Keeler, Pierre L. O. A

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Keeler, Pierre L. O. A.

American slate-writing medium who sat for physical phenomena before the Seybert Commission in 1885. The committee did not find the phenomena unexplainable by normal means and came to no definite conclusion except that it could "dismiss the theory of a spiritual origin of the hand behind Mr. Keeler's screen."

Alfred Russel Wallace describes in his book My Life (2 vols., 1905) some remarkable sittings with the medium in 1886 in the company of Elliott Coues, one General Lippitt, and a Mr. D. Lyman. In good light Wallace examined the enclosed space, the curtain, the floor, and the walls. After various telekinetic demonstrations, a hand appeared above the curtain, the fingers moving excitedly. Wallace narrates:

"This was the signal for a pencil and a pad of notepaper, then rapid writing was heard, a slip of paper was torn off and thrown over the curtain, sometimes two or three in rapid succession, in the direction of certain sitters. The director of the séance picked them up, read the name signed, and asked if anyone knew it, and when claimed it was handed to him. In this way a dozen or more of the chance visitors received messages which were always intelligible to me and often strikingly appropriate…. On my second visit a very sceptical friend went with us and seeing the writing pad on the piano marked several of the sheets with his initials. The medium was very angry and said that it would spoil the séance. However, he was calmed by his friends. When it came to the writing the pad was given to me, over the top of the curtain, to hold. I held it just above the medium's shoulder, when a hand and pencil came through the curtain and wrote on the pad as I held it."

At another séance, according to Wallace,

"… most wonderful physical manifestations occurred. A stick was pushed through the curtain. Two watches were handed to me through the curtain, and were claimed by the two persons who sat by the medium. The small tambourine, about ten inches in diameter, was pushed through the curtain and fell on the floor. These objects came through different parts of the curtain, but left no holes as could be seen at the time, and was proved by a close examination afterwards. More marvelous still (if that be possible) a waistcoat was handed to me over the curtain, which proved to be the medium's, though his coat was left on and his hands had been held by his companion all the time; also about a score of people looking on all the time in a welllighted room. These things seem impossible, but they are nevertheless facts."

Later in his career Keeler concentrated solely on slate writing, which he combined with pellet reading. A. B. Richmond, in his book What I Saw at Cassadaga Lake (1888), describes a sitting in which Keeler received an answer to a pellet inside a pair of locked slates, the key to which was in his pocket.

Admiral Osborne Moore, in his book Glimpses of the Next State (1911), writes of a successful séance in which, on five slates, 474 words were written and two pictures drawn in a period not exceeding ten minutes. The letters signed by names on the pellets were very commonplace. They contained no proof of identity. Still, Moore believed that the sitting was a striking exhibition of spirit power because there was full light and the slates were held above the table with no cloth or covering of any sort over them. He knew the reports of past slate writing through William Eglinton, S. T. Davey, and others, and said he thought that no explanation he had read was applicable to Keeler's case.

Hereward Carrington, during his investigations in the Lily Dale camp in August 1907, came to a different conclusion. He admitted that Keeler's slate writings were the most puzzling phenomena of their kind he had ever witnessed, but, as pointed out in his report (Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, vol. 2), there was sufficient evidence of fraud. In the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research (July 1908) an instance is mentioned in which Keeler was seen writing on a slate held on his lap under the table.

Carrington also stated that Richard Hodgson, Henry Ridgely Evans, David P. Abbott, and others thought that Keeler was a clever trickster, yet he said he did not wish to be dogmatic on the point since he was unable to explain many stories told to him by apparently good observers. Carrington reported only on his own sittings, saying that both the slate writing and direct voice were certainly fraudulent.

Keeler was also exposed by Walter F. Prince in 1921. In retrospect it seems doubtless that Keeler's phenomena—like those of so many other exponents of slate writing—were fraudulent.