Reviewed by Guy Lyon Playfair
This review first appeared in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research Vol 75(2).
This reviewer must declare a considerable interest in this book. In 1979, I contacted Ronald Hearn on the recommendation of a friend and asked him to do a proxy reading for my late colleague Maurice Grosse, whose daughter had recently been killed in a road accident. I told Hearn nothing at all except her first name, Janet, and the date of her death. Although he has done many public demonstrations, some together with artist-medium Coral Polge, Hearn generally prefers to work alone in his London flat, dictating his impressions to a tape recorder, as he did on this occasion. The tape he sent me contained more than a hundred statements about Janet Grosse, the overwhelming majority of which were correct, some being so specific as to rule out ‘lucky guesses’ (Playfair, 1980, 279–83).
He produced an equally impressive proxy tape in 1980 for a then recently bereaved Brazilian friend who reckoned that only three of the 119 statements made by Hearn were incorrect. Then in 1985 my friend and neighbour the Czech-born actor George Pravda died unexpectedly, and at the request of his widow Hana-Maria I again asked Hearn for a proxy tape. This contained so many direct hits that Hana asked for more, and continued to do so on and off until shortly before her death in 2008. I have described some of the early sittings in detail (Playfair, 1988, 1996), and will give just one example here to show how specific the communications could be.
In 1987 there was a cluster of statements about a visit to Holland, which Hana was not planning to make, and a reference to “whole row of elephants”. However, a month or so later Hana found herself making a TV commercial in Amsterdam’s zoo, spending several hours outside the elephant cage, where the animals were indeed standing in a row, no doubt watching the filming with interest. Back home, Hana received a new tape announcing that she would go back to Holland, which she had no intention of doing. On the same tape there was “something about a wheelbarrow and something unusual in it”. Hana was then called back to Amsterdam to remake her scene, after which the camera crew piled their equipment on a wheelbarrow. This is one of many incidents that were described on tape before they happened.
With experience of three such successful proxy sittings, I have no doubt as to the ability and integrity of this medium, whose work is unusual in many respects. As mentioned above, he normally never meets his sitters, so cannot be accused of ‘fishing’, muscle reading or whatever. He also specialises in repeat sittings, one of which, he tells us (p.194) has lasted for 36 years, and has described another long series of tapes in which he appears to have communicated with a nine-year-old Dutch boy who had died from leukaemia (Hearn, 1993). He also writes very well, and has no need for the kind of ghostwriter often called on to get mediums’ memoirs into coherent prose. Indeed, his account of his early years in the forties is almost a book in itself, (the subtitle refers to his descent on his mother’s side from the Yeo family), and his account of how mediumship appears to have been thrust on him relatively late in life is of particular interest, as are his experiences in such areas as dowsing, healing, psychometry and occasional ghost-hunting. Altogether this is a very readable and informative addition to the small shelf of useful autobiographies of mediums.
References
Hearn, R. (1993). The Little Dutch Boy. Lewes: Book Guild.
Playfair, G. L. (1980). This House is Haunted. London: Souvenir Press.
Playfair, G. L. (1988). An unusual series of communications. Light (Winter), 99–106.
Playfair, G. L. (1996). Actor’s evidence is on tape. Two Worlds (January), 17–21.