By that time I had found out that according to the definition adopted by the National Spiritualist Association of America, spiritualism is "the science, philosophy and religion of continuous life, based upon the demonstrated fact of communication, by means of mediumship, with those who live in the Spirit World."  Young and fresh from a pastorate in a denomination known for its empirical approach to religion, it then seemed to me a very sad thing that people should have to found a special church to feel at ease in speaking frankly and confidently of the basic concept of immortality.

As I watched other mediums I naturally caught on to something of their methods.  I found that when awake I could bring myself into a half-hypnotized state in which I could stand before an audience and describe unseen presences and often pick up their messages.  Spiritualist groups began to ask me to speak for them and to do this open clairvoyance.  I knew that I needed more training but in lieu of training I practiced on the audiences.

We formed a class in spiritual unfoldment, not too accurate a term, for it was our psychic abilities which were being unfolded rather than our spiritual powers.  It was here with this group that I learned to relax the body, a much rarer art than the average person supposes.  I also learned the beginning of a method of concentration.

One day in 1924 when I was in trance an invisible personality announced himself as Fletcher and said that henceforth he would be my permanent assistant on the unseen plane.  Just that simply our partnership began.  Fletcher said he was able to work efficiently with me because he had the right energy pitch or frequency for establishing and maintaining contact.  It was years before I had anything like a consistent notion of what he was talking about, but I was delighted that I was to have a dependable colleague who would appear whenever I went into trance and act as interlocutor between the invisible and visible visitors who came to talk together through my intermediacy.  Such a partner is commonly called a "control."  Of course it was not I whom Fletcher spoke directly; he announced himself to a friend of mine who was having the sitting — "Tell Ford that I am to be his control and that I go by the name of Fletcher."  At the next sitting my friend asked him, for me, who he was and for what personal reason he had attached himself to me in this helpful manner.  Fletcher then explained that he was one of the French Canadian boys who had lived across the river from my home in For Pierce.  He wished to use his middle name, Fletcher, he said, in order to save his family possible embarrassment because they were Roman Catholics and had certain ideas of the hereafter which did not exactly fit with what he had found.  They might even be disturbed, he said, to know that he had not found heaven to be inhabited exclusively be persons of his own faith; indeed, he himself had at first been very much surprised.  He said further that after the family left Fort Pierce he had grown up in Canada, had enlisted in the World War and had been killed in action.  He named his company and the place of his death; also he gave the address of his family.

I wrote to the family, asking after various members, including this boy, but not mentioning of course that I had heard from him directly.  One of the boys answered telling me of his brother's death, corroborating Fletcher's statement as to time and place.  So I accepted Fletcher at his (invisible) face value.  At times, however, I do see him and always as a young man.  Sometimes when I am giving a public demonstration and am not actually in trance, his face appears vividly before me.

We soon had a fine working partnership.  When I wish to go into trance I lie down on a couch or lean back in a comfortable chair and breathe slowly and rhythmically until I feel an in-drawing of energy at the solar plexus.  Then I focus my attention on Fletcher's face as I have come to know it, until gradually I feel as if his face presses into my own at which instant there is a sense of shock somewhat as if I were passing out.  Then I lose consciousness, appearing to be asleep.  My body is in a state of sleep and when I waken at the end of a session I feel as if I had had a good nap.

 

As soon as I am in trance, Fletcher announces his arrival to the sitters in the room by saying "hello" in a slight French Canadian accent.  Obviously it is my speaking equipment he is using, and for the most part my vocabulary.  Sometimes he uses words given him by discarnates but the fact that he catches an impressive does not mean he can pronounce it correctly.  Sometimes he spells out a specialized word as it is apparently being spelled to him; at other times he attempts two or three pronunciations until he seems to get an inner nod of approval that he has said the word correctly.

During the first moments of the trance Fletcher appears to size up the sitters.  He may comment upon their geographic derivation.  "You come from my part of the country."  "I see you've just flown in from the west coast."  "You seem to be quite a traveler."  Or he may say, "You're a chemist."  "You spend a lot of time at an easel."  "Another preacher tonight."  Or perhaps, "The worried man in the corner."  "The woman with a pencil."  He has even been known to correct the spelling of a sitter on the opposite side of the room from the sleeping medium.  He may ask the first names of the sitters and perhaps add, "The middle initial is X; that's an odd one."

The names of the invisibles are sometimes difficult for Fletcher to get, as for any control.  He may feel around saying Harry, Henry, finally coming out with, "No, he shakes his head; ah, it is Harrall."  On one occasion when a discarnate medical man was asked by a sitter to pick out the individual in the room who needed medical aid, the invisible physician immediately indicated the patient but had to feel around for her first name.  "Her name is — let me see — it is Summer, the fields are fresh and green, everything is  in full bloom — oh, yes, her name is June."  On another occasion when Fletcher was trying to get across the identity of a woman on the unseen side but could not seem to catch her name, he remarked, "They're showing me a book . . . it's a book of poetry . . . by Longfellow.  It's about my part of the country.  Acadia!  Oh, the name is Evangeline."

Sometimes amusing dislocations happen.  For instance, a rather saintly minister, discarnate, was reported by Fletcher as saying that a current family situation was a blankety blank shame.  After the sitting the horrified daughter protested that her father had never in his life used profanity.  When he was really angry, she said, he sometimes used the word tarnation and then they all got out of his way.  This kind of dislocation is apparently a part of the problem of translating emotional impact into words.

