The Book Test

Gladys Osborne Leonard

Invented by famed English medium, Gladys Osborne Leonard (and her spirit guide, Feda), The Book Test was popular around the time of The Great War (WWI).  A dead "communicator" would send a message to the living by way of a medium, who would direct the listener to a book in a location to which the medium had never been.  The dead spirit's message would be found in the text on a page number specified by the medium.  Like many fads of the American Spiritualist Movement at the turn of the 20^th-Century, the practice was inauthentic and short-lived.

A 1921 analysis of The Book Test found no merit to the practice, though a handful of cases proved inexplicable.  Of 532 tests, 17% were successful, 18% were partially successful, but 38% were total failures.  It was dismissed as providing any proof of life after death.

Russian medium Nina Kulagina presented a unique twist on The Book Test phenomenon, by naming the first letter of each paragraph on given pages of randomly-chosen books.

© The Weirding, 2016