Alfred Dodd: The voice of Albert said, “There is a big man coming out for you”.

Judge: This is the same seance, is it?

Alfred Dodd: Yes. “There is a big man coming out for you”. A form came out between the curtains.

Defense attorney: For whom?

Alfred Dodd: I was going to tell you of my grandfather.

Defense attorney: Albert said, “There is a big man coming out”. For whom?

Alfred Dodd: For me.

Defense attorney: How did he know you?

Alfred Dodd: Well, he called put first. I ought to have explained, he called out first. He said, “This is for the man with glasses in the second row”. He said, “Please speak”, and he said, “Yes, that is the voice. There is a big man coming out for you”. The curtains went on one side, and out there came the living form of my grandfather. I knew it was him, because he was a very big man.

Defense attorney: How big?

Alfred Dodd: A very tall man, about 6ft. 1. at least, very corpulent. He looked round the room very quizzically until his eyes caught mine. He then strode across the room from the seance cabinet to where I was. He pushed the heads of the two strangers that were before me on one side like that, and he put out his hand and he grasped mine. He said as he grasped it, “I am very pleased to see you, Alfred, here in my native city”. I was very surprised at seeing him, and I looked at him most closely, and I said to him, “Why, you look just the same”. He had on, his smoking-cap that he used to wear. He was dressed in a dark suit. He had on the donkey fringe I knew so well, having been brought up with him since five years of age. His face was brown and bronzed, just in the same way; the same look in his eye; the same expression and tones that I knew so well. As a matter of fact, he was born in Manchester, and I was born in Manchester.

Judge: Never mind. Did he say anything more to you?

Alfred Dodd: Oh, yes, he did.

Defense attorney: Tell us that?

Alfred Dodd: He next said, “I am sorry you are having such a rough time.” I was, because I was losing a lot of money on property at that time, and he seemed to know all about it. He spoke just as if he was one of the family. He touched on something very private and personal, which I could not make mention of in this court very well, but he then continued and said, “Ban is here” Ban, that is the pet name for the old nurse that I used to have as a child, which I had known as I grew up. “Ban is here”. I said, “I am very glad. I hope you are getting on very well.” He said, “Keep your pecker up, old boy” that was one of his characteristic expressions “Never say die while there is a shot in the locker”. He was holding my hand all the time. He held it with so firm a grip that my hand ached for hours afterwards. There was thrown over him, as it were, a net of I should think half-inch mesh; there seemed to be thrown over him a net, because, as I held his hand, I pulled the net in my hand quite distinctly. He stepped back like that and he put his hand on my friend’s shoulder, who was sitting at the front. He put his hand on and clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Stand up, Tom”, just in the same com- manding way he used to speak. “Stand up, Tom”, and my friend looked up at him and was afraid of a voice which was inside the cabinet. It was Albert’s voice which said to him, “Stand up; stand up”. So Tom Wallace stood up and, when he stood up, my grandfather being a much bigger man than him in every way, he said, “Look into my face, and look into my eyes”. He said, “Will you know me again, Mr. Wallace?”. Wallace said, “Yes”. “Very good. You ask Albert to-morrow to show you my portrait, which is hanging on the wall in his dining-room, and you will see it is the same man as is speaking to you, now”. He turned round and walked back to the cabinet, and he lifted up his leg and he slapped his thigh three times, three loud resounding smacks, and then he went ‘right to the curtain and he lifted himself to his full height. He smote himself on the breast three times, so that everybody could hear. He said, “It is solid, Alfred; it is solid”, and he went away inside. That was the first personal experience I had.

Defense attorney: Tell me this. Was your grandfather, as far as you know, or anything about your grandfather known to Mrs. Duncan?

Alfred Dodd: Oh, certainly not. My grandfather died in 1906.

Defense attorney: And the private affairs of which you have spoken, as far as you know, were they known to Mrs. Duncan?

