Spirit Children
Spirit Children
A Spiritualist explanation for the relatively frequent phenomenon of children reporting invisible playmates. In Spiritualism, these are children who have died and, according to accounts of mediums in trance, are growing to maturity in an afterlife. Child mediums have often claimed spirit children as their playmates, and mediums have often had a "child" as one of their spirit controls.
Florence Marryat, in her book There is No Death (1891), writes of medium Bessie Williams 's little girl "Mabel": "I have watched her playing at ball with an invisible child, and have seen the ball thrown, arrested half-way in the air, and then tossed back again as if a living child had been Mab's opponent." According to Marryat, when a still-born baby enters the other side, she is delivered over to the nearest relative of its parent to be named and brought up.
"The nurse of the little Guldenstubbe," writes Baron Hellenbach in his book Birth and Death as a Change of Perception (1886), "who afterwards became a very celebrated medium, noticed with terror that his playthings moved about by themselves, while the child declared that another child was playing with them."
Sources:
Marryat, Florence. There is No Death. London: K Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1891. Reprint, London: Griffith, Farran, 1893.