Posted on 24 March 2025, 8:08

In White Crow Books’ latest reissue about William T. Stead – Stead, The Man: Personal Reminisces, Stead, a British journalist and author on psychic matters, recalled sitting with a clairvoyant when the clairvoyant said, “I hear another voice speaking.” The voice then told Stead that “If you go to Chalons I will go with you.” 

Stead (upper right photo) asked who was communicating. “I have been dead some time,” came the response. My name is Lefevbre. Eugene Lefevbre (lower left photo) was a stunt pilot who was killed on September 7, 1909, the first person to die while piloting a powered airplane. However, neither Stead nor the others sitting in the circle recognized his name at first. Another spirit began communicating and it was not until the next day that Lefevbre returned. By that time, Stead had figured out who this communicator might be. The dialogue recorded after that was:

Stead: “Ask Lefevbre if he was the man who was killed in the aeroplane accident.”

Lefevbre: “Yes, I thought you knew it.” (Stead had been abroad at the time and was unaware of Lefevbre’s death.)

Stead: “You can communicate directly with me. Do you understand English?”

Lefevbre: “No, not much; but I transmit my thoughts to the medium and he translates them into English.”

Stead: “What was it that caused your rapid fall?”

Lefevbre: “I did not have time to think. You scarcely have time to reflect when you fall.”

Stead: “In your rapid fall did you keep your presence of mind?”

Lefevbre: “This is what I felt. I was conscious that I was falling, but before touching the ground I had lost consciousness. I felt no pain nor any sensation in my physical body. It seemed to me that my spirit was projected out of it. I had a sensation of rapid rotation, then something gave way suddenly, and I found myself in the air, seeing beneath my mortal remains and the machine. It was not disagreeable. I observed too that a being who was very powerful and who calmed me was near me.”

Stead was planning to go to Chalons a few days later to cover a flight demonstration by Prince Serge de Bolotoff. Lefevbre told him to warn Bolotoff that his motor would not work properly. Stead so warned Bolotoff. Bolotoff tested the motor and found nothing wrong with it and then took his seat in the aircraft. However, the motor would not then start and the starting handle broke. The demonstration flight was then abandoned.

Dogfight

That story brought to mind the story of Second Lieutenant Claude Herschel Kelway-Bamber, whose plane was shot down by a German fighter pilot as they engaged in a dogfight near the Flanders region of Belgium during November 1915. Claude (bottom right photo) was just 20 years old and attached to the Royal Flying Corps at the time of his death.

Claude is one of five WWI victims I wrote about in my book, Dead Men Talking. He communicated with his mother, Liza, through the mediumship of Gladys Osborne Leonard, one of the most famous mediums of that era. “I was rather depressed as I went out to my machine that last November morning,” Claude communicated to her. “I don’t know why.  I certainly had no presentiment of evil; but, once started, my spirits rose as usual, and I felt quite cheery and singularly free from nervousness.  Many men here have since told me this rather curious fact, that on the occasion of their last fight, whether in the air or in the trenches, nervousness left them.  I don’t know whether the spirit instinctively knows its fate and braces itself to meet it, or if one’s spirit friends are able to make their presence and comfort felt at that supreme crisis, but probably it was the only occasion on which I was absolutely free of all fear.”

Claude went on to explain that when he and his accompanying observer were attacked by two enemy planes, his feeling was one of complete irritation as they were on their way back after finishing some work over the enemy lines.  “I felt harassed, too, as I climbed and turned and dived here and there to attack.  My observer said something and I remember getting the nose of the machine down to get below one of our opponents, when I felt a terrible blow on my head, a sensation of dizziness and falling, and then nothing more.” 

Claude further communicated to his mother: “It may have been a fortnight or more later – we have no account of ‘time’ here, so I can not be sure – that I became conscious again. “I felt dizzy and stupid but was not in pain, and on collecting my thoughts and looking round found myself in bed in an unknown room. Before thought took definite form I felt I had been passing through space.  My body seemed to have become light.  I wondered if I was in hospital, and if anyone had written to tell you I was wounded. Nurses moved about the room; if I attempted to talk or ask questions a doctor came to my side, and putting his hand on my head soothed me to silence again.”

What seemed like several days later, a doctor came to Claude’s bedside and explained to him that he had passed out of the physical body.  With much confusion, Claude replied,  “Great Scot! You don’t mean I’m dead!”

