American trance medium Minnie Meserve Soule (1867–1936) was an important figure in early twentieth-century psychical research. Working with James Hyslop, Walter Franklin Prince and others, she produced automatic-writing communications containing apparently supernormal information that researchers used to test survival and telepathy hypotheses.
- Soule’s mediumship developed from vivid dreams, clairaudience and automatic writing into full trance, often involving named spirit controls.
- James Hervey Hyslop used her sittings in investigations of purported post-mortem communicators and cross-correspondences, while weighing spiritistic and telepathic explanations.
- Walter Franklin Prince and John Frederick Thomas likewise reported apparently supernormal personal information under precautions intended to limit normal information leakage.
Early Life
Minne Meserve Soule, called ‘Mrs. Chenoweth’ in the early reports about her, was an American trance medium who collaborated with several researchers associated to the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) and the Boston Society for Psychic Research in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
Minnie Meserve was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 12 November 1867. Very little is known about her childhood and adolescence. She was four years old when her mother died. A step-mother took care of her until 1883, when she moved to New Hampshire to complete her education. She worked as a teacher in that state and then in Somerville, Massachusetts, resigning in 1897 to marry Charles L Soule. Both were Unitarians.
Soule experienced vivid dreams while living in Boston. Those dreams were verified by events that took place years later. She also received messages via clairaudience from people she had never known. All this was eventually verified as well. Next came a series of communications which she wrote down automatically. The senders, again, were persons unknown, until one day her mother’s name appeared as signature. Soule showed the text to her father, who compared it with an old letter written by his wife. The similarities between the inscriptions were astonishing.1Tubby (1941), 31.
The Soules’ only daughter died as a baby and this loss led to their involvement in organized Spiritualism. They experimented with table-tipping and, in the process, Soule began to speak random words unconsciously. Scared, feeling that her mind was crumbling, she decided to stop. However, her husband and some friends convinced her that said reaction was not abnormal. She continued with the séances and other practices, thus discovering her gifts as sensitive.
In the early twentieth century, as her mediumship progressed, Soule introduced spirit guides. One of them, ‘Sunbeam’, purported to be a native American Choctaw who had died at sixteen. (That Sunbeam in fact spoke Choctaw was corroborated by a professor of Massachusetts who was interested in Soule’s feats.)2Tubby (1941), 33; Allison (1929), 19-20. Another guide, who claimed to be of Spanish origin, called herself ‘Bumblebee’. A third control, ‘Madam’, was recognized as a wiser and more dignified than the others.
Soule gave public lectures and, with the help of her husband and friends, created the Young People’s Psychical Inquiry Club, which lasted thirty years. She had many clients, and her ultimate aim was to help them heal. In 1907, she gave up lecturing to begin her long collaboration with James Hervey Hyslop (see below).3Berger & Berger (1991), 68.
Soule was so drained by what she had to see and hear in her early healing sessions that she asked her guides to make her unconscious before starting. That is how her mediumship gradually changed to full trance.
Soule died in Boston on 28 April 1936.
Association with James Hyslop and the ASPR
Soule collaborated with the ASPR from 1907 to 1924, first with Hyslop (until his death in 1920) and then with his assistant Gertrude Ogden Tubby and other members. Soule’s trance communications were mainly produced by automatic writing. Hyslop always referred to her as ‘Mrs. Chenoweth’ – mediums frequently were called by pseudonyms in those years, basically a security measure (one of many) taken to carry out experiments with different sitters, when the major concern was to determine whether a piece of information given by the medium was generated by telepathy, received from a disincarnate agent, or came from some other unusual source.
After many tests, Hyslop was struck by the quality of the phenomena Soule produced, which were similar to those of Leonora Piper and Gladys Osborne Leonard. He remarked that her trance, when controlled by ‘Starlight’ (as he called ‘Sunbeam’), was slight, ‘a hyperaesthesic condition of sense.’4Hyslop (1910), 723. However, he eventually became convinced that whoever the control was, Soule’s amnesia was total and her trance genuine. Her mediumship showed the influence of some ‘subliminal action’, Hyslop thought. He added: ‘Everything takes the coloring of her ideas and forms of expression, and it makes no difference what personality purports to communicate’.5Quoted by Tubby (1941), 33, and Melton (2001), 1439.
