The evident fatigue of the child put an end to the seance.  Neither the mother nor Fanny knew at that time anything of my relatives, our acquaintance being then of recent date, but our intimacy with the family in after years enables me to say that any attempt at deception is out of the question.  Fanny died not long after of consumption, as did the mother and two other children, one of whom, an elder sister, had been influenced in the same manner as Miss A., who will be mentioned later, but had never consented to take part in the manifestations, which she regarded with great repugnance.  While sitting with us en petit comite, she used sometimes to be seized with a convulsive and involuntary effort of her hand to write, but she always refused to submit to the influence.  Fanny in her normal state showed no indications of mediumistic powers, nor did the mother.

During the investigation, we heard of a remarkable case in the circle of our own acquaintance which had been kept from public knowledge as far as possible by the aversion to publicity of the father of the subject, my brother’s chief foreman.  She was a girl of fourteen, of a timid and nervous organization, who had suffered great annoyance by the persistence of the rappings about her wherever she might be; at first in her bedroom, but finally to her great dismay in the class-rooms of the primary public school of New York, in which she held the position of assistant teacher and where she conducted the recitations.  The rappings caused such fright amongst the school children that she was menaced with dismissal if they did not cease.  She implored the agency which was responsible for the sounds to leave her alone at school and do what seemed best to it at home, and the rappings did actually cease at school.  As her father was a man well-to-do in circumstances and annoyed by the occurrence, he silenced the gossip about the matter as well as he could, and gave an inflexible denial to the request for a seance which came from friends who by chance heard of it.  My brother Paul, who was a fellow-foreman in the iron works, got permission, however, for a seance at which he and I only were to be present with the girl.  The phenomena were so strange that I got permission for a repetition at which only my brother Jacob and myself were present, and we preserved the notes of what passed.

Miss A., as I shall call her, told us in detail the development of the case.  After having been for some time troubled by the rappings she began to feel involuntary motions in her right hand which increased to constantly recurring violent exercise of the muscles, when it occurred to her from the character of the motions that the hand wanted a pencil to write and she laid paper and a pencil on the table.  Her hand then took possession of the pencil and began to scrawl aimlessly over the paper until, after the interval of many days, the agency seemed to have sufficient control over the muscles to form legible letters.