| The
Afterlife of Leslie Stringfellow
A Nineteenth-Century Southern Family’s Experiences
with Spiritualism
Stephen Chism
A
family communicates with their dead son
In 1973 a young
man finds unusual objects at a yard sale in the historic district
of Fayetteville, Arkansas, which lead him through a series
of eerie coincidences and twists and turns to the story of
Leslie Stringfellow, who was born in Texas just after the
conclusion of the Civil War. Leslie’s untimely death
at age nineteen resulted in what his well-educated parents
regarded as successful attempts to make contact with their
dead son through private séances held nightly in their
own home.
Once established,
contact continued nightly for over fifteen years. With the
help of their dead son, Henry Martyn and Alice Stringfellow
recovered a lost inheritance, learned immediately the last
words of one of their own parents when he died over a thousand
miles away, and adopted and raised a two-year-old orphan girl
who grew up to become an active suffragist, newspaper editor,
and publicity director for the largest women’s organization
of the early twentieth century.
During the years
of contact with what the Stringfellows believed to be their
departed son, they received thousands of séance messages
through “automatic writing” in which the young
man described his personal afterlife and provided detailed
descriptions of the geography of paradise.
When Alice Stringfellow was eighty years old and widowed,
she decided to write about her experiences with Leslie with
the help of her adopted daughter. In 1919 the two women contacted
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who read their manuscript and sent
them two letters, one handwritten, encouraging them to publish
it. The creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories even proposed
an experiment that involved his own deceased son, Kingsley
Doyle, who was killed in World War I. These letters are published
here for the first time.
This book is the
result of years of extensive research by Stephen Chism, associate
librarian at the University of Arkansas, who was the young
man at the yard sale in 1973. Chism documents the objective
facts of the story and provides historical background on the
widespread practice of spiritualism in the American South
during the close of the nineteenth century.
Stephen
Chism
is an associate librarian at the University of Arkansas, and
is the author of From A to Zotamorf: The Dictionary of
Palindromes.
January
2006
140 pages, 18 illustrations
6 3/4" x 8 3/4"
OUT OF STOCK
$14.95 Paper
ISBN 0-9635152-5-X
ISBN-13 978-0-9635152-5-4
Distributed for Fullcourte Press
|
