Materialized Apparitions: If Not Beings from Another Life, What Are They
By Edward Augustus Brackett
In 1840, I became acquainted with Dr. Colyer, then lecturing on Mesmerism, at Peel’s Museum, New York, and fully believed, at that time, that he was a humbug and Mesmerism a fraud. Soon after, while visiting some friends with Mr. Pendleton, formerly from Boston, we thoroughly discussed this subject. Mr. Pendleton insisted that there was truth in it and that I was not treating it somewhat, and he proposed, as a matter of amusement, that I should try the experiment on someone of the party present.
Willing to turn the discussion into a less severe form, I consented to take the part assigned to me and soon found, to my astonishment, that I had a most excellent clairvoyant subject before me. What started as amusement became exciting entertainment, resulting in the parties meeting once a week to study Mesmerism. In the following spring, I moved to Boston, where in my leisure hours I continued my investigations, part of the time with Dr. William F. Channing, the inventor of the Fire Alarm, and at the time a student with Dr. Jackson.
I was indebted to him for many interesting suggestions, especially for using a very delicate galvanometer to detect, if possible, any magnetic or electric currents passing between the magnetizer and his subject. No such currents were discovered, and when we found that our subject could be controlled and thrown into a trance when more than a mile away, by the action of the will alone, the idea of testing currents was abandoned. All that has since been made public under Mind-Reading and Telepathy, and much more, was familiar to us.
When trance-mediumship became known, believing it was only a form of Mesmerism, I paid considerable attention to it. There were few mediums of note that I did not have more or less sittings with, but the most satisfactory communications I received came through a member of my own family. While the evidence was such that it would have convinced most people that these messages came from the other side of life, I was by no means sure of it.
Genre: Philosophy | Occult
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Edward Augustus Brackett
Edward Augustus Brackett (October 1, 1818 – March 15, 1908) was a self-taught American sculptor, author, and conservationist.
Biography.
Brackett was born in Vassalboro, Maine, to Reuben and Elizabeth (Starkey) Brackett and moved with his parents in the spring of 1837 to Cincinnati, where he started work as a sculptor. In 1839, he showed a pair of portrait busts at the Cincinnati Academy of Fine Arts and moved to New York City. In 1841, after roughly two years in New York, he moved to Boston with an introduction from his friend William Cullen Bryant, where from 1843 he lived in Winchester, Massachusetts (at that time Woburn), from the early 1850s onward in the octagonal Edward A. Brackett House.
In October 1859, after the raid on Harper’s Ferry, Brackett travelled to the jail, where he made sketches and measurements of John Brown’s head, which he subsequently cast as a bust. Today (2022) at Tufts University. After serving one year in the Civil War, he turned to horticulture and the scientific breeding of fish. In 1869, he was appointed to a state commission supervising inland fisheries and became its head in 1873. From 1894 until his death, he was head of the Massachusetts Fish and Game Commission. He died in Winchester on March 15, 1908.
Edward Augustus Brackett
