Patience Worth

This purported relationship produced several novels, poetry and prose which Pearl Curran claimed were delivered to her through channelling the spirit of Patience Worth.

She was an average but uninterested student, eventually dropping out in her first high school year, later stating she had a nervous breakdown due to the strenuous academics.

As Curran's musical talents blossomed, she was sent to Kankakee, Illinois for voice training, before moving to Chicago for tuition from J.C. Cooper.

From the age of 18 to 24 she worked at assorted jobs in Chicago during winter months, and during the summer she taught music at home in Missouri.

Though by no means wealthy, they lived a lifestyle which gave Pearl free time for moviegoing or playing cards with her husband or neighbors.

She did give some clues which were deduced by Casper Yost and other intimates of the Currans to indicate that Patience Worth had lived in rural Dorsetshire with her father John and mother Anne.

Her hair was dark red, mahogany, her eyes brown, and large and deep, her mouth firm and set, as though repressing strong feelings.

In 1916, in a book with a foreword written by Casper Yost, editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Henry Holt and Company publicized Curran's claims that she had contacted the long dead Patience Worth.

Once I look upon it, all I have to do is to watch its pages open before me, and revel in their beauty and variety and novelty....When the poems come, there also appear before my eyes images of each successive symbol, as the words are given me....When the stories come, the scenes become panoramic, with the characters moving and acting their parts, even speaking in converse.

Pearl and Patience together wrote several novels including Telka, The Sorry Tale, Hope Trueblood, The Pot upon the Wheel, Samuel Wheaton, An Elisebethan Mask [sic] as well as several short stories and many poems.

[9] The Patience Worth writings coincided with a revival of Spiritualism in the United States and Britain, possibly facilitating interest in the matter.

Skeptics derided certain aspects of the supposed communication, noting particularly that Patience was able to write a novel about the Victorian age, an era some 200 years after the one in which she claimed to have lived.

She was also cited by William Stanley Braithwaite in the 1918 edition of the Anthology of Magazine Verse and Year Book of American Poetry by printing the complete text of five of her poems, along with other leading poets of the day including William Rose Benét, Amy Lowell, and Edgar Lee Masters.

After his death, the record of the Patience Worth sessions became episodic and fragmentary, with long gaps of time unaccounted for.

Pearl now had a family of four to support by herself and her financial situation so bleak that Herman Behr, a devoted friend, sent money to Curran and announced that he would continue to do so as long as she needed it.

In the summer of 1930, Curran left St. Louis for good and moved to California to live with an old friend Alexander Bailey "Dotsie" Smith in the Los Angeles area.

Braude also considered the possibility of "super-psi": the view that Curran had subconsciously utilized a form of extrasensory perception to gather information.

Curran used the Ouija board at his home on two occasions but refused to be put under hypnosis because she believed that it would destroy her contact with Patience Worth.

[18]In 2011, the psychologist Richard Wiseman wrote: Unfortunately for Spiritualism, Curran’s writings failed to provide convincing evidence of life after death.

Try as they might, researchers were unable to find any evidence that Patience Worth actually existed, and linguistic analysis of the texts revealed that the language was not consistent with other works from the period.

The case for authenticity was not helped by Patience writing a novel set in the Victorian times, some 200 years after her own death.

Eventually even the most ardent believer was forced to conclude that Pearl Curran’s remarkable outpourings were more likely to have a natural, not supernatural, explanation.

[19]In 2012, the researcher Joe Nickell, who published an article on the subject in the Skeptical Inquirer, said he spent five hours studying Curran's writings at the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis.

[15] Daniel Shea, a professor emeritus of English at Washington University, studied the case and wrote there might have been fraud involved by Curran's reading books and other material in the hours before the Patience Worth sessions.