“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It was a lovely autumn evening. After supper I sat down at my old table in the living room, as I always did, to work on my poetry. Rob was painting in the back studio, three rooms away. I took out my pen and paper and settled down with my ninth or tenth cup of coffee for the day, and my cigarettes. Willie, our cat, dozed on the blue rug.

“You and your suggestions,” I countered. By now I was really having second thoughts. We’d never been to a medium. We’d never had a telepathic experience in our lives, never even seen a Ouija board. On the other hand, I thought, what did I have to lose? (It wasn’t until much later that I remembered that another of Rob’s suggestions had launched me into fiction in the first place.)

The third time we tried it, the little pointer finally began to move beneath our fingertips. It spelled out messages supposedly coming from a Frank Withers (not the real name) who had lived in Elmira and died during the 1940’s.

We were surprised that the board worked for us. I thought it was a riot, two adults watching the pointer go scurrying across the board, and we didn’t take it too seriously. For one thing, of course, neither of us particularly believed in life after death—certainly not conscious life, capable of communicating. Later on, we did learn that a man with the communicator’s name was known to have lived in Elmira, and died in the 1940’s—that took me back a bit. But we were much more interested in finding out what made the pointer move than in the messages it gave.