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This man claims he's in direct contact with the spirits of dead painters.

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But is it really possible to receive messages from beyond the grave?

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In the sales room, can mediums conjure up the spirits of the dead?

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Does this rare blue orchid hold the key to the question of life after death?

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Mysteries from the files of Arthur C. Clarke, scientist, writer and visionary.

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The scientist who invented the communication satellite, the writer of 2010,

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and now in retreat in Sri Lanka, the visionary who ponders the riddles of this and other worlds.

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The ancient port of Gaul on the southern tip of Sri Lanka contains many relics of its colonial past.

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Fewer more evocative than this old Dutch church, the Grote Kierk.

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Its monuments and tombstones are grim reminders that, for the early European settlers, life was fragile and short.

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Few of their children survived to see their second one soon.

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Grief at the death of loved ones is a universal emotion and therein is the seat of spiritualism.

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But the spiritualists believe that even when the body dies, the soul lives on.

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And more than that, they believe that if you can establish the right connection, you can communicate with the dead.

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It's a seductive idea, but is it anything more than wishful thinking?

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Bell Grave Square, London.

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During the day, the embassies and consulates here buzz with diplomatic activity.

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But it is by night that number 33 comes to life.

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For this is the headquarters of the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain.

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Every room is a light with the hopes of the faithful.

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To draw portraits of dead people, psychic artist Coral Polch needs the right connection.

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We're a little more than a telephone line.

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Answer up because that strengthens the contact so much.

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Many of our spirit friends have never done this sort of thing before.

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They don't often get the chance to have their pictures drawn.

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So I know sometimes you're nervous, but I'm sure sometimes they are nervous.

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Now, my first problem always is to sort out the people I'm drawing.

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Quite a young link here. I've got a boy killed in an accident, went over quite suddenly.

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Oh, stay calm, lad. I've got one of these links that...

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I don't know what happened to him, but it's a dreadful feeling that I've shot into the next world.

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If they get too excited, I end up with a load of scribble if I'm not careful.

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I'm being drawn. There's a lady there. You've got a blue...

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sort of blue colour on there.

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Do you have a brother in the spirit world? No.

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No. I know someone who passed through there.

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Into the spirit world. A young man.

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Do you remember his hairstyle? Yes.

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It was rather like that. Yes.

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Oh, OK.

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He calls it a bit like a buzzbee.

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You know, it's sort of the hair that stood up rather.

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You know what buzzes look like. Yes, I did.

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Well, that's slightly exaggerated, but it's that sort of style.

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I might get him right now, because I wasn't happy when I started.

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The head condition was making me go all off balance,

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and I couldn't see what I was drawing. That's better.

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You all remember him sticking his hands in his pockets, won't you? I do, yes.

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Yes, because he said if there's one thing you often told him about,

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take your hands out of your pocket, you do look slummacky or slouchy, sort of thing.

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And there's also his nose. He says, good size, isn't it?

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Yes, it was. You used to tell me I had a big nose.

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Yes, it was. He said I'm glad she's not drawing my feet, though.

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They're pretty big feet. They were big feet, yes.

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And he says, you know, I didn't think being in the spirit world would be so much fun.

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Obviously one thinks of a young man like that passing so subtly tragic,

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but he said, oh, I don't mind at all. It's great fun over here.

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I can do anything I like.

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It's terribly strange.

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That is my sister, because everything fits.

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She was only 40-odd and she actually took her own life.

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I mean, it's not perfect, but it's all there.

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I just feel very shaken and very moved that she should want to contact me.

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This is definitely a picture of my father, and this would be a picture of him

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in the last two or three weeks of his life, I know.

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With their portraits packed away, the spiritualists move on to sample the other attractions,

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like sand reading.

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Here, handprints seem to allow the spirits to provide, through the medium,

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amazing insights into the characters of the sitters.

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Looking at this, I realise that the person concerned has over a period of years

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passed through many upheavals.

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Your son tells me that you've always been very domineering, obstinate and brave.

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Even the fly you bring seems to reveal your secrets to the spirits.

