958. There were various cases of alleged direct "control" by spirits other than Phinuit during the first stage of Mrs. Piper's trance history. Two of these, the "E." control and the aunt of Professor James, are referred to in the report by Professor James which I have quoted in 956 A. These and several others are also mentioned by Dr. Hodgson in Proceedings S.P.R., vol. viii. pp. 28-40; but even in the most remarkable of these earlier cases of apparent "possession" of Mrs. Piper's organism by other spirits, the evidence available for publication was scanty, and in one or two cases there was scarcely anything to indicate that the supposed communicating personalities were not impersonations by Phinuit.

The most notable case was that of a lady, Miss W., who had forty-five sittings, at forty-one of which the control was taken for at least part of the time by a personal friend, who presented marked characteristics of the friend it purported to be; showed specific knowledge of private matters known only to that friend and the sitter; showed a knowledge of facts of which he was reminded by the sitter, and in turn reminded the sitter of facts temporarily forgotten by her; made some mistakes in matters once known to the friend, and remembered well by the sitter, and told the sitter of facts not known to her and afterwards verified (loc. cit. 43).

Usually, as we have seen, Phinuit acted as intermediary, reproducing the communications made by the "deceased" relatives or friends of the sitters, and in a favourable series of sittings the impression made was generally as described in the following case by Sir Oliver Lodge. (From Proceedings S.P.R., vol. vi. p. 455).

One of the best sitters was my next-door neighbour, Isaac C. Thompson, F.L.S., to whose name indeed, before he had been in any way introduced, Phinuit sent a message purporting to come from his father. Three generations of his and of his wife's family living and dead (small and compact Quaker families) were, in the course of two or three sittings, conspicuously mentioned, with identifying detail; the main informant representing himself as his deceased brother, a young Edinburgh doctor, whose loss had been mourned some twenty years ago. The familiarity and touchingness of the messages communicated in this particular instance were very remarkable, and can by no means be reproduced in any printed report of the sitting. Their case is one in which very few mistakes were made, the details standing out vividly correct, so that in fact they found it impossible not to believe that their relatives were actually speaking to them.

Such cases were not usual, and on the whole, although there seemed to be in this first stage of Mrs. Piper's trance history, in 1884-91, abundant proof of some supernormal faculty which demanded at least the hypothesis of thought-transference from living persons both near and distant, and suggested occasionally some power of telaesthesia or perhaps even of premonition, yet the main question with which we are now concerned, - whether Mrs. Piper's organism was controlled, directly or indirectly, by discarnate spirits who could give satisfactory evidence of their identity, - remained undecided.