Patience Worth Case

This is an interesting case of a women named Pearl Curran.

Pearl Curran believed that Ouija boards were a boring and silly pastime having seen the pointer spell out nothing but gibberish. Then, to the ladies surprise, the message on the board seemed to make sense. "Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth is my name," it spelled out.

According to the spirit who called herself Patience Worth, she had lived in Dorsetshire, England in either 1649 or 1694 (the pointer included both dates) but even that information was difficult to obtain. Patience spoke in an archaic fashion, using words like "thee" and "thou" and sometimes refusing to answer their questions directly. When Mrs. Hutchings pushed for more information, the spirit first replied by saying "About me ye would know much. Yesterday is dead. Let thy mind rest as to the past." Eventually though, the ladies would learn that Patience claimed to come to America, where she was murdered by Indians.

The initial contact with Patience Worth came through the Ouija board when Pearl and Mrs. Hutchings controlled it. But it was soon evident that Pearl was mainly responsible for the contact, for no matter who sat with her, the messages from Patience would come through.

For the next 25 years, Patience Worth dictated a total of about 400,000 words. Her works were vast and consisted of not only her personal messages, but creative writings as well. She passed along nearly 5,000 poems, a play, many short works and several novels that were published to critical acclaim.

Debunkers accused Pearl of hiding her literary talent in order to exploit it in such a bizarre way and become famous. However, exhaustive studies have shown this to be highly unlikely, if not impossible. Scholars have analyzed Patience’s works and have found them to accurate in historical detail and written in such a way that only someone with an intimate knowledge of the time could have created them.

No verification was ever made that Patience Worth actually lived in the 1600s and yet experts who studied Pearl Curran doubted that she could have produced the works attributed to the ghost on her own. She was a woman of limited education with no knowledge of the language used or the history and subject matter that was written of by the alleged Patience Worth. Pearl simply could not have created the works of literary quality that have become known as the works of her spiritual counterpart.