Leonora Piper (née Leonora Evelina Simonds; 27 June 1857 – 3 June 1950) was a famous American trance medium in the area of Spiritualism. Piper was the subject of intense interest and investigation by American and British psychic research associations during the early 20th century, most notably William James and the Society for Psychical Research.
Researchers and scientists who studied Piper's mediumship have described mentalist techniques such as cold reading, muscle reading and "fishing", all techniques that she may have used to gather information about séance sitters, so she could appear to have unexplained insight. Science writer and mathematician Martin Gardner dismissed Piper as a "clever charlatan."
Biography
Piper was born to Stillman and Hannah (Stevens) Simonds. She grew up in Nashua, New Hampshire, where, according to her parents, she first displayed psychic abilities as a child. At the age of 22 she married shopkeeper William Piper of Boston and settled in the city's Beacon Hill area. After the birth of her first child, Alta Laurette, on May 16, 1884, in Boston, she sought relief from recurring pain caused by a childhood accident. A second daughter, Minerva Leonora, followed on October 7, 1885. Upon visiting an elderly blind man who claimed he could contact spirits that could aid in healing, she said she heard voices that resulted in her ability to deliver a message by automatic writing to a local judge who claimed the words came from his recently deceased son. Before Piper was investigated by psychical researchers she worked as a paid medium at a dollar for each sitting.
George E. Dorr, Piper's manager, set up six sittings with Dr. G. Stanley Hall and his associate Amy Tanner both from Clark University. A sitting with Mrs. Piper about 1910 cost $20.00. Piper made a fortune from her séances whilst being tested by psychical researchers, she was receiving around $1000 a year for her mediumship services. Piper was a trance medium but in her later séances preferred automatic writing. Piper died on July 3, 1950, at her home from bronchopneumonia. She was buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Massachusetts.
Career
Investigators
Agreeing to do readings for other visitors in her home, she soon gained attention from members of the American Society for Psychical Research and later its British associate, the Society for Psychical Research. Among these were Minot Savage, Richard Hodgson and George B. Dorr. Later psychic investigators included Oliver Lodge, Frederic Myers, James Hyslop, and G. Stanley Hall and his assistant Amy Tanner.
In 1885, the year after the death of his young son, psychologist, philosopher, and SPR member William James had his first sitting with Piper at the suggestion of his mother-in-law. He advocated a "third way" as a sort of agnosticism for cases where things were not yet explained and held out for the possibility of belief. James was soon convinced that Piper knew things she could only have discovered by supernatural means. James expressed his belief in Piper by saying, "If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, it is enough if you prove that one crow is white. My white crow is Mrs. Piper." as well as stating, "My own conviction is not evidence, but it seems fitting to record it. I am persuaded of the medium's honesty, and of the genuineness of her trance; and although at first disposed to think that the 'hits' she made were either lucky coincidences, or the result of knowledge on her part of who the sitter was and of his or her family affairs, I now believe her to be in possession of a power as yet unexplained." However, James did not believe that Piper was in contact with spirits. After evaluating sixty-nine reports of Piper's mediumship he considered the hypothesis of telepathy as well as Piper obtaining information about her sitters by natural means such as her memory recalling information. James could find little "independent evidence" to support the spirit-control hypothesis. Most of it was ambiguous or only circumstantially relevant, and some of it was false. However, Piper and the Italian Eusapia Palladino became the most widely studied parapsychologists and mediums of their time, especially by the works of Hugo Münsterberg and G. Stanley Hall.
Later when Piper's "spirit contact" was claimed to be recently deceased Society for Psychical Research member Richard Hodgson, James wrote, "I remain uncertain and await more facts, facts which may not point clearly to a conclusion for fifty or a hundred years."