"I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer."
“Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world.” --Miguel Ruiz
Artwork | Daria Petrilli
“ Even if you feel you are falling behind, even if you are not where you thought you'd be, even if nothing turned out the way you thought it would, it does not mean you are not still growing. Real growth is not always just constant forward motion, it's also staying still. Growth is learning the hard lessons. Growth is deep rest. Growth is stopping to reconsider where you're headed before you arrive there. Growth is letting yourself settle, it's letting yourself blossom, it's letting yourself see how much good is already in your life before you hunger for more.”
“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”– Haruki Murakami
@Spud424 beautifully said my friend 🎉🎉
"Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female – whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male."
-Oprah Winfrey
THE MYSTERY OF PEARL CURRAN
On February 15, 1883, Pearl Curran was born in Mound City, Illinois. Until the age of 30, Pearl lived a very ordinary life. She played the piano, read magazines, went out to dinner with her husband, and enjoyed going to the theater. And then something happened that changed her life forever – a single incident with a Ouija board that allowed her to make contact with a spirit called Patience Worth. The collaboration between the two women – one living, and one dead – would create a mystery that has never been solved.
Before the strange events that began in 1913, Pearl Curran had no interest in the occult.
She was born Pearl Leonore Pollard in Mound City, Illinois, on February 15, 1883. Her father was a railroad worker and, sometimes, a newspaperman. She grew up in Texas, playing outdoors and exploring the countryside. Her parents -- George and Mary – were quiet, unassuming people. They never demanded much from Pearl, which made her an indifferent student. She left school after the eighth grade and moved to Chicago to study music. She lived with her uncle there and often played piano at his storefront Spiritualist church. Her uncle was a believer and a spirit medium, but Pearl had no interest in ghosts, or religion. She had attended Sunday School as a child but was disinterested in church and never read the Bible.
In fact, she never really read much of anything at all. She had enjoyed some of the popular children’s books of the day – like Black Beauty and Little Women – and was entertained by fairy tales, but with so little education, she never developed a love for reading. She certainly was not a writer. Her only creative outlet was playing the piano. As a girl, she dreamed of acting on stage, but gave up that idea when she married John Curran – a widower with a teenage daughter – when she was 24-years-old.
Her marriage was happy, but as uneventful as her childhood had been. The Currans were not wealthy, but John made a comfortable living. Pearl took care of their home, although she had a maid to take care of most of the household chores. They were a social couple. They enjoyed dining in restaurants, going to the theater, and getting together with friends and neighbors for drinks and to play cards in the evening. John and Pearl seldom read anything, aside from the daily newspaper or a magazine. They lived a simple life. They were happy, though, content in their middle-class apartment on Kingsbury Avenue with their family, friends, and acquaintances.
They could have never imagined the changes that were coming to their lives.
Most of John and Pearl’s friends were much like they were – ordinary folks who lived a quiet, suburban life in St. Louis – but Pearl did have one friend with literary connections. Her name was Emily Grant Hutchings and her poetry and fiction had appeared in many magazines and in newspapers. Emily was also a Spiritualist and a casual visit with Pearl on July 8, 1913, was going to change her friend’s life forever.
On that hot summer evening, Emily brought came over for cocktails and brought a Ouija board with her. Pearl had seen talking boards before – she even admitted to experimenting with one with her uncle – but they held little interest for her. It was, she said, a boring and silly pastime. Before July 8, she had never seen the pointer spell out anything but gibberish.
But this time was different.
Pearl and Emily placed their hands lightly on the Ouija board’s planchette. Pearl’s mother, Mary, was visiting and she sat next to the two women with a pencil and paper, ready to write down any messages that might be spelled out. To their surprise, the message that came through was not gibberish. It made perfect sense and it read:
"Many moons ago, I lived. Again, I come. Patience Worth is my name."
The three women were startled. Even Emily, a dedicated Spiritualist, had never seen a message quite like that before. Who was Patience Worth? Was she a real person? Pearl was the most skeptical of the three – she sincerely doubted that the dead could make contact with the living using a wooden toy. But Emily urged her to try again. So, Pearl asked the sender of the message to tell them something about herself. In moments, the replies began to come. The planchette moved furiously around the talking board, telling a strange story.
