Incidents in My Life

Incidents in My Life is the memoir of the nineteenth century's most celebrated physical medium, recounting a career of seances held for aristocrats, scientists, and royalty across Europe and America. Its central claim is that consciousness survives death and can act in the physical world, evidenced through dramatic phenomena offered as the work of spirit agency.

The narrative recounts reported levitations, the movement of objects without contact, instruments said to play untouched, and the unharmed handling of hot coals, presenting them as sincere demonstrations. Such sittings drew serious investigators, including the chemist William Crookes, whose tests in the early 1870s concluded the abilities were genuine.

The account belongs to Spiritualism's physical-mediumship stream and helped define the public image of mediumship for a generation. Notably, its author was never conclusively exposed as a fraud despite decades of scrutiny, a record that, in a movement riddled with detected hoaxes, kept the survival question genuinely open to inquiry.