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Hamlin Garland
1860-1940
THE PULITZER Prize-winning author of 52 books, Hamlin Garland was
intimately involved with major literary, social, and artistic movements
in American culture. He was awarded honorary doctorate degrees by the
University of Wisconsin, Beloit College, Northwestern University, and
the University of Southern California. The latter institution now houses
the Hamlin Garland collection in its Doheny Memorial Library. The Hamlin
Garland Society exists today to disseminate information on Garland’s
literary works, and his early home in West Salem, Wisconsin is a
national historic landmark and museum.
Garland was one of the early members of the American Psychical Society (APS)
- a group in Boston, Mass. that was unhappy with the way Richard Hodgson
was conducting the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) and
which decided to form its own organization. In his 1936
book, Forty Years of Psychic Research, Garland states that he was
an agnostic and a student of Darwin and Herbert Spencer when he was asked,
primarily because of his scepticism, to serve as an investigator for the
APS. Over his 40-plus years of research, Garland came to believe in the
reality of psychic phenomena, although he struggled with accepting it as
proof of life after death. He saw it all as some strange manifestation of
the subconscious. In Forty Years, he wrote:
"I
concede the possibility of their (spirits’) persistence, especially when
their voices carry, movingly, characteristic tones and their messages
are startlingly intimate. At such times, they seem souls of the dead
veritably reimbodied. They jest with me about their occupations. They
laugh at my doubts, quite in character. They touch me with their hands."
But, Garland continued, he could come to no conclusions as to the cause
or the origin of the phenomena as he simply could not comprehend a
“fourth dimension.”
Following the publication of Forty Years, Garland began
investigating a mystery which he documented in his final book, The
Mystery of the Buried Crosses, published in 1939. Garland had been
given some 1,500 crosses and other artefacts allegedly unearthed by
Gregory and Violet Parent between 1914 and 1924. He was told that Mrs.
Parent began communicating with “dead souls” in 1914, just after she
recovered from a serious illness. The communicating spirits directed her
to buried treasures and artefacts all over southern and central
California. They were said to be buried by North American Indians during
the missionary period of California. Through a direct-voice medium, Sophia
Williams, Garland then communicated with the deceased Violet Parent, as
well as long deceased missionary priests and was led to additional crosses
and artefacts buried around California and Mexico. Among the other spirits
communicating with Garland through Williams were Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir William Crookes, Dr.
William James, and Dr. Gustave
Geley, all psychical researchers who said they were there to help
Garland in his search.
Garland concluded Buried Crosses more convinced that the
communication was coming from spirits than from the subconscious of the
medium, but still couldn’t bring himself to say that he accepted it as
proof of life after death.
Source: Michael E. Tymn, editor of The Academy of Religion & Psychical
Research Bulletin.
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