By William “Skip” Deegans
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, described West Virginia’s Elizabeth Winn Blake as “one of the most wonderful voice mediums of whom we have any record, and perhaps the most evidential because in her presence the voices were regularly produced in broad daylight.” Blake was born in 1847 and lived in Huntington. She was well known in Greenbrier County and southern West Virginia as a spiritualist. When she died in 1920, her obituary noted that more than 200,000 people had attended her séances.
As shown in the undated photograph, Blake used a trumpet to make contact with the deceased. A “sitter” would place one end of the horn to his or her ear and voices from the dead would be transmitted through it. Blake never advertised, and she did not charge for the séances until late in her life when she began asking for $1 if the sitter could afford it. Academics and scientists tried to prove she was a fraud, but they were never successful. Doyle wrote an account of when Blake assisted the police in a murder investigation. A grandfather was found dead at the foot of a bridge with a smashed skull. The spirit of the grandfather told Blake he had been robbed and murdered by two men. The spirit described the men in enough detail that one or both were arrested and convicted.
Blake died when she was 72. Four hours after her death, she opened her eyes and told her family she had seen her deceased husband.
Photo from The Lawrence (Co.) Register.
Sources: The History of Spirtualism Vo. II by Arthur Conan Doyle, Greenbrier Independent, Cincinnati Enquirer, The Morristown Gazette.
