By Hamlin Garland
Famous American Author of “The Shadow World,” “The Tyranny of the Dark,” Etc.

    One summer night, a few years ago, I went over to Staten Island from New York to visit a young lawyer and who had told me marvelous stories of the manifestations at private circles which he held regularly in his home every Sunday night at 8 o’clock.
    His small apartment was in the second story of a frame house on a quiet street and the sitting took place in the little parlor. The “cabinet” was an alcove bedroom which was separated from the parlor by heavy draperies. The family consisted of his wife, her small daughter and her mother. One other visitor, a young Pole, and myself made up the “circle.”
    I examined the bedroom and closet at the request of the wife and then took my seat beside the young Pole. The wife played softly on the piano. Under these conditions and while a kerosene light was burning brightly enough for one to perceive anything in the room, the psychic suddenly appeared looking very white and very intense and began to pace up and down before the curtains. At last I moved to the right of the portiers and stood gazing intently at the opening.
    “Come out!” he commanded.
    Noiselessly—like a puff of gray-blue vapor—a figure emerged and confronted us. Its head and shoulders were well defined, but the arms appeared to trail off into smoke-like veiling. Its eyes were indistinguishable, its chin vague, but it bowed several times in slow and solemn fashion!
    Meanwhile I was studying the psychic who stood with a strained, distracted look on his face, his knees shaking. One hand was outstretched and clutching at the air as if he were making a supreme effort to hold the apparition till I should have time to study it. The other was at his heart as if to ease a pain.
    Slowly he crept toward the wraith. Each second he seemed to bend, to grow weaker and the ghostly visitor turned toward him, became vaguer and more formless and then, as two drops of water do, they appeared to meet and mingle and the psychic fell like a log inside the curtain, but the heel of one foot remained visible.
    The wife continued to play softly on the piano until at last the heel was withdrawn and my young host appeared looking pale and weak, but calm and mentally alert.
    He told me that he had held the “materialized form” as long as he could; that he felt a “drawing out” of his vital force, through his solar-plexus and from his forehead.
    “It is always hard to produce a form so far away,” he said.
    Conditions were not as I would have made them for a test, but they were plain and simple and the sitting a courtesy on the part of a young man who earned his living by hard work in the office of a New York corporation.
    I could not explain this projection of the astral then—nor can I now. It is one of the deep mysteries of my life.

From— The Day Book. (Chicago, Ill.), 26 Sept. 1913. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.