William T. Stead was a Victorian-era newspaper editor and journalist who got swept up in the London Spiritualism scene in the 1890s. But he didn’t just attend séances and report about his experiences. Stead discovered he had his own psychic abilities. He could receive direct messages from the dead through his hand—a process called automatic writing.  His main contact was Julia A. Ames, an American journalist he’d befriended years earlier, but who had died on December 12, 1891. Long before her passing, she and a lifelong friend, Ellen, agreed that whoever went to the grave first would send messages to … Continue reading When Automatic Writing Brought Us Words from Beyond the Grave