Books written by the dead can lift your spirits
The literary genre of "spirit writing" refers to books written by persons while dead. How was that possible? Well, guided by a supernatural wordsmith, mediums would write out messages, predictions, and even entire books, either through a planchette (a small wheeled board fitted witih a vertical pen or pencil), a standard pen, or through dictation to an assistant. As luck would have it, the psychic connection seems to be strongest with the great titans of literature, but their skills invariably prove to have rusted somewhat post mortem. "Strange perversions of style occur," the book historian Walter Hart Blumenthal noted dryly, "and lapses into the commonplace, even the mauldin, give rise to the suspicion that the afterlife is not especially stimulating to the literary spirit."
A few examples...
Shakespeare's final work was not "The Two Noble Kinsmen" (1613-14) but "For Jesus' Sake -- By Shakespeare's Spirit" (1920). Similarly, we have "Autobiography by Jesus of Nazareth" (from which we learn that Christ is generous with interminable sentences and exclamation marks).
Mark Twain's spirit wrote "Jap Herron: A Novel Written From the Ouija Board" seven years after Twain died.
Arthur Conan Doyle, who long flirted with spiritualism, got back in touch in 1983 to relay "The Great Mystery of Life Beyond Death."
In "Psychic Messages from Oscar Wilde" (1934), Wilde avoided any in-depth discussion of his work in favor of launching an unexpected and lengthy attack on James Joyce.
We can't leave this subject without mentioning University of Geneva psychologist Theodor Flournoy, whose book "From India to the Planet Mars" (1899) not only relayed messages from dead Marie Antoinette, but also from living, breathing Martians -- which included a Martian traffic report.
-Source: "The Madman's Library" by Edward Brooke-Hitching.
