So Supernatural - MYSTICAL: Patience Worth

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

Patience Worth hit America’s literary scene hard in the early 20th century. She was a celebrated poet, novelist, and a charming conversationalist. But she was far from your typical literary celebrity: Patience was a ghost.  

The following is a poem by Patience Worth. Am I a broken liar, who at the master's touch respondeth with a tinkle and a whir? Or am I strung in full, and at his touch give forth the full cord? These are familiar questions for anyone. Am I broken? Can I project something into the world that's full and beautiful? But they were especially important for the author, Patience. In the early 1900s, Patience was working extra hard to get her work out there into the world, which wasn't all that easy considering she was dead. This is Supernatural.

I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. This week, we're looking at Patience Worth. In the early 20th century, she hit America's literary scene as a celebrated poet, novelist, and as a charming conversationalist. In 1917, not one, but five of her poems appeared in the prestigious Braithwaite Anthology. But no one had actually seen her her because Patience was a ghost. We'll have all that and more coming up. Stay with us. Life was not easy in the early 20th century. I'm not talking like lack of dishwashers and vacuum cleaners. I'm talking about death. In 1900, the average lifespan is 49 years old,

thanks to things like childbirth, war, disease, you name it. So when a religious movement called spiritualism promises people a way to contact the dead, many of them leap at the chance. They miss their loved ones. And if mind readers, fortune tellers, and mystics can help dull that pain, they're all for it. One of these devotees is a middle-aged woman from St. Louis named Emily Hutchings. Spiritualism is more of an interest or hobby for Emily. By day, she's a writer, and she's also close friends with a housewife named Pearl Curran.

The two of them often spend their evenings in Pearl's parlor doing all the normal things women do in the night, like gossip or talk about an article Emily is working on, while their husbands play cards in the next room. Then, in the fall of 1912, Pearl's father dies. Pearl is devastated by this, and as a spiritualist, Emily decides to introduce a new activity to their evenings, a Ouija board. You've probably seen a Ouija board, most likely in some kind of horror context. They've become a huge part of pop culture thanks to movies like The Exorcist.

Nowadays, most people won't go near them, but in 1912, Ouija boards weren't seen as dangerous. They were one of spiritualism's most popular tools. They look a lot like your average board game. They're flat, rectangular board with letters and numbers printed across it and the words yes and no written on two corners. It also comes with a smooth, flat piece of wood called a planchette, which is placed on top of the board. Participants sit around the board, each with a finger on the planchette, and they wait for spirits to move it, spelling out messages. So Emily brings this board to Pearl's house and Pearl's like, listen, okay, I'm willing to try it.

Why not? Anything to talk to my dad again. For months, the two of them play with the Ouija board and for months, Pearl remains unimpressed. The planchette does move beneath their fingers, but it only seems to spell out gibberish, nothing worth writing down. Pearl calls it silly chatter. That is until the night of July 8th, 1913, when Emily and Pearl perch the Ouija board between their knees and put their fingers on the planchette. And that's when something very different happens.

The planchette starts moving quickly. And in this very assured way, it zips from M to A, and it keeps going until it spells out this sentence. Many moons ago I lived. Again I come, patience worth my name. Emily and Pearl are shook. They have never received a message even close to this clear before. As a dedicated spiritualist, Emily is thrilled and Pearl is excited too. So they put their heads down and start asking Patience more questions. Where was your home? Across the sea, Patience says. In what city or country? This time,

Patience gives a more complicated answer. She says, quote, about me, ye would know much. Pearl and Emily look at each other, wide-eyed. This is really happening. In a St. Louis sitting room of all places, they are talking to a ghost. Over the next few weeks, Pearl and Emily sit down at the Ouija board as often as they can, and they keep making contact with Patience. They recognize her by her distinct, old-fashioned way of talking. It sounds more like 17th century England than 20th century St. Louis. They also realize that Patience doesn't really want to talk to Emily, the real spiritualist at the board. She mainly wants to talk to Pearl.

Whenever Pearl sits at the Ouija board, the planchette just starts to slide, spelling out messages from Patience. And she doesn't just feel her fingers moving. Words and pictures play through her mind almost as if she's, you know, being shown a movie. Over time, it's clear that Patience has this special connection with Pearl. Like Emily can sit at the board, or anyone else for that matter, but Pearl has to be there too. When she is, so is Patience. Before long, Pearl's neighbors catch wind of a ghost down the street, and they all come calling. Pearl and her husband welcome them because, at this point, they're just as shocked and as excited as anyone else. Even Patience seems to like having visitors.

