What happens when your hand begins to write words you never consciously chose?

In Episode 5 of The Haunted Line, we explore the strange history of automatic writing, a practice that became deeply intertwined with the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement.

Long before the familiar Ouija board, Spiritualists were experimenting with writing planchettes, small devices fitted with pencils that supposedly allowed spirits to leave messages on paper. By the late 1800s, mediums were claiming they didn't need the device at all. They could simply pick up a pencil, surrender control of their hand, and let the dead write through them.

We look at Anglican clergyman and Spiritualist William Stainton Moses, whose automatic writings were attributed to spirit communicators including one called "Imperator," and whose messages were eventually published as Spirit Teachings.

Then we meet Pearl Curran and Patience Worth, one of the strangest cases in the history of spirit communication. Beginning with a Ouija board in 1913, Curran produced an extraordinary body of novels, poetry, plays and other writings attributed to a mysterious personality named Patience Worth.

But were spirits really guiding their hands?

Or could automatic writing reveal something equally strange about the human mind?

From Victorian séances and spirit writing to unconscious movement and the ideomotor effect, we're asking the question at the heart of automatic writing:

Who's really holding the pen?

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Sources & Further Reading

Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto
Planchette: The Great Ill-Famed Land of the Marvellous
https://fisherdigitus.library.utoronto.ca/exhibits/show/psychical-research-collection/planchette

Society for Psychical Research, Psi Encyclopedia
William Stainton Moses
https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/william-stainton-moses/

Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research
The Experiences of W. Stainton Moses
https://iapsop.com/archive/materials/spr_proceedings/spr_proceedings_v9_1893-4.pdf

Smithsonian Magazine
Patience Worth: Author From the Great Beyond
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/patience-worth-author-from-the-great-beyond-54333749/

U.S. National Library of Medicine / PubMed
"Words of Healing": The Literature of Automatic Writing as Treatment and Prescription in the Victorian Age
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34176814/

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Where History, Hauntings, and Folklore Meet.