Patience Worth: A Psychic Mystery

ON a July evening in 1913 two women of St. Louis sat with a Ouija board upon their knees. The result of what was to come has remained one of the biggest mysteries in literary history and a key event in psychical research to this day. As Pearl Curran and her friend Emily Grant Hutchings sat gazing at the board it became clear that Pearl was something of a sensitive or a medium, and in her presence the pointer of the Ouija board became agitated...The two women watched in amazement as without any physical help from them the board spelled out..."Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth my name." Over the next 24 years, Patience dictated approximately four million words, including seven books, some short stories, several plays, and thousands of poems. She discussed philosophy, religion, death, and the meaning of life with eminent visitors who came to see her in droves. In 1917, to great fanfare, The Sorry Tale, a 644-page, 325,000-word novel about the last days of Jesus, dictated by Patience was published in the USA. She was compared with Shakespeare and Chaucer and The New York Globe stated that The Sorry Tale exceeded Ben Hur and Quo Vadis as "a quaint realistic narrative." Professor Roland Greene Usher, dean of history at Washington University, called the novel "the greatest story of Christ penned since the Gospels were finished." He pointed out that the book was written in seventeenth-century English with no anachronisms. Patience considered herself a messenger from God, when she exclaimed; "Morn hath broke, and ye be the first to see her light. Look ye wide-eyed at His workings. He hath offered ye a cup."