Alec Harris's
materialisation and direct-voice mediumship
astounded those who witnessed it. His wife,
Louie, recorded the details of her husband's work
in a fascinating book entitled They
Walked Among Us.
One sitter who attended a seance in Alec's home
in the Whitchurch area of Cardiff, which is the
capital city of Wales, remarked, 'The
materialised people came out of the cabinet
sometimes two or three at a time. On that amazing
night, about twenty fully-materialised forms
greeted us and spoke with us, quite naturally.
After a while you forgot you were conversing with
so-called "dead" people'.In the mid
20th-Century, the editor of Psychic News,
Maurice
Barbanell said of Alec's mediumship
that 'the spirit forms not only show
themselves in good red light, but they also hold
sustained conversations after having walked about
ten feet from the cabinet'.
But
in the early days of his spiritual awakening,
Alec Harris at first refused to accept the idea
that he might possess such a rare mediumistic
gift: his family were Welsh Christians of the
'dyed-in-the-wool' kind. Born and bred in
Treherbert in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales,
where Christianity was most certainly the order
of the day, Alec wanted nothing to do with
'meddling' with the dead or with the religion of
Spiritualism.
But
then his sister, Connie, died then subsequently
returned to her family when Alec attended a
seance conducted by the remarkable Scottish
physical medium Helen Duncan.
His sister's spirit-return encouraged him to sit
for the development of his own spiritual gifts
and he became one of the finest materialisation
mediums to emerge from Great Britain in the
20th-Century.
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During
the production of materialised spirit forms,
Alec's spirit guides usually took him into a
deep-trance state, and the sitters were able to
clearly see him sitting on his chair (bound hand
and foot) inside the 'cabinet'. The seance room
was bathed in good red light while the
materialised spirit people walked around and
spoke with their loved ones. At one memorable seance attended
by Sir
Alexander Cannon, Sir Alex spoke to two spirit
forms who were Tibetans and these conversations
were held in their native tongue, which was
unknown to Alec Harris or any of the other
persons present at the seance. And Prof. T J Haarhoff, who was a professor
of classics, conversed with another materialised
spirit who spoke to him in ancient Greek.
Like other
physical mediums before him, Alec was treated
badly by sceptics who simply could not admit the
possibility that what they were seeing with their
own eyes was genuine phenomena, and the medium
was hurt in a seance in South Africa when a
journalist grabbed an ectoplasmic spirit-form
while other members of the press set off
flashlights without permission.
Alec Harris's
book is called
They
Walked Among Us, by Louie Harris:
See
a picture of a materialised
spirit-form
More on Alec's
mediumship
see the Ivy Northage
page.
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