Evolution of a Medium

Helen Hughes (1893-1967)

 

 

Maurice Barbanell's Power of the Spirit (1949) is the memoir of a journalist examining "psychic faculties" and diverse manifestations of "spirit power."  He'd attended many seances and public appearances of medium Helen Hughes.  Aspects of her mediumship encompassed clairvoyance/clairaudience and 'spirit communication' during trance (what today is called 'channeling').  There are also chapters about Helen in another edition of Maurice's remembrances, This Is Spiritualism (1959).  The following excerpts from the latter book describe incidents in her life in North East England that foreshadowed her becoming a medium.

Like most mediums, Helen Shepherd had psychic experiences as a child.  Because she was always "seeing things" her Methodist parents had secret fears about her sanity.  When she, the first of seven children of a bottle-finisher in a glass works, described her invisible playmates, she was scolded for indulging in "absurd fancies" . . .


No matter how many times she was reproved for "telling lies," Helen knew that she could see and hear real children, because she played with them.  Even at school she was punished for her visions.  Yet a number of other children shared one of her psychic experiences.

At the age of eleven she was going to morning school at Seaham Harbour.  Passing through a doorway, she was attracted by a child, unlike any of those attending the school, standing by the window inside her classroom.  Helen called about twelve other children and pointed to the figure by the window which, strangely, they all could see.  They decided that the child must have been accidentally locked inside the school.

The teacher approached the chattering crowd to ask the reason for their excitement.  They pointed to the window, but the child had disappeared.  Their explanations did not convince the teacher, who selected Helen as the "ringleader" of a practical joke.  As a punishment for "seeing a ghost," she made Helen stand by the same window where the vision had appeared.


About three years after the school incident, Helen had another strange psychic experience.  Playing with her friends in the street, she looked up in the sky and clearly saw the words, "Fever spreading."  This time none of the other children could see anything unusual.  When Helen's mother heard this latest story, she rebuked the child.  Yet three weeks later, Helen caught the fever.

Though soon afterwards Helen left school to start as an apprentice to a dressmaker, the visions and voices continued.  At the early age of eighteen, she married Thomas Hughes, a miner.  The responsibilities of a working woman's life, and the birth of three children in just under four years, seemed to force her psychic faculties into the background.  After the birth of her last baby she developed a severe spinal complaint, and became an invalid with no immediate help of recovery.

There followed the darkest days of her life.  Added to her constant pain was the growing fear caused by the return of the strange psychic happenings which began to make her doubt her own sanity.  There was no one to explain the simple fact that she was an undeveloped medium . . .


Helen Hughes had become so ill that she was expected to die.  Relatives and friends gathered for what seemed the inevitable end.  Instead, she found herself walking in a garden of dazzling beauty, profuse with flowers of all colours.  To her surprise she met an elderly woman friend whom she knew to be long since dead.  Excited by this reunion, they had a long discussion, in which Helen became conscious of a new lease of vigorous life in marked contrast to the miserable existence which had been her lot.

"After a few moments of conversation," Helen recalls, "I saw a flower that even in this garden of ineffable beauty seemed to outshine all in its brilliance of colour, and reached forward to caress it.  But I was restrained with the words, 'Not yet, you have work to do.'"

She awoke to find her relatives and friends bending anxiously over her.  Excitedly, she told them that she knew she was not going to die.  Outwardly, they agreed; inwardly, they doubted.  Her suffering was not over.  For two years she was unable to walk and had to use a bathchair.


. . . she began to hear the voices of people who she knew were long since dead, and she began to see them.

Encouraging her to walk, the voices became louder and were heard more often as Helen's health improved.  Other psychic phenomena experienced during this period were "knockings on the wall, and her bed would shake."  The "form of an unknown woman" made silent visits and Helen knew her visitor "was no longer in this world."  Helen and her husband moved to another cottage, expecting the haunting phenomena to cease yet "The phenomena were more insistent than ever."  Thomas Hughes began "seeing things" himself "when he perceived the unknown woman who had presented herself to his wife for many months."  A focal point for Helen's life changing was a visit from an "old roadman [vagabond] who had been working outside."  He was found to be "a spiritually enlightened wayfarer" that instructed her about Spiritualism and mediumship.