Very Little Suffering

Drawing from my book, The Afterlife Revealed, one of the earliest accounts of a person’s dying moments, as reported by the deceased person himself, was set forth in an 1863 book by Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan, the wife of Augustus De Morgan, the famous mathematician.  She reported on the experience of Horace Abraham Ackley, M.D., of Cleveland, Ohio, as communicated through a medium: “I experienced but very little suffering during the last few days of my life, though at first there were struggles, and my features were distorted; but I learned, after my spirit had burst its barriers and was freed from its connection with the external body, that these were produced by it in an attempt to sever this connection, which in all cases is more or less difficult; the vital points of contact being suddenly broken by disease, the union in other portions of the system is necessarily severed with violence, but, as far as I have learned, without consciousness of pain.

“Like many others, I found that I was unable to leave the form at once.  I could feel myself gradually raised from my body, and in a dreamy, half-conscious state.  It seemed as though I was not a united being – that I was separated into parts, and yet despite this there seemed to be an indissoluble connecting link.  My spirit was freed a short time after the organs of my physical body had entirely ceased to perform their functions.  My spiritual form was then united into one, and I was raised a short distance above the body, standing over it by what power I was unable to tell.  I could see those who were in the room around me, and knew by what was going on that a considerable time must have elapsed since dissolution had taken place, and I presume I must have been for a time unconscious; and this I find is a common experience, not however, universal.”

Lifted in the Air

Communicating through South African trance medium Nina Merrington, Mike Swain, who died in an auto accident, told his father Jasper Swain, a Pietermaritzburg, South Africa lawyer, that he left his body an instant before the cars actually impacted.  Heather, his fiancée’s young sister, was also killed in the accident.  Mike told of being blinded by the glare of the sun reflecting off the windscreen of the oncoming car.  “All of a sudden, the radiance changes from silver to gold.  I am being lifted up in the air, out through the top of the car.  I grab little Heather’s hand.  She too is being lifted up out of the car.”  When they were about 30 feet above the car, they witnessed the collision below them and Mike heard a noise like the snapping of steel banjo strings.  They had suffered no pain.

Back to William T. Stead and his Letters from Julia, published in 1909.  Stead recorded the following via automatic writing from a woman named Julia Ames, who had died in 1891.  Julia informed Stead that she had exchanged experiences with many others on her side of the veil.  “With me the change was perfectly painless,” Julia wrote through Stead’s hand.  “I wish that it might be so always with all who are appointed to die.  Unfortunately, the moment of transition sometimes seems to be very full of pain and dread.  With some it lasts a comparatively long time; I mean the time of quitting the body.  With some it is momentary.  The envelope opens, the letter is released, and it is over.”

Julia likened “death birth” to childbirth, tough for some, relatively simple for others.  “The tranquil soul that prepares and knows need not feel even a tremor of alarm,” she explained.  “The preliminaries of decease are often painful; the actual severance, although sometimes accompanied by a sense of wrench, is of small account.” 

Giving up the ghost

Many other clairvoyants have suggested that “letting go” or “giving up the ghost” is apparently difficult for many people and depends much upon one’s spiritual understanding or, concomitantly, how materialistic the person is. Gladys Osborne Leonard (upper left photo) explained that it is sometimes difficult for the etheric body to dissociate itself from the physical envelope. She pointed out that those who lack a spiritual understanding and fear death are more “fixed” in the physical, and thus there is much more of a struggle in the release. 

According to Leonard, drinking plenty of water strengthens the etheric body and enables it to more easily separate itself from the physical body. On the other hand, food is not necessary.  “Even if they will take it, I am convinced that the dying do not need ‘nourishment,’ Leonard continued. “To ‘nourish’ the worn-out physical envelope which the soul is trying its best to shake off is only to create and prolong an unnecessary struggle between the two bodies.  In many cases it does not even strengthen the physical, because it can no longer make use of solid food, which only clogs the system, and produces more pain and suffering.”

The administration of drugs also hinders an easy transition from the physical to the etheric body, Leonard added, again stressing the need to give the dying person water, even if only a few drops at a time by means of a syringe. “Water is the one thing that the etheric body can make use of when trying to free itself from the physical at the approach of death of the latter.”

In The Challenging Light, Frances Banks, communicating through the hand of Helen Greaves, states that those making the change from material to ethereal do not recall any pain in the process.  “If they experience terror, it is because they expected it,” explained Banks, an Anglican nun in her earthly life.  “The lurid pictures impressed upon the soul-mind by mistaken teachings of hell and torturing agonies become real.”

Banks further wrote that her own transition was very simple.  She seemed to relapse into nothingness until she awoke refreshed. “The death of the human body should hold no terrors,” Banks offered, “and when this thought is allowed to be taught and understood by the various practicing religions of the world, a big bogey will have been removed in the onward thinking of the races.”

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.
His latest book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is published by White Crow books.