Hyslop worked with Soule in various projects. An early one had to do with purported communications by the late William James.6Hyslop (1912). Then there was the case of the deceased painter Robert Swain Gifford’s purported influence upon Frederic Thompson, a goldsmith who sought Hyslop’s help after becoming obsessed with a series of hallucinations. The sittings took place in 1907. Soule transmitted messages from an entity that after intensive research was identified as Gifford. The investigation greatly depended on cross-reference analyses of Soule’s information and that offered by another sensitive, ‘Mrs. Rathbun’. The compounded evidence, in Hyslop’s opinion, suggested that the hallucinations were ‘veridical’ and not subjective. He was convinced of the supernormal origin of both mediums’ achievements.7Tubby (1941), 37-38.
After 1909, Soule contacted a group of controls to which Richard Hodgson and FWH Myers apparently belonged and produced many messages via automatic writing. In these experiments, the communicators seemed to offer indirect clues that might help reveal their identities.8Hyslop (1919), 200-1; Tubby (1941), 34-35. She was also instrumental in an effort to discover if Mark Twain was visiting from the beyond. Again, the method of cross-correspondences was fundamental. Hyslop held this in great esteem, for it – in his view – supported the ‘spiritistic hypothesis’ over the ‘telepathic’ one. If the former is correct, he thought, ‘it gives us a glimpse of what may be a constant influence from the transcendental world upon the living and upon the evolution of man…’.9Hyslop (1919), 38.
Soule also put through messages purportedly from Margaret Verrall, an English psychical researcher who died in 1916. The results of this case, for Hyslop, added strength to the ‘spiritistic hypothesis’.10Hyslop (1919), 100. He underscored that the performance of Soule (as that of Piper) was ‘undoubtedly supernormal’, although ‘not evidence to the continued personal existence of the dead’. Still, since the tenor of the multiple communications seemed to point in that direction, then telepathy could hardly be alleged as their ‘obvious explanation’.11Hyslop (1919), 78.
Soule was tested also by Walter Franklin Prince. Surely the most important report concerns Soule’s participation in the famous ‘Doris case’.12Hyslop (1917). ‘Doris’ was Prince’s foster daughter. In 1914, Prince used Soule to find out whether Doris’ mother, Emma Fischer, had been sending her messages from the afterlife.13Prince (1923); Berger & Berger (1991), 69. Prince wrote that this case was presented
mainly as a puzzle in evidence and logic for the attention of those who deny spirit communication and equally dread and deny telepathy. Will they explain this case on some other grounds? Will one of them attempt to explain it? It is time for all such to hold their peace until they are ready to meet a strong group of facts like this and to propose some theory which can possibly be applied to the case and which will reasonably explain the facts.14Prince (1923), 18.
In 1921, Prince published a long critical analysis of automatic writing by Soule working with Hyslop, related to a particular sitter, a ‘Mrs. Drew’.15Prince (1921).
In the 1920s, Soule’s mediumship became increasingly valuable to prove the identity of deceased persons. Prince felt that her powers were as strong as those of Piper and Leonard. In Leonard and Soule Experiments in Psychical Research, Lydia Allison has a section of further experiments (in 1929) with Soule, Prince and his daughter being the sitters. Prince commented:
it was far from my intention … that I or my daughter … should continue to be sitters. Data regarding public or professional life, data derivable from what is in print or what available living persons know regarding either of us, together with however shrewd remarks which might, nevertheless, be deductions from such material, would have impressed me not at all. But when it appeared that data of my youth and childhood, which were nowhere in print and which few living persons knew … were being brought forward, when the childhood of [my daughter] began to be similarly explored, and when all sorts of things relating to my late wife in her earlier years, and in her last illness, which could never have reached Mrs. Soule’s ears, commenced to pour forth, it seemed the part of good sense not to abandon mines which had begun to yield so richly.16Allison (1929), 200.