She greets guests with witty banter and sometimes cheeky remarks. For example, when a local doctor comes to visit, Patience spells out, quote, he yonder hath much aneath his skull's cap that he wardeth not. In other words, there's a lot going on in his head that he's not saying out loud. And when the doctor finally asks her some questions, Patience jokes. See, ye hath spoke a thing that set aneath his skull's cap. Pearl's neighbors aren't just here for old-timey banter. They want to know more about the spirit they're talking to.

They ask Patience Worth questions about herself, and gradually she fills them in on some of her backstory. She claims that she was born in the 17th century and that she initially lived in England but traveled to America later in her life and she was eventually buried in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Patience also indicates that she had long red hair and never married and at point, she even gives a detailed description of the church she attended back in England. She talks about how it looked with its little windows, even the sounds, how there were men's shoes scuffing the floor during service and women's skirts rustling, the creak of the wooden benches, and the hum of a bee who'd gotten stuck inside. Patience even describes the feeling of the church. She says it was aloof and had a, quote, chilling godliness about it. She says that when she sat there, quote, heaven seemed far, far.

There's something powerful about that description. It puts you completely in the strange 17th century scene. It feels real, like Patience has to have been there. But for all the incredible memories she does share, Patience is pretty reluctant to answer too many questions about her past, which means it's hard to get cold facts or anything to verify whether she ever actually existed. She's even more reluctant to answer questions about the future or afterlife, which means there's no quote-unquote evidence that she's actually supernatural. All of which brings up an important point. Is Patience really a ghost?

The fact that she spoke exclusively through Pearl makes fraud seem possible. Like, maybe this is all Pearl putting on an act. But for most of the neighbors witnessing it, there's one huge factor that makes fraud seem impossible. It's the consistency of Patience's 17th century vocabulary. She just never seems to use any modern words. Sometimes she even throws in some weird language that none of the Curran's guests understand, and they have to actually look it up in the dictionary. Whereas Pearl, she's just a regular old St. Louis housewife. She isn't particularly well educated and her main academic interest has always been music. It's not like she'd been some die-hard reader of 17th century novels. As far as Pearl's friends are concerned there's just no way

she'd be able to pull off Patience as an act, especially when Patience moves on from just chatting the evening away to dictating poetry, and good poetry at that. Coming up, Patience starts her literary career. Now back to the story. A few months after she makes her first appearance, Patience Worth goes from chatting to dictating poetry. At first, the poems are short fragments, like this one. A blighted bud may hold A sweeter message than the loveliest flower For God hath kissed her wounded heart

And left a promise there It's very sweet, but simple. Slowly, though, Patience seems to get more confident. Her poems get longer, and they start coming faster. The neighbors coming to watch her in action are amazed. She sometimes is dictating at a rate of 1,500 words an hour, and Pearl mostly stops using the Ouija board to capture all those words. She claims she doesn't need it anymore. Supposedly, patients' messages are coming to her

so efficiently and naturally they go straight to her head. Whenever this happens, Pearl feels a sort of, like, pressure in her head. She describes the feeling like this. I am like a child with a magic picture book. Once I look upon it, all I have to do is watch its pages open. If the stars are mentioned, I see them in the sky. If heights or deeps or wide spaces are mentioned, I get positively frightening sweeps of space. That definitely sounds like an otherworldly experience. And remember, before all of this, Pearl wasn't even a spiritualist. So while patience is not something scary to her, Pearl's also baffled by why this ghost chose her to be its medium. So in 1914, after about a year into her conversations with patients,

Pearl decides to talk to an expert about what's happening to her. She settles on this guy named Morton Prince. Prince is an expert on abnormal psychology and neurology. He's making big waves in America by helping establish psychology as a scientific discipline. So basically, he's someone with polar opposite beliefs to spiritualism, which is why Pearl wants his opinion. She travels all the way up to Boston where Prince works, and she does a few sessions with patients at his house. Prince is curious about what he's seeing, but he won't really make any pronouncements about what's happening to Pearl without studying her first. And the way he proposes to do that is through hypnosis. Now, Pearl's used to talking with ghosts at this point, but something about hypnosis freaks

her out. She imagines going into that altered state and a horrible thought occurs to her. She might lose patience in the process. Pearl can't risk that. Her connection to patience has become too important to her. So she turns down Prince's offer, returns to St. Louis, and tells her husband that this is it. She's not going to question it anymore. Patience is a part of her life, and she's going to make it her mission to promote her writing. Over the next year, that's exactly what Pearl does. And Patience seems to cooperate, because she starts dictating fiction as well as poetry. Patience does it in the same way as poetry, though,