According to the spirit, Patience Worth, she had lived in Dorsetshire, England, in either 1649 or 1694 – the planchette gave both dates – and she passed on messages using old words like “thee” and “thou.” Sometimes, she refused to answer their questions directly. But with more urging, the spirit went on. She claimed to have been an unmarried woman who had emigrated to America, where she was murdered by Indians on Nantucket Island.
The initial contact with Patience Worth occurred when Pearl and Emily were both using the Ouija board. However, it soon became evident that Pearl was the one responsible for the contact because, no matter who sat with her, the messages from Patience would come only if Pearl had her hands on the planchette.
That was spooky enough by itself. The messages that kept coming were even spookier.
Pearl became fascinated with the messages and began devoting more and more time to the Ouija board. Soon, the messages began coming through so fast that no one could transcribe them. And then Pearl realized that she didn’t need the Ouija board anymore – the sentences were forming in her mind at the same time they were being spelled out on the board. Now, she began to dictate the messages from Patience to anyone who could write them down. She hired a secretary to transcribe what Patience told her, but later, she recorded the words herself, using first a pencil, then a typewriter.
For the next 25 years, Patience Worth dictated hundreds of thousands of words their Pearl Curran. Her works were vast and were not only personal messages, but creative writing that including nearly 5,000 poems, a play, many short works, and several novels that were published to critical acclaim.
All of it written by a ghost.
Not long after Patience appeared, the Curran home began to overflow with friends, neighbors, and curiosity-seekers. People arrived from all over the country. The Currans, always gracious and unpretentious, welcomed anyone who wanted to witness the sessions when Pearl received information from Patience. The curious were followed by authorities in the field of psychic investigation and the Spiritualists, all anxious to see if the messages were evidence of contact with the other side. The Currans never charged admission, and each writing session was conducted openly. There were no spooky seances, candles, or darkened rooms. John Curran was usually in the next room with his friends, smoking cigars and playing pinochle. Patience Worth Curran – the baby girl that John and Pearl adopted in 1916 – would be playing with her toys. There was usually food and drinks and guests were encouraged to help themselves.
All of this would be happening while Pearl sat in the brightly-lit living room with her notebook or typewriter, waiting for messages from Patience. When they came through, she would begin to write.
Patience produced thousands of poems. She also produced full-length books -- using details of life in medieval England, of Palestine at the time of Christ – filled with objects, places, languages, clothing, and more that there’s no logical way Pearl could have known. It all seemed impossible, and yet it was being done – either by a housewife with an eighth-grade education, or by a ghost.
As the popularity of Patience Worth spread, there were just as many people who were amazed by her presence as there were those who doubted she existed at all. Critics simply refused to believe that contact with the ghost writer was possible. The whole thing had to be an elaborate hoax. For her part, Patience didn’t really care. She didn’t do much to convince people that she had really lived – and died. Supporters only offered the poems, books, and stories she wrote as evidence of the supernatural.
But many still refused to be convinced. Or at least they wanted more evidence than her supernatural writing output could offer. They often made requests of Patience to try and test her. She never hesitated when she answered their questions – through Pearl, of course – or when she responded to the tasks they came up with. When asked to compose a poem on a certain subject, she would deliver the stanzas so quickly that they had to be taken down in shorthand. Weeks later, when asked to reproduce the poem, she could do so without any changes or errors.
One night, author and psychical investigator Walter Franklin Prince – a regular visitor at the Curran home – posed an unusual task for Patience. He requested that she deliver a poem about the “folly of being an atheist,” while simultaneously producing a monologue that might occur between a wench and a jester at a medieval fair. He also asked that she alternate the dialogue between the two tasks every two or three lines.
Not only did Patience accomplish this, but she did it within eight seconds of the request. When she was finished, Pearl said that she felt as if her head had been placed in a steel vise.
