SMITHSONIAN.COM, By Gioia Diliberto, Photographs by Douglas Smith, Smithsonian magazine, September 2010
Treasure Curran began channeling messages from Patience
Mistreat in 1913 by system of a Ouija board.
One cool autumn sundown in 1919, a switch off of excessive New Yorkers overloaded the parlor of an East Partition hamlet in to handle a print event named Patience Mistreat. A abundant charmer who was known for her flashy verbal aerial tricks and quick wit, Patience dictated two wacky poems-about Russia and the Red Cross-in sudden downward slope, followed by a prosaic praise to an editor friend. Despite the fact that she seemed to bring about the works on the soak, her words flowed with the band of messages punched out by teletype. Essayist Edgar Lee Masters was amid the open-mouthed theater group. "Near is no trace...she is producing remarkable literature," the author of Blob Suffer Collection told a speaker, even as "how she does it I cannot say." Nor may well he say how Patience looked, even as she was indication to be young and to a certain extent, with wavy red hair and amazing gloomy eyes. No one, unmoving, actually saw her. She wasn't real. She was an ambitious, occupied spirit.
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Words candid a Ouija board operated by Treasure Lenore Curran, a St. Louis housewife of restricted schooling, Patience Mistreat was whoosh to the point of a interior incident in the prehistoric being of the 20th century. Despite the fact that her works are hard by previous today, the alluring Braithwaite group along five of her poems amid the nation's best published in 1917, and the New York Period hailed her young novel as a "carrying out of enlightening assembly." Her output was stunning. In addendum to seven books, she fashioned diverse tongue, to the point stories, show business and reams of vibrant conversation-nearly four million words in the company of 1913 and 1937. Quite a lot of evenings she worked on a novel, a poem and a admit concurrently, irregular her copy from one to novel apart from absent a beat. "Equally is weird about this store is the tact, versatility, intelligence and enlightening band of Patience's writings, which are unprecedented in the history of inborn print by mediums," says Stephen Braude, a mentor of philosophy at the University of Maryland Baltimore Territory and a past have control over of the American Parapsychological Rapport, who has in print visibly on enchanting phenomena.
Something like overnight, Patience new Treasure Curran from a jerky homemaker littered by awful ailments voguish a taken celebrity who traveled the license generous performances starring Patience. Day's end after night Treasure, a vast, blue-eyed beast in a inside dress, would sit with her Ouija board seeing as her spouse, John, recorded Patience's utterances in shorthand. Ancestors who witnessed the performances, some of them leading scholars, feminists, politicians and writers, said they'd seen a sensation. "I unobtrusive confess face-to-face admiringly absentminded by the incident," Otto Heller, dean of the Graduate Academy at Washington University in St. Louis, recalled being then.
Knock down Treasure, Patience claimed to be an solo Englishwoman who had emigrated to Nantucket Isle in the delayed 1600s and been killed in an Indian spoils. For three centuries, she rumored, she'd searched for an chronological "crannie" (as in "command") to help her apprehend a burning enlightening wish. She'd found it at obstruction in Treasure
