the first serious psychical researcher following the mediumship
epidemic started by the Fox sisters on March 31, 1848. No doubt there were
some casual or informal investigations with the Fox sisters and other
mediums before Edmonds began his research in January 1851, but Edmonds
seems to have approached his research as a project rather than as one of
curious observation and simple validation.
Following the death of his wife in 1850, Edmonds, Chief Justice of New
York State Supreme Court, was persuaded to attend a séance with friends.
In a letter to the New York Herald on August 6, 1853, he wrote that
he attended thinking it fraud and intending to expose it as such. “Having
from my researches come to a different conclusion, I feel that the
obligation to make known the result is just as strong,” he explained the
purpose of his letter. “Therefore it is, mainly, because there is another
consideration which influences me, and that is the desire to extend to
others a knowledge which I am conscious cannot make them happier and
better.”
Edmonds had served in both branches of the New York legislature, for some
time as president of the Senate, before he was elevated to the Supreme
Court. He had a reputation as a tough, scholarly, reform-minded lawyer.
After witnessing phenomena that puzzled him in that first séance, Edmonds
decided to further investigate. He later wrote that over a period of 23
months he witnessed several hundred manifestations in various forms,
keeping very detailed records of them, collecting some 1,600 pages of
manuscript. “I resorted to every expedient I could devise to detect
imposture and to guard against delusion,” Edmonds wrote in a letter to the
New York Tribune sometime in 1853. “I felt in myself, and saw in
others, how exciting was the idea that we were actually communing with the
dead, and I laboured to prevent any undue bias of my judgment. I was at
times critical and captious to an unreasonable extreme.”
Edmonds said that the manifestations were of almost every known form, both
physical and mental. He observed a mahogany table with a lamp burning on
it levitated at least a foot off the floor. He also observed a mahogany
chair thrown on its side and moved swiftly back and forth on the floor
with no one touching it. It repeatedly stopped abruptly within a few
inches of him. As for spirit communication, there were many, the chief
communicators being Swedenborg and Bacon. Sometime in 1853, Edmonds
discovered that he had mediumistic abilities and began receiving messages
by means of automatic writing. He recalled receiving a spirit message
early one morning that his grandson, some 400 miles away, was seriously
sick. He immediately traveled there and found his grandson recovering, but
his daughter informed him that at the time the message received he was
very sick.
But it was Edmond’s daughter, Laura, who really had the gift. She
developed into a trance medium. It is said that although she knew only
English and a smattering of French in her awakened state, she spoke
Spanish, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Latin, Hungarian, and Indian
dialects fluently when entranced (or rather the spirits spoke the
languages using her voice mechanism). Edmonds wrote that a Mr. E. D.
Green, an artist of his city, came for a sitting with his daughter
accompanied by an acquaintance from Greece. While the man from Greece
spoke entirely in Greek for more than an hour, the replies coming through
his daughter were sometimes in Greek and sometimes in English.
After writing a book on his experiences with mediums, Edmonds came under
attack by politicians and the press, and was forced to resign his position
on the Supreme Court, returning to the practice of law. “The publication
of a book on spiritualism by a person so distinguished as Judge Edmonds,
of our Supreme Court, is an event in literature demanding more than a
passing notice,” an objective editorial in the December 1853 edition of
Putnam’s Monthly read. “The subject and the author alike arrest the
public attention. An attempt to prove the reality on an intercourse
between departed spirits and men on this side of the grave, by an eminent
judicial functionary, is a fact that has much significance.”
The editorial went on to say that a large number of people of different
ages and conditions in the United States, England, France, Austria,
Central America, and India had reported curious phenomena, such as
rappings, table-turningss, bell-ringings, poundings, and writings in
recent years and that there was much similarity in the reports. “The
reputation of such an endorser as Judge Edmonds – a lawyer of great
sagacity, accustomed to weighing evidence, and a man of the most exemplary
integrity, whose words on a matter of fact cannot be doubted – ought to
commend the subject to an impartial investigation, or at least shield it
from flippant commentaries on the lower order of journalism.”
If Edmonds was not the first psychical researcher, he was likely, as one
reference put it, the “first martyr” in the cause of Spiritualism.
By Michael E. Tymn
Sources
Berger, Arthur S. and Joyce, The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and
Psychical Research, Paragon House, New York, 1991
Wallace, Alfred Russel, Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, Arno
Press, New York, 1975 (reprint of 1896 publication)
http://www.fst.org/edmonds.htm
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