It should come as no surprise that Pearl’s life was forever changed by the arrival of Patience Worth. Pearl often called her alliance with her spirit a wondrous affair, but it demanded a lot from her, both physically and mentally. She never allowed herself to become obsessed with Patience – she always took time for herself, her friends, and her family – and she and John never attempted to exploit the partnership for material gain. Aside from the sales of Patience’s books and stories, the Currans never charged admission to witness the writing sessions and tried to continue living the same life that they always had. Pearl continued, with help from her maid, to do all her own shopping, cooking, and housework and she continued to visit with friends as she had always done.
Later, Pearl tried to produce some stories of her own, but they were terrible. Two of them ended up being published in a magazine, but more for the novelty of their source, rather than for their content. Patience was tolerant, although condescending, about Pearls’ abilities. This created a sort of love-hate relationship between them. Patience was often irritated with Pearl, but never failed to show her kindness. She simply seemed to think that her human counterpart was slightly stupid and that only by perseverance was she able to make herself understood, especially when Pearl failed to grasp the spellings and meanings of certain words. There were many occasions when she ended a session in frustration..
But the two plodded along together – amassing a great body of work – until about 1922.
That year, the connection between them began to deteriorate. It was largely because of the many changes in Pearl’s life that occurred at that time. Pearl became pregnant for the first time at age 39. Then, John Curran passed away, leaving Pearl to give birth to a daughter, six months after his death. A short time later, Pearl’s mother also passed away and the contact between Pearl and Patience eventually faded away.
By then, public interest in the mystery had also faded – especially since no solution had ever been found as to how Pearl had accomplished her remarkable feats. The Roaring 20’s had moved America into the modern age and suddenly Pearl Curran and her Puritan ghost seemed stodgy and old-fashioned. After the publication of several books and hundreds of poems, interest in Patience Worth was replaced by cynicism. Debunkers accused Pearl of hiding her literary talent, so she could exploit it in such a bizarre way and become famous.
Was this the case? Exhaustive studies have shown this to be highly unlikely, if not impossible. Scholars have analyzed Patience’s work and have found it to be accurate in historical detail and written in such a way that only someone with an intimate knowledge of the time could have created it.
Pearl died of pneumonia in California on December 4, 1937. Whatever the secret of the mysterious ghost writer, she took it with her to the grave, leaving a fantastic mystery in her wake.
What really happened in what is one of the great St. Louis mysteries of all time? Did a spirit really speak through Pearl Curran from beyond the grave? Or did Pearl come up with all those writings on her own?
History has failed to provide answers. There were several women named Patience Worth who were listed on passenger logs of sailing ships that came to America in the seventeenth century – and yet no evidence that any of them were the Patience Worth who spoke through Pearl. But experts who studied Pearl doubted that she could have produced the words attributed to Patience on her own. She was a women of limited education, with no natural writing ability, no knowledge of the language used, or of the history and subject matter that was written about by Patience Worth.
Simply put, Pearl could not have created such works of literary quality on her own.
But someone did.
Could Patience have been created from Pearl’s unconscious mind? Was she Pearl’s secondary personality – one that had been unknowingly created by her, somehow amassing the vast knowledge that was needed to produce the allegedly unearthly messages?
This too seems unlikely because in the rare occasions when secondary personalities have been documented, they have always been shown to take over the main personality for a time. This was not true in Pearl’s case. Her personality co-existed with that of Patience Worth – whether she was real or not – and Pearl was aware of that fact.
So, what did happen in St. Louis in 1913? Was this a true case of afterlife communication, or was this the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the literary and Spiritualist communities? We will never know for sure.
It seems we have, as Sherlock Holmes advised, attempted to eliminate the impossible in this case so that we can be left with – however improbable – the truth. But what if the truth also seems to be impossible? To believe in this story, we have to believe in the idea that a ghost named Patience Worth managed to write books, poems, and stories through the physical hand of Pearl Curran.
Seems impossible, doesn’t it? Or maybe not.
I guess that we’ll have to leave the possibility of this story up to you to decide
"I want purity in my life. And kindness...and I want to keep moving and learning. This is not what most people want, so I go it alone, but I'm not lonely: I'm protected."--Lillian Gish