 

For six months, the roadman came to see her daily, encouraging her in every way he could.  Finally, he advised her to visit a Spiritualist church.  She received a message from the visiting clairvoyant, a complete stranger, who knew all about her psychic experiences and predicted that she would become a great medium herself.

Upon greeting the 'mystery woman' at her next appearance, Helen learned that she was the mother of Willie Ducker, who lived in the same village and had been declared missing while in military service.  The sequence of events involving the 'mystery woman' reached a climax the following day when Helen went to tell Willie's sister about the surprising turn of events.  When Helen arrived she was greeted with the news:
 

"Our Willie's been killed."  The tragedy had been conveyed to the sister in news brought only a few minutes before by the postman.

Maurice Barbanell wrote in the first chapter of This Is Spiritualism:  "The medium is, in effect, a human radio or television set.  He or she . . . is able to tune in to a world of activity that for the rest of mankind is invisible and inaudible . . . Mediumship comes into being when these innate psychic powers are developed in conscious co-operation with what are called spirit guides, who are qualified, because of their advanced evolutionary state, to act as tutors in spiritual matters."  Maurice mentioned about Helen Hughes: "Mackenzie King, when he was Prime Minister of Canada, always made a point of having a private séance with her whenever he visited Britain."

A chapter of Power of the Spirit includes Helen's descriptions of the sensations experienced by a trance medium and what occurred during sittings; along with perspectives of the purpose and meaning of this phenomena, as follows.
 

"During control," she says, "I am completely unconscious and am dependent on the testimony of my friends for knowledge of the phenomena that occur.  I am told there is a complete transformation of my personality.  Facts and proofs of Survival are given of which I could have no previous knowledge.  When controlled, my voice, gestures and pose of body alter and take on the characteristics of the controlling entity."

Though she is not entranced during demonstrations of public clairvoyance, Helen Hughes says that she experiences a modified form of control.  She appears to be doing everything of her own volition, yet she is aware of the stimulating action of psychic forces on her nerve centres.  This frequently accounts to a feeling of ecstasy, but she never loses consciousness.

The release from the trance state she likens to the feeling of awakening after sleep.


I have had many trance sittings with Helen Hughes, the most evidential being when they have taken place impromptu and not by pre-arrangement.  There are three regular communicators.  The first is White Feather, a dignified Indian with slow and deliberate speech.  "He is the philosopher, the teacher and the comforter," says Helen.  "Many hearts have been healed by his kindly words.  Tolerance and love are his greatest ideals.  He is the great moulding influence in my life."  Then there is Granny Anderson, a North Country woman with the distinctive dialect and idioms of that district, who never holds anything back.  Lastly there is Mazeeta, a "spiritual Peter Pan," she has been called, a disarming child who really is a child and not a secondary personality.  Her ideas, speech, mannerisms, spelling and writing are all those of a child.

A hard-bitten Northern journalist, after inquiring into Helen's mediumship, summarized his experience of her three guides by declaring: "I can only say that if you heard these three voices on your radio you would find it impossible to credit that they could come from one person.  If Mrs. Hughes is not a genuine trance medium, then she could make a fortune giving character impressions on the stage."

Each of these communicators brings different types of evidence at seances.  In addition, there is frequently direct control by your own loved ones or friends who have passed on.  [A blog article concerning such a predicament is "Raymond's Other Guides".]


Usually at a sitting with Helen Hughes, you have a succession of communicators, with the three guides speaking at the beginning and two of them returning at the end.  Granny contents herself with one communication only, but what she has to say is very much to the point.  Mazeeta takes a childish delight in giving evidence by writing, and her messages, which include the giving of names, are spelled phonetically.


The trance seances of Helen Hughes have been the means of bringing comfort to many bereaved people, particularly the relatives of the war dead.  I have met scores of these former mourners, whose lives have been transformed by psychic knowledge, during my travels up and down the country at the many meetings I have addressed with Helen Hughes.

Maurice wrote in This Is Spiritualism about her appearances when many people are gathered:

Her public displays of clairvoyance are always given at great speed and almost without pause.  Frequently she breaks off in the middle of one spirit message to start another from a communicator who has suddenly made himself visible or audible to her.  Knowing that the previous recipient will be disappointed at the thought that the message will not be completed, she provides reassurance by saying that she will return to it when she has successfully transmitted the new communication.