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If I just expand a little that this leaf is telling me this,

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I see that you have a very fine sense of humour.

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You can speak to somebody who would be a little bit uneasy and nervous

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and get them laughing, get them speaking quite naturally.

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And the pets at the psychic surgery have been brought from miles around

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by owners who are convinced that the spirits can work miracles.

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Yeah, because it's like patches, he was blind.

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He's the best that he'd never see, actually.

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And he went for contact healing twice.

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And then recently, since absent healing, we've had confirmation that yes,

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he's got tunnel vision and his vet thinks he's quite incredible

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and it's quite a miracle.

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The people who try to establish contact between the living and the dead are called mediums.

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To master the techniques of mediumship,

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apprentices need years of training and development classes.

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We're going through these psychic centres, we're going to open up those centres

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starting with the emotional, solar plexus, the spleen and the heart centres.

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Feel that power coming up, now bringing it up to your throat

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and now the clairvoyant eye between your eyebrows.

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Once prepared, trainees are invited to try out their powers.

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Your mother's telling me that you have three brothers?

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No.

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OK.

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How did you get it?

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Um...

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You didn't bring it up, did you?

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I didn't do that, no.

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You see, always accept, dear, that if something occurs, an error,

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then in some way you've not used your mechanism properly

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or you've interfered mentally or something.

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Right.

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Never let it pass. Go back.

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Spiritualism, now a worldwide movement, began in this house in Hidesville, New York State, in 1848.

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Katie Fox and her two sisters, Leah and Margaretta, claimed they were in touch with the dead.

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They said that the spirits communicated by making furniture fly about the room

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and by wrapping in answer to questions.

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Spiritualism became the rage on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Mediums vied with one another in curious stunts.

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In America, Marjorie Crandon claimed she could materialize a spirit hand for sitters to shake.

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She also exuded ectoplasm, a mysterious substance said to come from beyond the grave.

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In Europe in 1868, Daniel Hume astonished friends by appearing to fly from one third-floor window to another.

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He held more than 1500 sales.

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Some mediums like Florence Cook said they could conjure life-sized spirits from the dead.

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A diaphanous form called Katie King was photographed at her sales.

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Eminent physicist Sir William Crookes pronounced the phenomena genuine,

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while another scientist Sir Oliver Lodge, along with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

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championed spiritualism in lectures, magazines and books.

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Today, spiritualists from all over America go for their holidays to camp Chesterfield in Indiana.

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This psychic holiday camp offers all manner of methods for communicating with the dead.

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In the Museum and Art Gallery are a range of treasures said to come from beyond the grave,

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including spirit paintings depicting life after death.

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They claim these gems and arrowheads are gifts from the spirits.

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There's everything here that a spiritualist holidaymaker could wish for.

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Camp Leader Louise Irvine

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Spiritualists expect to have family gatherings, whether they are in the physical body or out of the physical body.

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They still come together together in this beautiful holiday atmosphere.

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And they consider this to be a family reunion, just the same as other people throughout the world.

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Have a reunion in a park or at the lake somewhere.

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We're all, all of the family gathers together from great distances.

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And so to them, they do this here, their family reunion in the body and out.

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Many of them describe the tremendous burdens and weights that they feel as they have come here,

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just simply being released and just leaving them like a vaporous cloud.

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They find that they are in a place like none other that they have ever been in before upon this earth.

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It is its hallowed ground, its holy ground.

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The camp offers a strange mixture, Christian guidance with red Indian spirit guides.

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It's exhilarating when visitors hear from their dead relatives.

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One time during a storm, the vibrations were very, very high because of all the energy.

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And the two worlds must have been very close together because my aunt, who had only been gone for about six months, came to me.

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And I was so shocked that I couldn't talk to her.

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And all I could say was, oh, and she repeated the word for me.

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And then she says, Jimmy, don't you realize who I am?

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And then I says, no.

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And she says, I'm your aunt, Myrtle.

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And I talked to her a little bit and she told me how wonderful it was on the other side and how well she was getting along.

