Achsa W. Sprague, a19th Century “Trance Speaker,” was an early abolitionist and women’s rights pioneer. She died on July 6, 1862.
Rosemary Isabel Brown (nee Dickeson, 27 July 1916 – 16 November 2001) was an English composer, pianist and spirit medium who claimed that dead composers dictated new musical works to her. She created a small media sensation in the 1970s by presenting works purportedly dictated to her by Claude Debussy, Edvard Grieg, Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, Frédéric Chopin, Igor Stravinsky, Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms, Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann and Sergei Rachmaninoff.
Brown claimed that each composer had his own way of dictating to her: Liszt controlled her hands for a few bars at a time, and then she wrote down the notes; Chopin told her the notes and pushed her hands on to the right keys; Schubert tried to sing his compositions; and Beethoven and Bach simply dictated the notes. She claimed the composers spoke to her in English.
With Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and others he founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 and became its president. In 1878 he and Blavatsky visited India. The two settled there in 1879 and in 1882 established the permanent headquarters of the Theosophical Society of Adyar, Madras. Olcott was born on August 2, 1832 and died on February 17, 1907.
Andrew Jackson Davis (August 11, 1826 – January 13, 1910), known as the “Poughkeepsie Seer,” was an early healing medium and spiritualist. As a young man, he developed the ability to go into magnetic trance on his own, and in that state, he was able to diagnose disease. In the late 1840s, he claimed he met the spirit of the ancient Greek physician, Galen, who gave him a magic staff that he believed he could use for healing.
Mollie Fancher, born on Aug. 16, 1848 was known as the Brooklyn Enigma. Despite spending 50 years bedridden , she gained fame as an intimidating spirit medium. She died on Feb. 11, 1915.
Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge, FRS (12 June 1851 – 22 August 1940) was a British physicist and writer involved in the development of, and holder of key patents for, radio. He identified electromagnetic radiation independent of Hertz‘s proof and at his 1894 Royal Institution lectures (“The Work of Hertz and Some of His Successors“), Lodge demonstrated an early radio wave detector he named the “coherer“. In 1898 he was awarded the “syntonic” (or tuning) patent by the United States Patent Office. Lodge was Principal of the University of Birmingham from 1900 to 1920.
Lodge was also noted for his Spiritualist beliefs and research into life after death, a topic on which he wrote many books, including the best-selling Raymond; or, Life and Death (1916), describing what he believed to be detailed messages through a medium from his deceased adult son who was killed in World War I.
William Stainton Moses (Nov. 5, 1839 – September 5, 1892) was an English cleric and spiritualist medium. He promoted spirit photography and automatic writing, and co-founded what became the College of Psychic Studies.
Victoria Woodhull (September 23, 1838 – June 9, 1927), a medium and carnival show clairvoyant, was the first woman-owned Wall Street brokerage house, the first woman to address a Congressional committee and the first woman to run for president. She championed free love, believed that marriage was institutionalized slavery and supported paid sex work.
Allen Kardec, the 19th Century founder of “Spiritism” and a man who changed the course of Latin American religious movements, was born on October 3, 1804.