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FRANZ HARTMANN’s EXPERIENCES WITH SPIRITISM




« Thus far I had been an enemy to spiritism because I had been told that all the “spiritistic” phenomena were produced by trickery and fraud.  A believer in spiritism was, to my mind, a long-haired crank with goggle eyes, who would see the products of his own diseased imagination in the shape of ghosts in every comer.

Nevertheless, my curiosity prompted me to visit a certain “materializing séance” held by a medium by the name of Mrs. Rice or Mrs. Holmes, and there I saw the most wonderful phenomena of tangible appearances and materializations of ghosts, known as the spirits of Katie King and certain others.

I became interested in these things and went to hear the lectures of Professor Peebles, and the philosophy which he taught seemed to me very rational and plausible; but it overthrew all the theories of Buchner and Comte.

Just at that time I had a lady patient whose name was Katie Wentworth. She was a highly accomplished married lady, with English and Indian blood in her veins.

She was not a believer in spiritism, and rather unwilling to give credence to the accounts which I gave her of what I had witnessed; but for the purpose of seeing “whether there was anything in it,” she consented to sit with me, and after her recovery we held frequent séances together.

At first the phenomena were insignificant and the communications received through the “planchette” puerile; but after a while other influences were attracted, and we had the most astonishing results.

My friend Katie Wentworth became herself one of the most remarkable mediums for all kinds of manifestations, including trance, materialization, levitation, apports, direct writing, etc.  And perhaps, owing to her presence, I myself became to a certain extent clairvoyant and clairaudient, and I highly enjoyed the intercourse with the “departed.”

Being accustomed to go easily into extremes I now devoted nearly all my time to the reading of books on spiritism, such as the works of Andrew Jackson Davis, Hudson Tuttle, Judge Edmonds, and many others, while my principal amusements were my séances with my friend and with other mediums whom I had learned to know.

Some of my experiences during that time have already been described in the Occult Review.

Katie Wentworth’s accomplishments as a medium soon became known among the spiritualists; she received invitations for holding séances from all sides and accepted many. The consequence was that she was continually vampirized by these ghosts, lost her vitality, became paralyzed and died.

That these “spirits” were not what they claimed to be was clearly shown by the fact that, even within half an hour of that lady’s death, pretended spirits of some of the most celebrated physicians that ever lived on earth, came and made prescriptions for her and insisted that there was no danger.


It would perhaps have been well for me, if I had remained at New Orleans; but desire for change and adventures, together with glowing reports that came to me from Colorado, induced me to go to that country. I was tired of fashionable city life and I longed to see the “Wild West.”

There I made the acquaintance of Mrs. N. D. Miller, of Denver, one of the most remarkable “materializing mediums” that ever existed, and as she sometimes stayed at my house I had occasion to witness the most interesting phenomena, fully materialized ghosts became my almost daily companions, fresh seaweeds were brought from the far distant ocean; I was myself levitated to the ceiling and carried through the air; in short, all the now well-known spiritual phenomena occurred under test conditions which left nothing to desire.

I was, and am of course still, a believer in these phenomena, for I cannot “unknow” that which I have actually experienced and known as well as any other fact in my daily life; but my experience with my friend Katie Wentworth had already taught me that these phenomena were probably not always caused by the spirits of departed human beings, and that they surely often originated in occult but intelligent forces or powers at present unknown to us.

My desire was to know the cause of such things. I had no doubt that in some cases, especially in those of suicides or sudden deaths, the souls of the killed, being still bound to earth by their own unfulfilled desires, could communicate with mortals.  I had received strong proof of it and especially the following experience made a strong impression upon my mind:

I was elected coroner for the district of Clear Creek Country, to which Georgetown belongs, and it would have been my duty to order and hold inquest in cases of sudden death.

One morning, however, in a town not far from where I resided, a physician committed suicide by poisoning himself with morphine. I was duly informed of it, but missed the first train to go to that place, and when I arrived in the afternoon, the other physicians there had already dissected the body of their colleague and cut it to pieces without waiting till it grew cold.

That night the apparition of the suicide rose up before me. He was in a horribly mutilated shape and seemed to suffer a great deal.  It seems that his astral body had not yet been separated from his material form at the time of the dissection.  The apparition may have been the product of my imagination, but it seemed exceedingly real.

I made use of every opportunity to stay at houses that were reputed to be haunted by ghosts, and had some remarkable experiences; but the ghosts I saw or heard showed very little or no intelligence: sometimes they appeared to be birds of enormous size; their footsteps were audible and the rush of their wings could be felt.


~ * ~

But despite experiencing a lot I could not find a tangible explanation that would help me understand these phenomena.

While my perplexity was at its highest and I despaired of the possibility of knowing anything certain about these manifestations, a number of The Theosophist, a journal edited by H. P. Blavatsky and published at Madras, fell into my hands.

It contained an article describing the sevenfold constitution of man and the seven principles in the universe. This came to me like a revelation, and seemed to furnish the key to those mysteries whose explanation I had sought so long in vain.

I was delighted with this discovery, and my greatest desire now was to become personally acquainted with Theosophy and to learn from her more of the secrets of life and death. »

(Source: extracts of his autobiography published in the Occult Review, January 1908, p.12-17)




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