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And it was fantastic.

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And it was a very uplifting experience for me.

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This Brazilian psychologist claims that when he goes into trance, he's in direct contact with the spirits of great painters of the past.

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And he turns out old masters in a matter of minutes.

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He says that Van Gogh works through his fingers.

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Under the scrutiny of the art department of Leeds Polytechnic, Luis Gaspareto produces the unmistakable brushstrokes by slapping the paint on with his fingers.

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And when the mood of the music changes, so does the artist.

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And when the music changes, the artist is in the mood to be a musician.

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And when the music changes, the artist is in the mood to be a musician.

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And when the music changes, the artist is in the mood to be a musician.

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And when the mood of the music changes, so does the style of his paintings.

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And when the music changes, so does the style of his paintings.

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In this session, Gaspareto produced eight crayon drawings and five oil paintings in less than an hour.

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And everyone carried the signature of a master.

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But do they convince the experts?

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I thought it was incredible. Absolutely wonderful.

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There's a very superficial resemblance in some of the work to the styles of some of the artists.

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But in the end, personally, I have to judge the whole business on how good drawing and painting quality is in the end, and it's very poor.

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If those artists had drawn and painted in that fashion, there's no way their work would be hanging in the galleries of the world.

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Retired teacher Stella Horrocks also claims to be in creative communication with the dead.

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In her case, they seem to come through by automatic writing.

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I'm in touch with over 200 spirits at the present time, but some come and go.

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You see, when you get dead over there, you don't just stay dead forever and ever.

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Some of them are born pretty quickly again.

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My uncles come through this week and they're burying him today.

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And my aunt Janet came through on the train coming home from her funeral last week.

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But it isn't only her relations. Among her contacts, she includes a galaxy of famous people.

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They seem to be able to write much faster through Stella than they did when they were alive.

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From her pen have come letters, diaries and books, each in different handwriting, from Virginia Woolf, John F. Kennedy and Jane Austen.

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They go to terrific speed. When the Austen one came through, I got through, I counted up, I couldn't believe it.

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2000 words an hour. David didn't even come through this year.

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Noel Coward is a regular visitor. And my authors are Charles Dickensard.

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Some set him on. He's written a whole book called The War Web.

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He was very interested in why he did a bit of espionage work, I think, and it's four war stories.

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And Noel digs into the paper with his pen. They're all different touches.

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Another one who's coming through the next novel is Thomas Hardy.

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But in spite of all Stella's efforts, there have so far been no best sellers amongst these volumes dictated by the dead.

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Well, there's certainly a strange talent operating here.

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But these second hand productions are mere pale shadows of the original works of art.

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They almost suggest that even if we do survive death, our skills don't.

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As a writer, I'm not prepared to accept those terms.

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What I find most depressing about the claims of the spiritualists is that so often they turn out to be deceptive.

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Spiritualism was tainted with fraud from the start. Margarita Fox, one of the founding sisters,

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confessed in 1888 that she'd faked the spirit raps by clicking her toes.

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There were scandalous court cases. Henry Cavendish sued three charlatans for the return of a quarter of a million pounds.

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Many mediums were caught using conjuring apparatus.

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In this chair, the unscrupulous Mr. Eldred hid all the props for a spectacular spirit show until he was exposed in 1903.

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The great escape artist Harry Houdini tirelessly campaigned against the charlatans of the spiritualist world.

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He used his experience as a magician to expose their tricks.

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In 1944, Scottish medium Helen Duncan was jailed for fraud.

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Sceptics said her spirits were made of cardboard, coat hangers and old vests.

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Even Camp Chesterfield suffered from scandals.

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In 1960, the psychic observer came out in mourning.

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Fraud had been uncovered at the camp.

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Editor Tom O'Neill had believed that an infrared camera would provide proof that spirit materialization was genuine.

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He was welcomed by the camp authorities.

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But to everyone's horror, the film showed all too clearly that the spirits were far from dead.

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The mysterious forms were actually well-known camp staffs waved in shifon.

