Gladys Osborne Leonard

Gladys Osborne Leonard (28 May 1882 – 19 March 1968) [1] was a British trance medium, renowned for her work with the Society for Psychical Research.

[4] Leonard gained fame as a medium after conducting séances with the family of Oliver Lodge, which were described in his book Raymond or Life and Death (1916).

[4] Researchers such as Clodd (1917), Culpin (1920), Hansel (1966) and Moore (1981) who investigated Leonard's mediumship from psychical reports were not convinced she had communicated with spirits.

[14] Charles Richet who studied the alleged communications in Raymond concluded that autosuggestion was the likeliest explanation for the information gathered by Leonard and her spirit control "Feda" was a secondary personality.

[18]Although Lodge was convinced that Leonard's spirit control had communicated with his son, he admitted a good deal of the information was nonsense and suggested that Feda picked it up from a séance sitter.

Philosopher Paul Carus wrote that the "story of Raymond's communications rather excels all prior tales of mediumistic lore in the silliness of its revelations.

But the saddest part of it consists in the fact that a great scientist, no less a one than Sir Oliver Lodge, has published the book and so stands sponsor for it.

[20] To investigate this the psychical researchers Theodore Besterman and Gerald Heard tested with microphones the amount of displacement from the medium's mouth.

[21] It was claimed by spiritualists that Leonard's spirit control Feda communicated with Raymond, however when asked specific questions he failed to answer them.

In a séance on 3 December 1915 Leonard described an army photograph featuring Raymond the son of Oliver Lodge sitting on the ground with an officer placing his hand on his shoulder.