Part 1

PATIENCE WORTH

A PSYCHIC MYSTERY

CASPER S. YOST

NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1916

COPYRIGHT, 1916

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

Published February, 1916

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PREFACE

The compiler of this book is not a spiritualist, nor a psychologist, nor a member of the Society for Psychical Research; nor has he ever had anything more than a transitory and skeptical interest in psychic phenomena of any character. He is a newspaper man whose privilege and pleasure it is to present the facts in relation to some phenomena which he does not attempt to classify nor to explain, but which are virtually without precedent in the record of occult manifestations. The mystery of Patience Worth is one which every reader may endeavor to solve for himself. The sole purpose of this narrative is to give the visible truth, the physical evidence, so to speak, the things that can be seen and that are therefore susceptible of proof by ocular demonstration. In this category are the instruments of communication and the communications themselves, which are described, explained and, in some cases, interpreted, where an effort at interpretation seems to be desirable.

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CONTENTS

PAGE

THE COMING OF PATIENCE WORTH 1

NATURE OF THE COMMUNICATIONS 9

PERSONALITY OF PATIENCE 37

THE POETRY 63

THE PROSE 107

CONVERSATIONS 173

RELIGION 223

THE IDEAS ON IMMORTALITY 247

INDEX 287

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THE COMING OF PATIENCE WORTH

Upon a July evening in 1913 two women of St. Louis sat with a ouija board upon their knees. Some time before this a friend had aroused their interest in this unfathomable toy, and they had since whiled away many an hour with the inscrutable meanderings of the heart-shaped pointer; but, like thousands of others who had played with the instrument, they had found it, up to this date, but little more than a source of amused wonder. The messages which they had laboriously spelled out were only such as might have come from the subconsciousness of either one or the other, or, at least, were no more strange than innumerable communications which have been received through the reading of the ouija board.

But upon this night they received a visitor. The pointer suddenly became endowed with an unusual agility, and with great rapidity presented this introduction:

“Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth my name.”

The women gazed, round-eyed, at each other, and the board continued: