Seven people — men, women and a teen-aged girl — barricade themselves in a home located in El Cerrito, California as they spend days consulting Ouija boards. By all accounts they went insane in the process. One of the then-crazed women warned surrounding police to stay back lest her husband — then dead three months — started killing. A priest was summoned. Doors were broken down.
Largely forgotten today, the March 3, 1920 police scene in a small community just outside Berkeley, California has been described as one of the most unusual occult incidents ever investigated by California authorities. A documented case of Ouija-inspired mass hysteria, the incident generated front-page headlines, attracted the attention of medical professionals and prompted calls for reform legislation.
Edgar Cayce (March 18, 1877 – January 3, 1945) was an American attributed clairvoyant who claimed to speak from his higher self while in a trance-like state. During the sessions, Cayce would answer questions on a variety of subjects such as healing, reincarnation, dreams, the afterlife, past lives, nutrition, Atlantis, and future events. A devout Christian and Sunday-school teacher, Cayce said that his readings came from his subconscious mind exploring the dream realm, where he said all minds were timelessly connected. Cayce founded a non-profit organization, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, to record and facilitate the study of his channeling and to run a hospital. Cayce is known as “The Sleeping Prophet“, the title of journalist Jess Stearn‘s 1967 Cayce biography. Religious scholars and thinkers, such as author Michael York, consider Cayce the founder and a principal source of many characteristic beliefs of the New Age movement.
Canadian-born author, lecturer, astrologer and mystic Manly Hall was born on March 18, 1891. Hall is best known for his 1928 work The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Over his 70 year career, he gave thousands of lectures, including two at Carnegie Hall, and published over 150 volumes. In 1934, he founded The Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, which he dedicated to the “Truth Seekers of All Time,” with a research library, lecture hall and publishing house. See a video about Manly Hall at this link.
Daniel Dunglas Home (pronounced Hume; 20 March 1833 – 21 June 1886) was a Scottish physical medium with the reported ability to levitate to a variety of heights, speak with the dead, and to produce rapping and knocks in houses at will. His biographer Peter Lamont opines that he was one of the most famous men of his era. Home conducted hundreds of séances, which were attended by many eminent Victorians.
Emanuel Swedenborg, born February 8, 1688 and died March 29, 1772, was a Swedish Christian theologian, scientist, philosopher and mystic. He became best known for his book on the afterlife, Heaven and Hell (1758). Swedenborg had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist. In 1741, at 53, he entered into a spiritual phase in which he began to experience dreams and visions, culminating in a “spiritual awakening” in which he received a revelation that opened his spiritual eyes so he could freely visit heaven and hell to converse with angels, demons and other spirits. Some describe Swedenborg as a progenitor of modern Spiritualism.
Allen Kardec, the 19th Century founder of “Spiritism” and a man who changed the course of Latin American religious movements, died on March 31, 1869.
Guest Post: How Kardec Influenced Afro-Latin Spiritual Systems
Cora Lodencia Veronica Scott (April 21, 1840 – January 3, 1923) was one of the best-known Spiritualist mediums of the last half of the 19th century. Most of her work was done as a trance lecturer, though she also wrote some books whose composition was attributed to spirit guides rather than her own personality. Married four times, Cora adopted the last name of her husband at each marriage, and at various times carried the surnames Hatch, Daniels, Tappan, and Richmond.
William H. Mumler (1832–1884) was an American spirit photographer who worked in New York and Boston. His first spirit photograph was apparently an accident—a self-portrait which, when developed, also revealed the “spirit” of his deceased cousin. Mumler then left his job as an engraver to pursue spirit photography full-time, taking advantage of the large number of people who had lost relatives in the American Civil War. His two most famous images are the photograph of Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of her husband Abraham Lincoln and the portrait of Master Herrod, a medium, with three spirit guides.
Eusapia Palladino (alternative spelling: Paladino; 21 January 1854 – 16 May 1918) was an Italian Spiritualist physical medium. She claimed extraordinary powers such as the ability to levitate tables, communicate with the dead through her spirit guide John King, and to produce other supernatural phenomena.
Her Warsaw séances at the turn of 1893–94 inspired several colorful scenes in the historical novel Pharaoh, which Bolesław Prus began writing in 1894.