● ● ●  seeking to win personal attention, as her enemies claimed, this would have been a rich field for her to exploit; but it was not, she evidently felt, the way of true spirituality.

From her earliest years, according to her own later account, certain unexplained phenomena had marked her experience. As a small child, she had repeatedly heard a mysterious “voice” calling her. Her mother, persuaded at last of the reality of the occurrence, had read to her the story of the prophetic call which came to the child Samuel. Subsequently she had had instances of what today would be called extrasensory perception and precognition, experiences not uncommon to one who is extremely sensitive to the atmosphere of thought. But she kept these things to herself when they occurred, and pondered their meaning. No record of them exists apart from the reminiscences of a few intimates to whom she recounted them in her later years.⁵⁹

Then and since, spiritualists have been eager to claim her as one of their own. Many who knew her were convinced that she could be a great sensitive. After she became famous, newspaper reports would periodically quote stray individuals who “knew” her as a practicing medium (or sometimes it was a fortuneteller) in Boston or St. Louis— oddly enough during the very years that she was lying in a state of helpless invalidism in North Groton. Investigation has shown that a Mrs. Eddy and a Mrs. Glover, wholly unconnected with Mrs. Patterson, did apparently operate in one or another of those cities in the ’fifties and ’sixties, but most of the reports did not have even that much shadow of substance to rest on.⁶⁰