Comment on the case of Patience Worth

Comment made to Smithsonian Magazine article "Ghost Writer." Click here for link

Other reference: The Patience Worth Record

Skepdic weighs in about Patience Worth

Here is a great thread about whether Patience Worth was channeled or just an imagining

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My comment
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Just shooting from the hip:

Putting my skeptic's hat on, my first thought is that Pearl may have been somehow reading or reciting writing by Hutchings. (Hutchings was the companion who first started using the Ouija board with Pearl. Hutchings was an accomplished, published writer.)

It would be good to compare Hutchings' writing style and phrasing with the works of Patience Worth. It would be great to have the two bodies of writing digitized -- one could quickly check for identical passages and phrases.

A good case can be made for some sort of acting out by Pearl. She was ambitious, and unsuccessful, and her mother had been ambitious and unsuccessful. As a child, Pearl was talkative, had a good memory, and had a flair for lively description. As a child, to quote the article, her "family's meager resources were poured into Pearl's piano, singing, acting and elocution lessons." It seems that many nature/nurture vectors supported her becoming some sort of performer in the arts. In young adulthood, she demonstrated ambition to perform in front of others by working jobs to earn money for voice lessons. However, as an adult, she had found no forum for expression. Meanwhile, she was reported to be prone to hysterical fantasy.

All of this would not be inconsistent with the creation of an alter ego, Patience Worth.

Another thing to check out is the debunking techniques of Walter Franklin Prince, an ace skeptical investigator of the time. What were the tools in his debunking kit, and did he use them all? My first question of him would be, did you check to see if Pearl was reciting writing by Hutchings?

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OK, this is all "sketch thinking" -- call it skeptical sketching. No conclusions drawn -- just throwing some ideas out there for the online community. I don't pretend to have investigated this fascinating case thoroughly.

Mucho kudos to Gioia Diliberto for a great, provocative article!
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