Posted on 10 March 2025, 7:59

While recently watching one of the many UFO (now UAP) documentaries on television, Gina, my wife, commented that it is going to take a good photograph of one of the alien occupants of those UFOs for most people to believe they are genuine and not optical illusions of some kind. I took issue with her and pointed out that a number of photographs have been obtained of materialized spirits and yet few people are aware of them and most of them dismiss them as bogus. 

Gina quickly added that the alien photos would have to be taken by someone very credible for anyone to believe they are not fakes, to which I pointed out that Sir William Crookes (bottom left photo), who took photos of the spirit entity called Katie King, was one of the most renowned scientists in the world during the latter part of the nineteenth century. He was credited with discovering the element thallium and inventing the radiometer, the spinthariscope, and the Crookes tube, a high-vacuum tube which contributed to the discovery of the X-ray. He was knighted for his scientific work and was the founder and editor of the publication, Chemical News and also served as editor of the Quarterly Journal of Science. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1910 and received honorary degrees in law and science from Birmingham, Oxford, Cambridge, Ireland, Cape of Good Hope, Sheffield, and Durham universities. He was highly respected and not someone to be easily duped or to fabricate strange stories. 

From December 1873 to late March 1874, Crookes studied Florence Cook, a teen-aged girl whose mediumship involved the materialization of a “spirit” calling herself Katie King, although saying her name had been Annie Owens Morgan in her earth life and that she was the daughter of buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan. She claimed that her appearances were part of her assignment from the other side to convince the world of the truth of Spiritualism.

Due to darkness and a materialization cabinet being required for condensation of the ectoplasm exuded by Florence Cook, the actual materialization of Katie King was not witnessed. What was seen was Florence Cook going into the cabinet and Katie King emerging while Cook remained in an altered state of consciousness in the cabinet. Debunkers claimed that Florence Cook was simply changing costumes in the cabinet. However, King and Cook were seen and photographed separately and although somewhat similar in appearance, there were distinct differences in height, hair color, and facial characteristics.

Rumors then circulated that Cook had arranged for her sister to wait outside and sneak in the house at an opportune time, playing the role of Katie King. A later rumor had it that Crookes was having an affair with the young medium and therefore collaborated with her in the hoax.

Among those observing Katie King was popular author and editor Florence Marryat (bottom right photo), who reported that even though Katie King warned Crookes that light could harm her and the medium, the sitters asked Katie at one sitting if they could turn up the gas light to better observe.  Katie consented but later said that it had caused much pain.  “She took up her station against the drawing-room wall, with her arms extended as if she were crucified,” Marryat wrote. “Then the gas-burners were turned on to their full extent in a room about sixteen feet square. The effect upon ‘Katie King’ was marvelous.  She looked like herself for the space of a second only, then she began gradually to melt away.  I can compare the dematerialization of her form to nothing but a wax doll melting before a hot fire.  First, the features became blurred and indistinct; they seemed to run into each other. The eyes sunk in the sockets, the nose disappeared, the frontal bone fell in.  Next the limbs appeared to give way under her, and she sank lower and lower on the carpet like a crumbling edifice.  At last there was nothing but her head left above the ground – then a heap of white drapery only, which disappeared with a whisk, as if a hand had pulled it after her – and we were left staring by the light of three gas burners at the spot on which ‘Katie King’ had stood.”

More than fleeting appearances 

It is not entirely clear how many experiments Crookes carried out with the young medium, but indications are that it was in the dozens over those four months and that that they were all not fleeting appearance. In one experiment, Crookes said that Katie King walked about the room for two hours. Marryat reported that Katie sat on her lap and talked with her. “…to imagine, I say, the Katie King of the last three years to be the result of imposture does more violence to one’s reason and common sense than to believe her to be what she herself affirms,” Crookes stated.

Photographs were taken by Crookes and others, but photography was still in its early stages at the time and they are not as sharp as one might expect today.  (Top right photo shows Florence Cook in trance on the floor while Katie King materialized; top left photo show Crookes with Katie King on the left and with Florence Cook on the right).

Marryat asked Katie if blood ran through her body and if she had a heart and lungs.  Katie responded that she had everything that Florrie (Cook) had.  On that same evening, Marryat observed Katie naked before her as Florrie Cook lay beside her on the floor.  When Marryat asked where her dress was, Katie said she had sent it on before her (to the other side)..  At another sitting Marryat and other sitters were given pieces of Katie’s dress, but when they got home they had all disappeared.