where she basically sends her messages straight into Pearl's head. And for Pearl, it's a way more intense experience. She describes it this way. When the stories come, the scenes become panoramic, with the characters moving and acting their parts, even talking. It basically sounds like Pearl is having 3D visions, like IMAX status. She's doing her best to write down everything Patience is telling her. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is just catching wind of Patience's worth. The first bit of attention comes from the spiritualist community. They're elated, and for many of them, this feels huge, like an incredible piece of evidence that spirits actually exist.

But the real commotion starts in 1916, three years after Patience first made contact with Pearl and Emily. The publisher, Henry Holt and Company, prints an account of Patience's worth. The book is full of snippets of her writing and conversations, and once it's published, the attention isn't just coming from spiritualists. The broader public is riveted. Even the literary world latches on. The New York Times comments, patient worth's messages out of the darkness never sink into the commonplace level, but always show high intelligence and sometimes are even tipped with the flame of genius. Patience and Pearl are suddenly full-on celebrities. The next year, Patience's first novel, The Sorry Tale, A Story of the Time of Christ,

is published to rave reviews. And the following year, in 1918, the Joint Committee of Literary Arts of New York names Patience Worth one of its outstanding authors. Her poetry appears in anthologies alongside all the leading poets of the day, like Amy Lowell and Edna St. Vincent Millay. This is way more than a gimmick. Patience is considered a real talent by the literary tastemakers of her time. Part of what impresses them is her range. The sorry tale takes place in the time of Christ. Her second novel, published in 1918, is a classic Victorian romance presented in a tight 19th century voice. Still, anytime Patience Worth talks, it's that 17th century dialogue.

And I guess it makes sense. Patience is from the 17th century, but she's been a ghost ever since. She's witnessed how people in the 19th century talked. But it's an impressively large wheelhouse considering how unfailingly accurate her word choice is. So obviously, the current household is drawing bigger and bigger crowds than ever. Guests come for big buffets of supper. The men smoke cigars and they all play cards. And children are even running around. I mean, it's this like cheerful party atmosphere. There are none of the ominous trappings of spiritualism, no candles or

chanting, no cliches. The real product is on full display because patience is at the top of her game. She's writing and writing and writing, but she's still stopping to chat with her audience and make cheeky observations about their quirks. From what I can tell, she's doing it the same way she writes her novels and poems, without the Ouija board. She just speaks straight into Pearl's head and Pearl tells it to the audience.

It sounds maybe a little iffy, but very few people leave the Curran House unsatisfied. Many think that they've encountered a miracle. One of those is Otto Heller, the dean of the graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis. After a visit to Pearl's house, he says, quote, I confess myself completely baffled by the experience. The poet Edgar Lee Masters tells one reporter, there is no doubt that she is producing remarkable literature.

How she does it, I cannot say. Of course, there are always skeptics. The more famous Patience gets, the more they're looking for ways to delegitimize her. One of the most persistent arguments that they make is that this whole thing is a huge opportunity for profit. In other words, Pearl is pretending to be Patience just to make money. Except she isn't. Pearl doesn't charge people to talk to Patience or to listen in on her writing sessions. Plenty of Patience's writing is published, but even in the best of times, that doesn't make tons of money.

Pearl and her husband even start a literary magazine to share more of Patience's writing with the public. And they end up losing money. Plus, they're paying for the constant dinner parties at their house out of pocket. And when Pearl occasionally travels outside of St. Louis to do demonstrations, they pay for that too. Still, it's not enough to keep tongues from wagging. And when a man named Charles Corey catches wind of Patience, he is ready to solve the mystery. For good. Coming up, the vultures descend on Pearl and Patience.

