One hundred years ago this week, St. Louis, Missouri housewife Pearl Curran created a stir with a Ouija board by unleashing a legend named “Patience Worth.” Beginning in July 1912 Pearl Curran and her friend Emily Grant Hutchings began experimenting with the Ouija board during afternoon teas while their husbands were at work. After nearly a year of these “dabblings” on the talking board, Pearl thought Ouija boards to be a “boring and silly pastime” having seen the pointer spell out nothing but gibberish.
Then on July 8, 1913 the board seemed to be possessed with “unusual strength” and Patience Worth came alive. Her first communication was: “Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth my name. Wait, I would speak with thee. If thou shalt live, then so shall I. I make my bread at thy hearth. Good friends, let us be merrie. The time for work is past. Let the tabby drowse and blink her wisdom to the firelog.” When asked when she lived, the dates 1649-94 were given and that her home was “Across the sea.”
Thus began the saga of Patience Worth and Pearl Lenore Curran, a symbiotic relationship that lasted a quarter of a century and produced several novels, theatrical plays, short stories, poetry and prose. Ms. Curran was born Pearl Lenore Pollard in Mound City, Illinois the day after Valentine’s Day in 1883. She was an average but uninterested student, dropping out of high school during her freshman year due to a nervous breakdown. Pearl was a normal girl and was sensitive about her looks, considering herself to be ugly. She admitted to having little imagination and few ambitions, except to be successful as a singer. She had a short attention span and read very little during her formative years.
Pearl married John Howard Curran at age 24 and settled quickly into a typical middle class lifestyle. The Currans had an average education for that time and owned few books; neither of them had travelled extensively. The first seven years of their marriage were uneventful. Patience Worth would change all that.
Patience spoke in an archaic fashion, using words like “thee” and “thou” and refused to answer specific questions about her past personal life directly. It soon became clear that Patience Worth did not want to talk about herself. When pushed directly, the spirit replied by saying “About me ye would know much. Yesterday is dead. Let thy mind rest as to the past.” Eventually, Pearl learned that Patience came to America and was murdered by Indians. Although the initial contact between the duo came through the Ouija board, it was soon clear that Pearl was the target contact, for no matter who sat with her, the messages from Patience would come.
Although Worth indicated that she was from England, she never named the town or village in which she lived. Eventually, researchers deduced through clues from the sessions that Patience lived in rural Dorsetshire with her father John and mother Anne. Although no authenticated documentation has ever been found to indicate that someone with that name had lived in Dorsetshire, England during the later 17th century, several women named Patience Worth appear in census data of early settlers of the United States living in the New England area.
Pearl visualized that Patience lived in “…green rolling country with gentle slopes, not farmed much, with houses here and there. Two or three miles up this country on this road was a small village — few houses.” Mrs. Curran then visualized Patience leaving for America on a huge, wood three-masted schooner. Patience was described by Mrs. Curran as “…probably about thirty years. Her hair was dark red, mahogany, her eyes brown, and large and deep, her mouth firm and set, as though repressing strong feelings. Her hair had been disarranged by her cap, and was in big, glossy, soft waves.” Mrs. Curran also saw Patience “sitting on a horse, holding a bundle tied in sail-cloth, tied with thongs and wearing a coarse cloth cape, brown-gray, with hood like a cowl, peaked. The face is in shadow. She is small and her feet are small — with coarse square-toed shoes and gray woolen stockings.” After a long voyage the ship arrived at the jagged coast of America where they could find no landing place for the ship. Several flat boats were launched and Mrs. Curran saw Patience standing in the prow of her boat and one of the first to reach the shore. Patience Worth was later to indicate that she was eventually killed by a band of Indian raiders.
Pearl was fascinated with the messages that they were now coming fast and furious and she began spending more and more time on the Ouija board. Eventually, the messages began coming so rapidly that no one could write them down and Pearl began to realize that she didn’t need the board anymore. The sentences were forming in her mind at the same time they were being spelled out on the board. She began to “dictate” the replies and messages from Patience to anyone who would write them. She hired a secretary, but she couldn’t keep up and Pearl decided to record the words herself, first with a pencil and then with a typewriter.
People came from all over the world to witness the phenomenon for themselves and the Curran’s were always gracious and unpretentious, welcoming visitors to witness the automatic writings sessions. The Curran’s never charged any admission to the house and all of the writing sessions were conducted with openness and candor. There were no trappings of Spiritualism here with darkened rooms and candles. Pearl usually sat in a brightly lit room with her notebook or typewriter and when the messages began to come to her, she would begin to write. The stories were filled with ancient languages, words and objects that had not been in use for hundreds of years; words, terms and phrases that the sparsely educated Pearl could have known of independently.
Pearl explained that as the words flowed into her head, she would feel “a pressure” as the scenes and images appeared to her. She would see and describe the details of each scene in careful detail. If two characters were talking along a road, she would see the roadway, the grass on either side of it and the landscape in the distance. If they spoke a foreign language, she would hear them speaking but above them, she would hear the voice of Patience as she interpreted the speech and indicated what part of the dialogue she wanted in the story. She would sometimes even see herself in the scenes, standing as an onlooker or moving between the characters. The experience was so sharp and so vivid that she became familiar with things that she could have never known about from her own experience. These items included lamps, jugs and cooking utensils used long ago in distant countries, types of clothing and jewelry worn by people in other times and the sounds and smells of places that she had never even heard of before.
During one session, Pearl was shown a small yellow bird sitting on a hedge that Patience wanted included in a poem, but Pearl had no idea what type of bird it was. Finally, Patience became frustrated and said, “He who knoweth the hedgerows knoweth the yellow-hammer.” Pearl and her husband later consulted an old encyclopedia and saw that the yellow-hammer in her vision was not a type seen in America, but only in England.
Unlike Spiritualists of the time, Pearl never went into a trance during her writing sessions. Routinely, Pearl would call out the words to a stenographer while smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee or eating a snack. As time passed, Patience became tolerant but condescending of her host’s intelligence level, especially when Pearl failed to grasp the spellings and meanings of certain words. Patience often scorned Pearl, but never failed to show her kindness.
Over the next 25 years, Patience Worth dictated a total of about 4 million words including nearly 5,000 poems. She would be acclaimed a literary genius — her works compared with Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Spenser. She was called a wit, a poet, a dramatist, and a philosopher. “The unusual distinction about this Patience Worth is her exceptional and consistent intelligence,” a New York Evening Sun review read. “She shows in all her messages every sign of a vigorous, keen mentality.” From the Chicago Mail: “You will wonder at the sheer beauty of the story’s thought and diction. You will be convinced that here is a tale from the pen of a master word builder.” A New York Tribune review of the Patience Worth ghost written book “Hope Trueblood” read: “The psychological analysis and invention of the occult, the dramatic power displayed in the narrative are extraordinary, and stamp it as a work approximating absolute genius.” All from an encounter on a Ouija board.
Next week: “Patience Worth Part 2″
Al Hunter is the author of “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Indiana National Road” and “Haunted Irvington” book series. Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