Who in the unseen worlds comes to the seances?  First of all, the loved ones of the sitter.  Most persons who come to a medium have someone they care for who has died, with whom they wish to make contact.  If that individual is interested and available he is probably waiting at the threshold and may be the first person Fletcher describes and introduces.  Usually the invisible relative or friend wants first to identify himself, and often does so by calling the sitter by a nickname or referring to other members of the family by traits known only to the family; or he mentions key incidents in the past, incidents often known only to the sitter and the one communicating.  The wealth of evidence brought through may be considerable.  And among the best of the evidential is often some trivia which the sitter has forgotten and brushes aside as inaccurate.  I have found that it never pays to refuse any data; just make notes and wait.  Later the items under suspicion may prove the most valuable evidence of continuing consciousness.

For instance, one night in the winter of 1955 I attended a dinner party in Rye, New York.  There were a dozen guests, among them the guest of honor, Dr. William T. Bidwell, of Greenville, South Carolina.  After dinner we sat in the library.  I was seated alone on one of the davenports and being full of good food, I was drowsy and fell into a clairvoyant but not unconscious state.  I recall that a guest from New Jersey discovered that he and a guest from Connecticut had a common friend and someone made the usual remark about the smallness of the world.

Then I spoke up, "There is a man here who gives his name as Adams and he says how right you are.  He says his old home is only a couple of blocks from Dr. Bidwell's home in Greenville and that he knew the Browns in China."  (I am borrowing the name Brown.)  Dr. Bidwell said he never heard of this man Adams; Mr. and Mrs. Brown said they never heard of him either.  Someone chided me, remarking that even a medium couldn't always be right.  But a few minutes later Mr. Brown walked over to the bookcase and took down an issue of Who's Who.  There was the name Walter Alexander Adams; the permanent address was Greenville, about two blocks from Dr. Bidwell's home; the man Adams had been first vice-consul both in Nanking and Tsingtao when the Browns lived there in the early twenties.  They could not have helped but know him in that small foreign community.

Most discarnates intent upon reaching their loved ones still living on earth want more than anything to establish the fact that they are not dead; next they usually want to send their love, to manifest the emotional bond which keeps them in contact with those they care for.  Hence most messages are personal, concrete, more or less trivial.  That is, the average invisible does not make philosophical pronouncements or divulge epochal scientific knowledge, and for the best of reasons; he would not speak in those terms if he were meeting his family face to face.  He evidences much the same interests he had on earth, with one exception.

The exception which creeps into a high percentage of the messages is the fact that the invisibles want their earth friends to know that their plane of consciousness, their situation as "dead" persons, is nothing like the stereotype of heaven.  Only a few bother to be coherent about what their state is like, but then very few sitters ask consistent questions.  The only people vaguer than the dead are the living.  It never ceases to amaze me that so few ministers, who spend their lives comforting the dying and consoling the bereaved, who speak eloquently about Easter and promise salvation in terms of eternal life, should have so little intelligent curiosity about the nature of death and the afterlife.  Most of them do not even have a tentative hypothesis.  Nor does the average person who comes for a sitting.

Apparently discarnate friends, sensing the general ignorance and lack of interest, do not try to enlighten the incurious in the short hour or so afforded by mediumistic communication.  And how could they when the whole subject of the nature of consciousness is involved?  However, a discarnate will sometimes do his best to inform a sitter that the communication between them could be direct.  Sometimes the message is heeded and the living person will put some effort into developing his own pick-up in the form of clairaudience, automatic writing or trance.  After all, there are thousands who know this direct communication one way and another.

Besides family and friends, specialists of various kinds show up in response to specific requests for specific aid.  But the specialists appear to be acquaintances of the interrogator or some discarnate friend of the interrogator's friend!  They do not just appear uninvited because a sitter legal aid, say, or psychological counseling.  Invisible promoters of causes sometimes arrive to give counsel to earth friends who are interested in the same cause; editors pop in on the seance of a writer, but usually because of some former contact, direct or by way of a mutual acquaintance, living or discarnate.

Fletcher does not seem to move aimlessly back and forth between the visible and invisible worlds.  In terms of place, he does not seem to move at all, and is always insisting that the universe is one and that the invisibles are not in another place but only in another state of consciousness.  Or, as a discarnate husband recently remarked to a grieving wife when she was bewailing having been left alone, "I haven't gone anywhere."

Now it is one thing to state that Fletcher exists as a personality separate from my own personality and to describe his ostensible method of acting as a go-between, and it is something quite different to explain how he operates.  This is a question I am often asked — the process which enables a discarnate personality to impress a "living" mind.

The customary explanation is that the mind of the entranced medium becomes passive and the mind of the discarnate who acts as control then takes possession of the body mechanism of the medium; using the medium's speaking apparatus but his own mental equipment, the control reports what he "sees" and "hears" among other discarnates and is also able to comment upon things going on in the room.  Thus, in trance I would be said to be mentally quiescent, blacked out, while Fletcher in some way takes over the physical mechanism which controls my hearing and speaking.  This explanation sounds reasonable enough, in broad terms, if one does not press for particulars.

 
Whatever the intricacies of our relationship, Fletcher has become as much a part of my daily life as any of my contemporary friends.  I am not dependent upon the trance state for glimpsing his face and knowing that he is at hand.  I know him objectively as a personality and the partnership that we effect in trance has made him something of an authority to hundreds of others.  People are constantly thanking him—as indeed they should, for without him my effectiveness as a psychic would be greatly limited—and I always feel satisfaction in a tribute to my partner.