Now back to the story. When Charles Corey hears about Patience, he's just not ready to accept that Patience is a real ghost. Corey is an academic, the chairman of the philosophy department at Washington University. He believes in facts and research. And even if there's no fraud going on here, he doesn't believe in ghosts or Ouija boards, period. Corey goes to several of Pearl's sessions to check out the phenomenon for himself, and he is very impressed with what he witnesses. Like most of their guests, he leaves the Curran house astonished. It definitely seems like Pearl is channeling something. Still, there has to be

some kind of rational explanation. And if he can just study Pearl, Corey's sure he'll figure out what is actually happening inside her brain. Unfortunately, ever since Morton Prince tried to convince Pearl to do hypnotism, she isn't interested in being studied by anyone. But Corey refuses to be deterred. He pours over the writing supposedly produced by patients and studies all the accounts of her that he can find. Then, in 1919, he publishes his conclusion in the Psychological Review. And you can probably guess it is not very supernatural. In Corey's opinion, Pearl Curran has what we'd refer to today

as dissociative identity disorder. And Patience Worth is her alternate self. Now Corey has to acknowledge one shortfall in his conclusion. Normally, people with dissociative identity disorder inhabit just one personality at a time, but Pearl is very much present during her sessions with patients. She'll ask patients questions or chime in with her own commentary. It's definitely more like a conversation between two people, so Pearl doesn't totally fit the profile of someone with this disorder. There are other things Corey's theory fails to explain, too, like how this housewife with an average education and no prior writing experience

could speak in perfect 17th century diction, not to mention multiple novels that accurately reflect different time periods. Other critics come up with their own quasi-scientific explanations. Some of them think Pearl has a type of inherited nerve cells, basically a talent that's been biologically transmitted to her by her ancestors. That's obviously not a real thing. And even in the 19-teens, none of these so-called rational arguments are strong enough to stop Patience and her literary momentum. In fact, her decline has nothing to do with science

or any evidence that Pearl is a fraud. And it has everything to do with public taste. While Patience kept speaking to and through Pearl for her entire life, by the 1920s, spiritualism was going out of fashion. Literature was in a state of rapid change thanks to heavyweights like F. Scott Fitzgerald, and authors like Patience Worth faded into the background. Pearl Curran ultimately died in relative obscurity in 1937. When she did, so did Patience Worth. But the pair didn't fully disappear. They left behind Patience's seven full-length books, plus reams of poetry, short stories, plays, and witty conversations, which altogether amounted to nearly four million words. As long as those words have survived, so has the debate around patience and pearl. Some critics have questioned whether the language patience spoke was really so authentic to the 17th century.

So fraud seems a bit more likely now than it did to people back then. Others have marveled at Patience's incredibly detailed knowledge about obscure topics like the daily lives, plants, and foods of people across multiple historic time periods. Daniel Shea, English professor emeritus, told the Smithsonian Magazine that even if Pearl was doing some serious studying, that alone couldn't explain it. But there is one possible explanation for patience. It has to do with research in neuroscience that's happened since Pearl's death. She may have had what researchers call a highly superior autobiographical memory. This is similar to a photographic memory, but it's not limited to visual images. It can include things like conversations, even from decades ago. It's extremely rare, but when it

does occur, it can happen in otherwise average-seeming people with very normal lives, just like Pearl. If Pearl did have this kind of mental capacity, she might have carried detailed memories of everything she's ever read or ever heard ever since her childhood, and she'd been able to use some of them to create a 17th century ghost. Still, Pearl's friends and acquaintances never reported on her having a special memory. And a super autobiographical memory doesn't explain the moments of real talent in Patience's writing. What might explain this, according to Gioia Della Berto at the Smithsonian, is a piece of writing Pearl published under her own name. This was in 1919, about six years after Patience Worth made her first appearance. It's a short story called Rosa Alvaro Entrante,

and it follows a Chicago salesgirl named Mamie. Mamie is living a lonely, boring life when she encounters a fortune teller. The fortune teller is clearly a fraud to the reader and to Mamie. But when the fortune teller says there's a passionate, fiery Spanish spirit watching over her, Mamie is charmed by the idea. So she starts slipping into a persona of this spirit, Rosa Alvaro. It's all an act, but as far as Mamie is concerned, it represents a side of her that she can't otherwise express. Rosa is passionate and exciting. And as Mamie says in the story, it's what used to be me before the world buried it.

In other words, Rosa Alvaro is the kind of person Mamie isn't allowed to be as a Chicago shop girl or as a St. Louis housewife. Because obviously, this story feels like a metaphor for Pearl's own relationship with patients. Still, it's only recently that researchers have looked to Rosa Alvaro Entrante for answers, which only helps prove a point. People at the time weren't interested in what drab Midwestern women like Pearl had to say. Inventing a colorful ghost may have seemed like the only way for her to become a relevant author. But let's not forget the principle of Occam's razor, which tells us that the simplest answer is usually the correct one. In the case of Patience Worth,

the simplest answer could be that it was all true. Patience was a spirit. Pearl Curran was her chosen medium. And together, they created something extraordinary. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all AudioChuck originals.