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In nearby Indianapolis, former Camp Chesterfield medium Lamar Keen demonstrates the secrets of the sales room.

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Good evening friends of Earth.

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This is Dr. Charles Bailey.

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I am the instrument in charge of the seance.

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It is a pleasure for me to meet you here today and to speak to you.

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I might reveal the magnificent truth of spiritualism as we know it.

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Let's have the lights on please.

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We're actually in a hotel room converted into a makeshift seance room.

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Think of how much more effective it would be in a real seance room with spiritual music, with prayer, with singing.

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And in a real atmosphere.

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In this book, Keen confessed he'd always been a fake and explained how he hoodwinked sitters in trumpet seances.

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Actually, in a real trumpet seance what you would see would be this trumpet floating about the room.

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The spirit voice built within.

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The trumpet moving, perhaps landing in your lap, perhaps resting in the palms of your hand.

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You would see the luminous bands here, here and here.

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You would feel the resonance of the trumpet from the voice apparently within.

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But actually what would be happening would be that I would be speaking through this trumpet

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and the voice would be vibrating and bouncing from the other trumpet, making it resonate or vibrate.

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He also revealed that there'd been a vast filing system kept in a secret vault under the cathedral.

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In it they'd stored information, filtered from visitors during seances.

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Later the sitters would be amazed at the medium's knowledge.

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With tricks like these, he'd done very well for himself.

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I made quite a lot of money. I didn't always have time to count it all.

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Sometimes when camp was over, I would leave with a suitcase full of money.

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As you'll have realised by now, I'm not very much impressed by the evidence.

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But here's a story, one of the very few that makes me wonder.

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During the war, Georgina Fieckes was living in this house.

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Part of the family had emigrated to South Africa, and her cousin, Owen Howison joined the army there.

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In 1944 he was killed in action.

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Soon afterwards, she claims, he appeared before her, rising from a ball of golden mist.

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He said his tongue had been hit, but he still felt very much alive.

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Would I please tell his mum and please give his love to Thor Helen?

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Georgina says she was dumbstruck, but she wanted evidence.

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And I tried to speak, although my lips were numb and frozen.

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I said, proof, give me proof. And he said, watch.

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And to my amazement, he opened the top of his shirt and took out a beautiful blue flower, a penetrating perfume.

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It was very beautiful, it wasn't just a daisy stuck on top of a stalk, it was long and bell-like, orchid-like.

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Wonderful scent permeated the entire room.

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And while I stared in amazement, he put it back in the shirt, took it out and put it back and took it out.

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This extraordinary behaviour.

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And then he said, quite lovely, tell mum, Table Mountain, and instantly shivered and shook and it all went.

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She wrote it once to Owen's mother. Back from her Aunt Beatrice in South Africa came this curious explanation.

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Owen had one day gone up Table Mountain, something she was quite unable to do, and had picked one protected blue flower and brought it home, hidden in his shirt.

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The flower was a rare blue orchid that grows on Table Mountain. It was a criminal offence to pick one and Owen had risked prison to bring it back to show her.

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Naturally he was jumpy when he did so.

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While he was showing it to her, the doors slammed and he hastily hid it again, but it was a false alarm and he took the flower out and she was able to examine it.

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Georgina says she couldn't have known about the blue flower because her aunt had kept the story secret to protect Owen.

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His second appearance seemed to provide more evidence that Owen's spirit had survived his death.

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The next time Owen appeared, again and always in golden mist, he approached me bitterly for not having contacted Helen.

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I was very distressed about this because I had tried and his mother had been through all his correspondence. There was no letter signed Helen or even an abbreviation for Helen.

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But there had been a Helen in Owen's life. He'd written her romantic letters and poems. She contacted the family when she saw the story of the blue orchid in the newspapers. Otherwise they might never have known.

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So could Owen Howison really have returned from beyond the grave?

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There's no doubt that spiritualists get great comfort from their beliefs. And who would wish to rob them of that? But personally I remain a skeptic. Will we ever know the truth until we join these dead?