LETTERS FROM A LIVING DEAD MAN

BY ELSA BARKER

LETTERS FROM A LIVING DEAD MAN

WRITTEN DOWN BY ELSA BARKER

WITH AN INTRODUCTION

NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 FIFTH AVENUE

COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY MITCHELL KENNERLEY

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

ONE night last year in Paris I was strongly impelled to take up a pencil and write, though what I was to write about I had no idea. Yielding to the impulse, my hand was seized as if from the outside, and a remarkable message of a personal nature came, followed by the signature “X.”

The purport of the message was clear, but the signature puzzled me.

The following day I showed this writing to a friend, asking her if she had any idea who “X” was.

“Why,” she replied, “don’t you know that that is what we always call Mr. ——?”

I did not know.

Now, Mr. —— was six thousand miles from Paris, and, as we supposed, in the land of the living. But a day or two later a letter came to me from America, stating that Mr. —— had died in the western part of the United States, a few days before I received in Paris the automatic message signed “X.”

So far as I know, I was the first person in Europe to be informed of his death, and I immediately called on my friend to tell her that “X” had passed out. She did not seem surprised, and told me that she had felt certain of it some days before, when I had shown her the “X” letter, though she had not said so at the time.

Naturally I was impressed by this extraordinary incident.

“X” was not a spiritualist. I am not myself, and never have been, a spiritualist, and, so far as I can remember, only two other supposedly disembodied entities had ever before written automatically through my hand. This had happened when I was in the presence of a mediumistic person; but the messages were brief, and I had not attached any great importance to the phenomena.

In childhood I had several times put my hand upon a planchette with the hand of another person, and the planchette had written the usual trivialities. On one occasion, some months before the first “X” letter, I had put my hand upon a planchette with the hand of a non-professional medium, and the prophecy of a fire in my house during a certain month in the following year was written, supposedly by a dead friend, which prophecy was literally verified, though the fire was not caused by my hand, nor was it in my own apartment.

A few times, years before, I had been persuaded by friends to go with them to professional séances, and had seen so-called materialisations. I had also seen independently a few appearances which I could not account for on any other hypothesis than that of apparitions of the dead.

But to the whole subject of communication between the two worlds I felt an unusual degree of indifference. Spiritualism had always left me quite cold, and I had not even read the ordinary standard works on the subject.

Nevertheless, I had for a number of years almost daily seen “hypnagogic visions,” often of a startlingly prophetic character; and the explanation of them later given by “X” may be the true explanation.

Soon after my receipt of the letter from America stating that Mr. —— was dead, I was sitting in the evening with the friend who had told me who “X” was, and she asked me if I would not let him write again—if he could.

I consented, more to please my friend than from any personal interest, and the message beginning, “I am here, make no mistake,” came through my hand. It came with breaks and pauses between the sentences, with large and badly formed letters, but quite automatically, as in the first instance. The force used on this occasion was such that my right hand and arm were lame the following day.

Several letters signed “X” were automatically written during the next few weeks; but, instead of becoming enthusiastic, I developed a strong disinclination for this manner of writing, and was only persuaded to continue it through the arguments of my friend that if “X” really wished to communicate with the world, I was highly privileged in being able to help him.

“X” was not an ordinary person. He was a well-known lawyer nearly seventy years of age, a profound student of philosophy, a writer of books, a man whose pure ideals and enthusiasms were an inspiration to everyone who knew him. His home was far from mine, and I had seen him only at long intervals. So far as I remember, we had never discussed the question of postmortem consciousness.

Gradually, as I conquered my strong prejudice against automatic writing, I became interested in the things which “X” told me about the life beyond the grave. I had read practically nothing on the subject, not even the popular Letters from Julia, so I had no preconceived ideas.