There is something in the voice of the recipient which is indicative to the medium.  At the beginning of the message more than one person may try to claim it.  I have noticed how eagerly Helen Hughes will listen to the would-be recipients and eliminate one of them by saying, "It is not your voice I want."

In a chapter of Power of the Spirit about Helen's public exhibitions, Maurice mentioned that at times a factor is "an unusual psychic gift of smell."

I heard her tell one person that the dead man she was describing was a chemist because she could smell a chemist's shop.  At another meeting, she added the evidence that the communicator liked a good smoke, and she was sure it was not a pipe.  She knew it was a cigar, she said, because she could smell it.


Audiences have laughed when she has said that the particular individual whose message she was transmitting liked his little drop of drink.  She knew because of her psychic sense of smell.


"In clairvoyance," she said, "I see a spirit form as naturally as if I were using the physical eyes.  I feel as though I am there and yet not there."

She added: "First, before I begin to demonstrate, I have to make myself completely passive.  I can tune in at any time and when I do so I can see with my spirit eyes and hear with my spirit ears.  It is something like opening or closing a door.  It is a power within myself which I can either open or close.  It is something within me that does the seeing and the hearing, something like an inner eye and an inner ear."


"I feel as if an electric force, which takes of something magnetic in nature, is at my feet, and, rising, flows through me.  When it is working well and is really strong, there seems to be something like a series of telegraph wires, a range of vibrations, along which comes the messages.

"After a time, the 'power' dies down.  I cannot pick up the vibrations easily, and then, as I am liable to become less accurate, I always have to stop.  One must never force this strange 'power,' for fear of inaccuracy, and also because it imposes a strain on the system."


"I actually hear the spirit voices sometimes speaking in my ear.  At other times I hear them in the region of my solar plexus.  The voices vary in clarity, some being as loud as ordinary physical voices and others whisperings or muffled tones."  [There is a parallel between these variations and what may be heard in audio recordings of Direct Voice Phenomena.  The range in manifesting speech is mentioned in the blog article "Leslie Flint's Life as a Direct Voice Medium".]


I asked her about the problem of when two or three people claim to recognize the same spirit message.  Usually, she said, a spirit light comes from the communicator and moves to the person for whom the message is intended.  When the light does not appear, and two or three people respond, the medium knows which one is the right one because when she hears the correct response from the audience something "clicks" within her.


She explained the fact that she breaks off one message to start another by saying that the voices often do not give her much time.  They are rapid and always break in.

When the spirit fails to make himself heard, then her guide has to step in, but that is never as effective as direct communication.


When she is giving clairvoyance, said Helen: "I see a spirit form as naturally as if I were using the physical eye.  I am not aware of any abnormal sensation until I begin to respond to the feelings or characteristics of the spirit that appears to me."

"But all these feelings seem to be under the control of my will.  That is, I can 'close up' or 'open out' at will.  If a sensation is too unpleasant I can 'switch it off.'  I can often get a clear understanding of the mission and message of the spirit by interpreting these sensations."

The mediumship often functions spontaneously in the street, on trains and elsewhere.  The dead people, she told me, can see her and they frequently greet her.  Usually this takes place in the morning rather than in the evening.  "The freshness of the morning somehow makes them easier to my vision," she added.  Frequently in railway carriages Helen has been faced with the problem of eager spirit communicators who show themselves clearly, converse with her, and then ask for messages to be given to one of the occupants of the compartment.  To break down the traditional British reserve and talk with a fellow passenger in a train is bad enough, but to pass on a spirit message to a complete stranger is to ask a rebuff.  Occasionally Helen has taken a chance and when she has transmitted the message it is almost invariably received with gratitude.

Another interesting fact is that in the streets she often sees spirit forms of dogs walking with their earthly owners.  Seldom, however, has she clairvoyantly seen cats out of  doors, although she has seen them sitting on people's laps in their own homes.  When she takes a walk in her village Helen is usually accompanied by the Alsatian who was her earthly friend for many years.

Maurice wrote in the Foreword of Power of the Spirit —
 

When death comes we "shuffle off our mortal coil," that is, we discard our physical body which has served its purpose and is returned to nature, which utilizes is elements for her own purposes.  But that is not the end of us.  Our consciousness persists.  We continue as complete individuals, with all our characteristics and idiosyncrasies, with the ability to love, to enjoy affection and friendship, with our memory intact and with a complete set of faculties expressly designed for use in the larger life that we now inhabit.