Piper had her first
trance. Suffering from a traumatic tumour, she had gone to ask advice of
a blind medium named Cocke. This medium gave medical consultations, but
he also asserted that he had the power of developing latent mediumship.
At this first sitting Mrs Piper felt very strange thrills, and thought
she was going to faint. At the following sitting Mr Cocke put his hands
on her head. She felt at once that she was on the point of losing
consciousness. She saw a flood of light, as well as unrecognised human
faces, and a hand which fluttered before her face. She does not remember
what happened afterwards. But when she woke she was told that a young
Indian girl named _Chlorine_ had manifested through her organism, and
had given a remarkable proof of survival after death to a person who
happened to be present.

Mrs Piper was therefore really a medium. Her personal friends
immediately began to arrange sittings with her. Little by little
strangers were admitted to this private circle. Various self-styled
spirits communicated by her means in the earlier days. Phinuit, who
later took almost sole possession of Mrs Piper's organism, was far from
being alone at first; his place was disputed. The first controls, if
they themselves are to be believed, were the actress Mrs Siddons, the
musician John Sebastian Bach, the poet Longfellow, Commodore Vanderbilt
the multi-millionaire, and a young Italian girl named Loretta Ponchini.

At the outset Dr Phinuit, when he appeared, confined himself to
diagnosing and giving medical advice. He thought everything else beneath
him.

At last, one evening, John Sebastian Bach announced that he and all his
companions were about to concentrate their power on Dr Phinuit, and make
him the principal control. Naturally we do not know what they did, but
it is certain that from that time Dr Phinuit became so much the
principal control that he had almost sole possession of Mrs Piper's
organism for years. As we shall see, he ceased to confine himself to
giving medical consultations. He willingly replied to all questions
addressed to him, and he even talked readily on all sorts of subjects
without being questioned at all.

The first person of educated intelligence who had an opportunity to
examine and study, although somewhat summarily, Mrs Piper's trance
phenomena, was Professor William James of Harvard University. In 1886 he
made a brief report of them, which he published in the _Proceedings of
the