Psychic Hub

I see the Bangor Daily News has posted a new article on it’s Lifestyle & Arts page today commemorating a tragic event 100 years ago and the mystery surrounding the psychic claims of the time.

On 12th June 1906, four students of the Brewer High School were drowned on Brewer Lake which was then known as Hymes Pond. It was a tragic boating accident that brought huge sadness to their families and the community. To quote from the article, things developed thus :-

This tragedy would have been forgotten long ago had it not been for a strange event that occurred the next day in an Old Town hotel 18 miles away. Over the noon meal, Henry T. Sparks, superintendent of the Brewer Public Works Department, was describing to Samuel D. Crocker, proprietor of the Crocker Hotel, about where searchers thought the bodies might be located in the pond.

Suddenly, at a table some 15 or 20 feet away, Crocker’s wife was observed to have gone into a trance. With tears streaming down her face, speaking in a “constrained and very peculiar voice,” she described where the boat was lying on top of one of the boys “in a great boiling spring” spewing forth sand, and where the other bodies were located at the bottom of the lake. Mrs. Crocker’s vision turned out to be generally accurate, although it was of no help to the searchers who found the sailboat and the bodies around 2 p.m. before the information had reached the pond.

Local historian Fannie Hardy Eckstorm investigated this strange case of clairvoyance on behalf of her college alma mater professor H Gardiner. Frustratingly, Eckstorm was unable to complete the investigation and left Gardiner pondering the question of whether this was truly a case of some extraordinairy clairvoyance or simply a coincidence.

Eckstorm was hardly on her own in the psychic world at that time in the local area and a fascinating insight into the operators at the time is given in the article which you can find at http://www.bangornews.com/news/templates/?a=136110.