Free Beyond the Occult by Colin Wilson

the family for years.
    Mrs Garrett then went on to make a series of weirdly accurate comments on Wendy — for example, that she loved horses and had recently developed an unexpected interest in American history.
    Her insights into the dog were equally impressive, particularly since LeShan knew nothing about dogs and the neighbours had only just moved in. Mrs Garrett announced that the dog had had a severe pain in its paw, and that it seemed to have a Sealyham companion. The neighbours verified that the animal had cut his paw so badly that it had turned septic and necessitated a six-week stay in hospital, and that although a pure-bred Welsh terrier, something about its bone structure made dog fanciers ask whether it had a touch of Sealyham. (LeShan did not even know what a Sealyham was.) As to the rose, Mrs Garrett commented that the soil was too acid for it to grow well — something LeShan had been told by expert gardeners.
    But perhaps his most impressive encounter with Eileen Garrett concerned a missing doctor. The man had gone to a medical conference in a distant town and failed to return home. Knowing that he was working with Mrs Garrett, the doctor’s wife sent LeShan a two-inch square from the shirt the doctor had been wearing the day before he vanished. When LeShan visited the medium he said nothing about the missing doctor. But when she was in a trance he placed the cloth in her fingers and told her that the man to whom it belonged had disappeared. Mrs Garrett replied, ‘He is in La Jolla [California]. He went there due to a psychic wound he suffered when he was fourteen years old and his father disappeared.’
    That evening LeShan telephoned the wife — who lived a thousand miles away — and asked her if anything had happened to her husband between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. She replied that his father had deserted the family when he was fourteen and returned home twenty-five years later. In due course the doctor reappeared of his own accord and verified that he had indeed been in La Jolla.
    The more LeShan investigated mediums, the more he became convinced that they see the world from a viewpoint that differs completely from that of the ordinary person. It is as if they can put themselves into states of mind in which they cease to be subject to the ordinary limitations of space and time. LeShan cites a case involving Mrs Margaret Verrall, the wife of a Cambridge don, who was one of the most remarkable mediums in the early decades of the twentieth century. When practising ‘automatic writing’ Mrs Verrall recorded the following scene: ‘The cold was intense and a single candle gave poor light. He was lying on the sofa or on a bed and was reading Marmontel by the light of a single candle… . The book was lent to him, it did not belong to him… .’ In a script a few days later she wrote, ‘Marmontel is right. It is a French book, a memoir I think. Passy may help, souvenirs de Passy, or Fleury. The book was bound and was lent — two volumes in old-fashioned binding and print.’
    Some time later she met a friend, a Mr Marsh, who told her that she had accurately described something that had happened to him. He had borrowed one volume of Marmontel’s memoirs from the London Library and taken it to Paris, where he had read it in bed, on a freezing cold night, by the light of a single candle. The chapter he had been reading was about the discovery of a picture painted at Passy and associated with a certain M. de Fleury.
    An interesting piece of clairvoyance, one might think, but not particularly remarkable… . Until we learn that Mrs Verrall wrote her description on 11 December 1911 and Mr Marsh did not read the book in Paris until 21 February of the following year. Mrs Verrall had accurately foreseen something that would not happen for more than two months.
    But then the episode of the vanishing doctor seems to carry the same implications. The doctor’s wife sent a shirt he had worn on the day