When Dead Authors Kept Writing: The Strange Obsession With Spirit Literature
Did Mark Twain write a book via a medium after he’d died? It went to court, but it wasn’t the only book by a spirit.
In 1917, a woman named Emily Grant Hutchings published a novel titled Jep Herron. What caused the book to catch the eyes of journalists was her claim that it had been dictated to her by the ghost of Mark Twain, who had died seven years earlier.
Twain, born Samuel Clemens, is one of the most famous writers in the English-speaking world, so the idea that he had continued his literary career from beyond the grave was irresistible to newspapers. However, it was a lot less appealing to his publisher.
Harper & Brothers, which held the rights to Twain’s works, brought a lawsuit to prevent publication. Whether they believed the claims or not (and they probably didn’t), they had intellectual property to protect.
Hutchings maintained that the manuscript had come to her through automatic writing, a process by which a person writes while claiming to be guided by an external force. The court was not persuaded by spectral authorship. The judge ruled against Hutchings, and the book was withdrawn from circulation. Contemporary reports joked that Samuel Clemens might have to be called as a witness, but, sadly, no seance was held in court. The episode became one of the more memorable legal skirmishes in publishing history.
At the time, occult and spiritual beliefs were more mainstream
The Hutchings case did not arise in isolation. It took place during a period when spiritualism had entered respectable society. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, seances were attended not only by eccentrics but by politicians, scientists, celebrities and authors. It was a time of rapid change and emerging sciences.
The Society for Psychical Research in Britain investigated claims of telepathy, apparitions, and automatic writing using methods that purported to be scientific. At the same time, psychology was emerging as a discipline. The work of Freud and others introduced the concept of a subconscious mind capable of influencing behaviour without conscious awareness. These developments created a curious overlap between scientific inquiry and belief in unseen agencies.
Within this cultural setting, automatic writing became both a spiritual practice and a psychological puzzle.
Pearl Curran wrote a tale featuring Jesus, dictated to her by a seventeenth-century spirit
One of the most famous practitioners was Pearl Curran, an American housewife who began experimenting with a Ouija board in 1913. Through the board, she claimed she’d made contact with a seventeenth-century English spirit named Patience Worth. Over the following years, Curran produced poems, plays, and several novels attributed to this spirit.
Among them was The Sorry Tale, a lengthy narrative set in the time of Jesus and centred on his final days. It featured Jesus, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Judas Iscariot, and Mary Magdalene. It caused quite a stir.
Curran’s descriptions of the ancient Near East were so vivid and accurate that her supporters, somewhat patronisingly, argued that the language and historical detail in her works were far beyond what an American housewife could have produced unaided.
Critics, including linguists and historians, said the historical material could be traced to sources available in libraries and popular reference works of the period. They also noted that the supposedly archaic language used resembled modern pastiche rather than authentic seventeenth-century English.
The debate over Curran’s abilities continued for decades, and the case soon attracted psychologists interested in dissociation and the creative capacities of the subconscious mind.
Spirit writing appealed to all of society’s strata
The attraction of spiritual authorship extended beyond private individuals and even reached the seats of power. Alfred Deakin, Australia’s second Prime Minister and one of the architects of the new federation, maintained a lifelong interest in spiritualism. Deakin practised automatic writing and recorded in his diaries communications that he attributed to spiritual intelligences, which he called his ‘Invisible Helpers’.
Meanwhile, the author of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, publicly defended spiritualism and regarded mediumistic communications as genuine evidence of survival after death. The boundary between scepticism and conviction was not always aligned with education or social status.
Other cases from the period further demonstrate the breadth of belief. Hélène Smith, a Swiss medium studied by psychologist Théodore Flournoy, claimed to channel spirits from Mars and produced texts in an invented Martian language. Flournoy concluded that her visions and writings were products of her imagination, shaped by cultural influences and subconscious processes.
Why did so many people buy into this?
The early twentieth century was marked by upheaval. The First World War caused mass casualties and left families desperately searching for reassurance about the fate of dead loved ones. Spiritualism offered the possibility of continuity and communication. Much like today, it gave people comfort.
At the same time, the expanding publishing industry created opportunities for unusual narratives to reach a wide readership. Automatic writing, especially when attributed to a famous spirit, provided a dramatic origin story that distinguished a book in a crowded market.
Organisations such as the Society for Psychical Research gave these claims a veneer of legitimacy. Belief in psychic phenomena and the occult still exists, but today it is more firmly separated from mainstream science than it was a century ago.
This does not mean that everyone involved was a deliberate fraud. It seems more likely that many participants were experiencing psychological phenomena that felt external and meaningful.
Psychologists have some insights
Psychological interpretations developed alongside spiritual explanations. After all, psychology emerged as a science (from things like philosophy and physiology) around the same time, in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Researchers note that automatic writing can occur in states of dissociation, in which individuals experience a division between conscious awareness and mental processes operating outside it. For example, creative work often feels as though it arrives from elsewhere, a sensation frequently described by novelists and poets. (If you’ve ever written fiction in flow state, you might know the feeling.)
Characters are said to speak to their creators, and plot developments sometimes appear unexpectedly during sustained concentration. In the context of spiritualism, such experiences were interpreted as evidence of external agency. In psychological terms, they may reflect the mind’s capacity to generate complex material without deliberate planning.
Automatic writing has long since declined, but hasn’t disappeared
By the 1920s and 1930s, enthusiasm for automatic writing as proof of spirit communication began to decline, though it did not disappear.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a woman named Jane Roberts channelled an entity named ‘Seth’. She wrote a series of books known as the Seth material that discussed metaphysics, consciousness, reality, and more. The work would strongly influence strands of New Age thought.
Another example is Neale Donald Walsch, who wrote a series called ‘Conversations with God’ in the 1990s, using automatic writing. It is notable that the series’ marketing was pitched as spiritual guidance rather than paranormal evidence.
Final thoughts
The idea of a spirit dictating books has slowly been pushed to the cultural fringes. Advances in psychology offered alternative explanations, and public scandals involving fraudulent mediums damaged credibility.
Nevertheless, dead authors and spirits writing through mediums remains a revealing chapter in cultural history. It shows how developments in science, religion, and publishing intersected during a period of uncertainty. Intelligent and influential individuals entertained the possibility that creative works could originate beyond ordinary consciousness.
Courts and scholars eventually imposed more conventional explanations. The fascination, however, persists.
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This type of writing continues. I have an old edition of 'Fate' magazine from the mid 1990s that details a similar event wherein supposedly the spirit of a 19th century woman named Amy Kitchener dictated a cookbook. The book was finally published in 2001 and still can be found second-hand:
https://www.abebooks.com/9781880090251/Spirit-Kitchen-Recipes-Reflections-19th-Century-1880090252/plp
I think a story about a ghost taking over and author's established great writing and making it bad would be pretty funny and no one would believe the author, like eh, they just fell off. Hehe. Lots of possibilities. Great post, Jason.