Leonora Piper

Leonora Piper (née Leonora Evelina Simonds) was born on 27 June 1857 and grew up in Nashua, New Hampshire, where her family said she first showed psychic sensitivity as a child.

She became a trance medium, delivering messages through “controls” — first a French-styled persona called “Phinuit,” later figures such as “George Pelham” — and in her later sittings often turned to automatic writing rather than speech.

She gave her last séance around 1911 and retired some years afterward. Piper became the single most intensively studied medium of her era. In 1885 the psychologist and philosopher William James, an early Society for Psychical Research member, had his first sitting with her and famously called her his “white crow” — the one exception that, for him, disproved the rule that all mediumship was fraud, since her trances seemed to reveal knowledge she could not have gained normally.

The SPR investigated her for decades, even hiring detectives to follow her in search of fraud, and found none. Investigators such as Richard Hodgson devoted years to her case. She died on 3 June 1950.

A note on the evidence. Piper was never caught cheating, but the SPR’s verdict was never unanimous: explanations ranged from spirit survival to telepathy to skilled cold-reading and lucky inference, and the survival hypothesis remains unproven. Her enduring importance is as the figure who forced careful, sustained scientific scrutiny onto the question.