Cooper, Blanche (ca. 1927)

British direct voice medium at the center of the famous Gordon Davis case. In 1921-22, S. G. Soal, then a teacher at the University of London carried out a series of experiments and observations surrounding Cooper's mediumship. He was concerned with the remarkable communications he obtained from a deceased brother, from presumably fictitious entities, and from a friend, Gordon Davis. Davis was believed to have died in the war but was later discovered alive in 1925 and was ignorant of the communications that came through in his "voice." (See Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 35, 1926.)

In his report, Soal says Cooper: " … does not go into trance and in the intervals when the voice is not speaking she is apparently normal and able to converse with the sitters and sometimes even able to repeat words which the voice has just said. There is, however, right through the sittings a certain degree of absentmindedness and the medium is sometimes slow to respond to questions addressed to her by the sitter. While the voice is not speaking she keeps up a continuous humming noise with her lips, and this humming noise ceases when the voice comes into play. Throughout the period of my own experiments the medium seemed unable to sustain the voice for more than a minute or two at a time and the information was given for the most part in rapid snatches punctuated by periods of silence lasting from a minute up to a quarter of an hour. Moreover, it appeared that the voice could only be produced while the musical box was playing, and only on one or two occasions were words spoken a second or two after the music had ceased. Objective lights were seen at every sitting but these appeared in the silent intervals and were never simultaneous with the voices. These lights varied in appearance from dim amorphous patches to bright bluish discs about the size of a half a crown."

Soal noticed the peculiar feature that "questions asked by the sitter are seldom answered immediately in the case when the sitter is holding the correct answer in his conscious mind." In such cases it was usually found that the idea had to pass back into the unconscious mind of the sitter before it could emerge from the automatism of the medium. The communicator, when asked for an answer, would usually reply, "I cannot give it now, but will try to give it later." Then at a later period of the sitting, when the sitter had forgotten the question, the correct answer would be given. In cases when the correct answer was not known to the sitter, a direct question would often result in immediate success.

In the case of Gordon Davis, his voice, accent and manner of speech were reproduced fairly accurately. He described incidents of his boyhood known to Soal, and described his last meeting with Soal and the substance of their conversation. He expressed a desire to send messages of comfort to his wife and child, and though he did not give the circumstances of his death, spoke as if he were deceased. He gave an accurate description of the environment and interior arrangements of a house which he did not occupy until a year later.

In the debate over Soal's paper before the Society for Psychical Research, Dr. Wolley suggested that when the house was described in Davis's spirit voice (Soal) the sitter was unconsciously forseeing an event in his own life, i.e., his visit to the house in April 1925.

This theory, however, would allow almost any piece of information given by a medium and afterward verified by the sitter to be considered the sitter's forseeing the future and subconsciously passing it along to the medium.