The now famous Vale Owen messages began after the mother of the Vicar of Orford, the Rev. George Vale Owen, passed away in 1909. Shortly afterwards, Vale Owen’s wife developed an aptitude for automatic writing and through her he received messages instructing him to sit quietly, with a pencil in hand, and write down any thoughts which came into his mind. After a time, he came to understand that the thoughts were coming from an external force rather than his own consciousness. At first the messages were vague and drifted from one subject to another but gradually they began to take form and he began to receive information unbeknown to him.

Most of the early messages came from an entity claiming to be Vale Owen’s mother and a communicator named Kathleen, who assisted by acting as an intermediary between his deceased mother and himself. Aside from Vale Owen’s mother, many of the messages came from a group of entities that wanted to relay information about the afterlife and what we can expect when we get there.

Vale Owen came to the attention of Lord Northcliffe, the ‘press baron’ of the day. Northcliffe was so impressed with the messages he published them in his newspaper, the Weekly Dispatch. Given that this was the era of World War I, the messages gave hope to many that their loved ones killed in battle, far from disappearing into oblivion, had transitioned to another plane of existence.
Subsequently, the messages were combined into this series of four books entitled, The Life Beyond the Veil.

A clergyman of the Church of England and later a convert to Spiritualism, George Vale Owen (1869-1931) is most remembered today for his four volume work titled The Life Beyond the Veil (The Lowlands of Heaven, The Highlands of Heaven, The Ministry of Heaven, and The Battalions of Heaven), the first volume of which was published in 1921. He authored a number of other books, including Facts and the Future Life (1922), The Kingdom of God (1925), Problems which Perplex (1928), and Body, Soul, and Spirit (1928).

Born in Birmingham, England, Owen was educated at Midland Institute and Queen’s College, and ordained in 1893, serving in Seaforth, Fairfield, and Liverpool, before being appointed curate-in-charge of Orford, Warrington in 1900, where he served for 20 years. After some of his early automatic writing scripts came to the attention of renowned publisher Lord Northcliffe, they were printed as a series in the Weekly Dispatch, the result being that Owen was forced to resign from the Church of England. He was persuaded to put the scripts into book form, The Life Beyond the Veil going through many reprintings in the English-speaking world and translated into French, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Portuguese. After a lecture tour in the United States, Owen became the pastor of a Spiritualist church in London. Continued