After Hyslop’s death in 1920, Soule continued to work with the ASPR. Lydia Allison had eleven sittings with her between 1921 and 1922. ‘Sunbeam’ and ‘Imperator’ were the main controls at this time.17Allison (1929), 11-31. Allison was not from Boston, where Soule resided, a fact relevant from the perspective of research design. As Prince noted:
[Allison] was not only unmentioned by name but was unseen by the medium, entering after the latter was entranced, sitting behind her, and leaving the house before the termination of trance. I should not insist that even these precautions were absolute guarantees if Mrs. Allison’s were the only case. But many others who have received evidential material, often in the first sitting, have been required to observe the same precautions, yet in all these years there has developed no instance, to my knowledge, giving grounds for suspicion that Mrs. Soule had tried to gather information about a sitter.18Allison (1929), 175.
Experiments with the Boston Society for Psychic Research
After the Boston Society was created in 1925, Prince became affiliated with it, and investigations of Soule’s later years were done under the auspices of this organization.
Soule was one of the principal mediums used by John Frederick Thomas when he was working on a PhD under William McDougall at Harvard and later at Duke University. Thomas worked with Soule from 1926 to 1929, sometimes in association with JB Rhine and Louisa E Rhine. Soule, Thomas said, reported facts of which all objective evidence had disappeared, or which the sitter could not doubt that were known only to himself.19Thomas (1929), 6-8, 10. Thomas was so impressed that deemed them of supernormal origin. However, he does not claim to know whether the source should be attributed to spiritual agents or to some forms of telepathy (clairvoyance, for example).20Thomas (1937), ch. 9.
Archival Resources
The New York State Library in Albany, New York, has a 6.4 linear-foot collection of materials under the name Minnie Meserve Soule. The materials include correspondence of James Hyslop, WF Prince, JB Rhine and others concerning Soule’s mediumship, along with original scripts and séance transcripts, encompassing the years 1906–55. Additional items relating to Soule’s mediumship may be found in JF Thomas and ASPR collections at the same institution. See here for catalog summaries.
Roberto R Narváez
Works Cited
Allison, L.W. (1929). Leonard and Soule Experiments in Psychical Research. [Full text.] Boston, Massachusetts, USA: Boston Society for Psychic Research.
Berger, A.S., & Berger, J. (1991). The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House.
Hyslop, J.H. (1910). A record and discussion of mediumistic experiments. [Embedded in PDF.] Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 4, 1-785.
Hyslop, J.H. (1912). A record of experiments. [Embedded in PDF.] Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 6, 1-976.
Hyslop, J.H. (1913). The subconscious and its functions. [Embedded in PDF.] Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 7/1, 1-192.
Hyslop, J.H. (1917). The Doris Fischer case of multiple personality: Part III. [Embedded in PDF.] Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 11, 5-866.
Hyslop, J.H. (1918). Life After Death: Problems of the Future Life and Its Nature. [Full text.] New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.
Hyslop, J.H. (1919). Contact with the Other World: The Latest Evidence as to Communication with the Dead. [Full text.] New York: The Century Co.
Melton, J.G. (ed.) (2001). Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology, Vol. 2. Detroit, Michigan, USA: Gale Group.
Prince, W.F. (1921). Introduction. [Embedded in PDF.] Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 15, 1-43.
Prince, W.F. (1923). The mother of Doris. [Embedded in PDF.] Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 17, 1-216.
Thomas, J.F. (1929). Case Studies Bearing upon Survival. [Full text.] Boston, Massachusetts, USA: Boston Society for Psychic Research.
Thomas, J.F. (1937). Beyond Normal Cognition: An Evaluative and Methodological Study of the Mental Content of Certain Trance Phenomena.. Boston, Massachusetts, USA: Bruce Humphries.
Tubby, G.O. (1941). Mrs. Chenoweth (in memoriam). [Embedded in PDF.] Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 35, 31-39.