Gladys Osborne Leonard Medium
Medium Gladys Osborne Leonard
The greatest Trance Medium with whom the author is acquainted is Mrs.
Osborne
Leonard. The outstanding merit of her gift is that it is, as a rule, continuous.
It is not broken up by long pauses or irrelevant intervals, but it flows on
exactly as if the person alleged to be speaking were actually present. The usual
procedure is that Mrs. Leonard, a pleasant, gentle, middle-aged, ladylike woman,
sinks into slumber, upon which her voice changes entirely, and what comes
through purports to be from her little control, Feda. The control talks in
rather broken English in a high voice, with many little intimacies and
pleasantries which give the impression of a sweet, amiable and intelligent
child. She acts as spokesman for the waiting Spirit, but the Spirit occasionally
breaks in also, which leads to sudden changes from the first person singular to
the third, such as: "I am here, Father. He says he wants to speak. I am so well
and so happy. He says he finds it so wonderful to be able to talk to you" and so
on.
At her best, it is a wonderful experience. Upon one occasion the author had
received a long series of messages purporting to deal with the future fate of
the world, through his wife's hand and voice in his own Home Circle. When he
visited Mrs. Leonard, he said no word of this, nor had he at that time spoken of
the matter in any public way. Yet he had hardly sat down and arranged the
writing-pad upon which he proposed to take notes of what came through, when his
son announced his presence, and spoke with hardly a break for an hour. During
this long monologue he showed an intimate knowledge of all that had come through
in the Home Circle, and also of small details of family life, utterly foreign to
the Medium. In the whole interview he made no mistake as to fact, and yet many
facts were mentioned. A short section of the less personal part of it may be
quoted here as a sample.