Wearied by the attacks and rumors from skeptical colleagues, while other witnesses cowered from testifying in his support, Crookes gave up psychical research and returned to orthodox science.  Although he maintained a private interest in psychical research, he spoke very little of the subject in public, often very guarded and occasionally indicating that the “psychic force” he had witnessed may not have been the work of spirits.  However, in a speech before the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1898, he said he had nothing to retract.  His writings in subsequent years indicate that he returned to a belief in spirits and, concomitantly, the survival of consciousness at death.  In a letter dated February 6, 1915 to physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, Crookes addressed a question by Lodge about a statement made years earlier.  “Respecting my alleged statement that I had never had a satisfactory proof that the dead can return and communicate you must bear in mind that the quotation is from a letter said to be written by me in 1874.  I do not remember much of my opinions at that date, but I have no doubt the statement was true at that early date.”
 

In 1916, Crookes stated that the phenomena he had observed during the early 1870s, “point to the existence of another order of human life continuous with this, and demonstrate the possibility in certain circumstances of communication between this world and the next.” In 1917, a year after his wife’s death, Crookes is said to have had a lively conversation with her at a London séance. He died in 1919 at age 86. 

One of the scientists who lambasted Crookes for not debunking Cook and medium D. D. Home was Dr. Julian Ochorowicz, professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of Warsaw and one of the founders of the Polish Psychological Institute in Warsaw.  After he began investigating psychical phenomena and photographed materializations coming from the medium Stanislawa Tomczyk, he changed his views. “I found I had done a great wrong to men who had proclaimed new truths at the risk of their positions,” he confessed. “When I remember that I branded as a fool that fearless investigator, Crookes, the inventor of the radiometer, because he had the courage to assert the reality of psychic phenomena and to subject them to scientific tests, and when I also recollect that I used to read his articles thereon in the same stupid style, regarding him as crazy, I am ashamed, both of myself and others, and I cry from the very bottom of my heart. ‘Father, I have sinned against the Light.’”

Photographing Phantoms

Dr. Charles Richet, the 1913 Nobel Prize winner in medicine, dedicated his 1923 book, Thirty Years of Psychical Research, to Crookes and Frederic W. H. Myers, another pioneer of psychical research.  Like Ochorowicz, Richet initially scoffed at Crookes’ findings.  “…the idolatry of current ideas was so dominant at that time that no pains were taken either to verify or to refute Crookes’s statements,” Richet wrote.  “Men were content to ridicule them, and I avow with shame that I was among the willfully blind.  Instead of admiring the heroism of a recognized man of science who dare then in 1872 to say that there really are phantoms that can be photographed and whose heartbeats can be heard, I laughed.  This courage had, however, no immediate or considerable effect; it is only today that Crookes’s work is really understood.  It is still the foundation of objective metapsychics, a block of granite that no criticism has been able to touch.”  Richet observed and photographed a “spirit” known at Bien Boa.

Nevertheless, the debunkers stick tightly to the stories about Cook’s sister sneaking into and out of the house – not just once but many times – and Crookes having a romantic interest in Cook.  As for Marryat seeing Katie King dematerialize and sink into the floor, the debunkers ignore her since she was not a scientist. The photos taken by Crookes, though a seemingly honorable and reputable scientist, are not convincing. Moreover, the fact that Richet also saw and photographed Bien Boa, must, they claim, also be bogus.

Wikipedia praises Crookes’ career in science, even mentioning that his discovery of the Crookes Tube “changed the whole of chemistry and physics.” However, Wikipedia also offers that he had poor eyesight and therefore cannot be trusted in what he claims to have seen among the spiritualists.  They say nothing about the others who reported seeing the same thing as Crookes.  Wikipedia relies on a psychologist who wasn’t even born when Crookes died, to say that he was gullible when it came to so-called spiritual matters.  They further point out that he had grieved the loss of a brother a few years earlier and this probably added to his “will to believe” in such an obvious hoax.   

I asked AI (ChatGPT) what Katie King was.  The reply, in part: “Katie King was a spirit who allegedly materialized during séances in the 19th Century…[Crookes] conducted extensive experiments with Florence Cook in 1874 and took a series of photographs that, at the time, were said to show the materialization of Katie King….Crookes himself seemed convinced that what he observed and photographed was genuine…He stated that he had seen Katie King in full physical form and believe her to be a materialized spirit..  However, skeptics have argued that the materialization of Katie King was likely a trick, possibly involving clever use of the medium’s clothing or a hidden assistant…….Despite the controversies, the story of Katie King remains one of the most famous cases of spirit materialization in the history of spiritualism, with debates still ongoing about whether the events were genuine or the result of deception.”

But AI makes no mention of the experiments by Richet, Ochorowicz, and a dozen or more other credible scientists who reported much the same thing as Crookes. Shouldn’t the cumulative evidence be factored in?  Were each and every one of those esteemed scientists duped over and over again? 

And so I maintain that photos of alien beings, even if taken by credible people, will be dismissed as likely fakes.  It all exceeds the boggle threshold of the vast majority of people.

Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.
His latest book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is published by White Crow books.