Leonora Piper - Biography

Biography

Piper grew up in Nashua, New Hampshire where, according to her parents, she first displayed psychic abilities as a child. At the age of 22 she married shopkeeper William Piper of Boston and settled in the city's Beacon Hill area. After the birth of her first child, Alta, she sought relief from recurring pain caused by a childhood accident. Upon visiting an elderly blind man who claimed he could contact spirits that could aid in healing, she said she heard voices that resulted in her ability to deliver a message by automatic writing to a local judge who claimed the words came from his recently deceased son. Before Piper was investigated by psychical researchers she worked as a paid medium at a dollar for each sitting. George E. Dorr, Piper's manager, set up six sittings with Dr. G. Stanley Hall and his associate Amy Tanner both from Clark University. A sitting with Mrs. Piper about 1910 cost $20.00.

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