Alfred Dodd: Oh, no. They could not possibly have been known. He said before he went, I ought to add to my evidence, one more remarkable thing. He said, “You are on the right track, Alfred. Go on with your work,” he said, “I mean the sonnets”, and there was not a living person in Manchester who knew I was interested in Shakespeare’s sonnets. I was editing an edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Defense attorney: We must not go into a controversy about Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Alfred Dodd: It is a great controversy.

Defense attorney: At any rate, was it something you were interested in?

Alfred Dodd: Yes.

Defense attorney: I think one controversy at a time is enough. Have you had any other experience personal to yourself? .

Alfred Dodd: Yes, I can give you another one.

Defense attorney: Did anything else happen at that particular seance?

Alfred Dodd: Yes.

Defense attorney: Personal to yourself?

Alfred Dodd: It was personal in a sense.

Defense attorney: Just tell us?

Alfred Dodd: That particular seance began in this way. After the voice had come and several forms had come out to other people, he called out and said, “There is a lady here, an old lady who wants a gentleman in the front row, and she is calling out the name of Jim.” Now I saw a little old body come out, very small in a dark garment, white of face, grey hair, and I recognized her by her photograph. That is why it is personal to me. I recognized her by her photograph. She came out without the slightest hesitation, and came straight from the cabinet, through the curtains right to where Mr. James Waller was sitting in the front row, and as she seized his hand and as he took hers, I heard the two. I heard the two voices. He said, “Oh, mother, mother”, and she said to him, “My boy, my boy”. They had a private conversation. I took the place of the sister who ought to have been there, and that was referred to in the course of the conversation. She was very, very sorry a sister, a girl named Lily, was poorly. Then he said, “My brother Tom is here, you know”. She said, “Yes, I am going to him”, and she disengaged her hand quite literally, and went across an intervening space of two or three persons id went to shake hands with Tom. As she finished shaking hands with m, she said, “Now, be good to your father”, and she went back. As soon as ever she had gone back into the cabinet, Albert’s voice called out once more, and he said that lady’s name. We will call her grandmother Mary. He said, “She has brought with her a little girl, and her name is little Mary” we will call her. He said, “Now little Mary has come to look for her daddy and her mummy; they are here”. As she spoke, I saw a white formless mist which seemed to come through the curtain; it came through the curtain in such a way that it remained about three yards from the sitters, and this formless mist began to condense. It took shape, and there I saw, to my astonishment, a little girl with a rope in her hand’ and she was skipping. I can see the twist of her hands even now, it was so real. It went on for six or seven skips, and then this little girl whom I and she appeared almost to clamber on her knee, and sat between her knees, in some way. Then the voice of Albert called out, “Come back; come back”, but the little girl said, “I want to show them my curls. I want to show them my curls”. He said, “You must come at once”. She said, “No, I will not”. There was quite a little altercation, and the two voices were crossing each other from outside and inside. Then he said, “All right. Show the curls”, and she showed her head. I saw them; I saw those golden curls. I was sitting right behind. She bent her head forward, and that was that. Then she went back.

Defense attorney: Now, on that particular occasion I would just like to ask you this. Did the voices as far as you could judge, corroborate the appearance?

Alfred Dodd: Oh, certainly, certainly. There was absolutely no question of there being two personalities there.

Defense attorney: Would you give us another occasion, Mr. Dodd?

Alfred Dodd: Yes, in 1936. This was such a remarkable seance to me. I had to wait for some time until I had a chance. I did not book Mrs. Duncan; I got an agent to book her, for a private sitting with Mrs. Duncan. I was particularly interested in obtaining certain definite answers to certain questions relating to a historical character. Well, the seance took place. There were ten chosen sitters by Mrs. Arguis, at Bootle. We were all trained observers; we were all professional or businessmen, who said the seance was a disappointing one, for at the last minute Mrs. Duncan said, in a word, that she would not sit unless her two friends, Mr. and Mrs. Aldous, with whom she had come, were to sit at the seance also. That seemed to upset the conditions, and the manifestations which took place were not satisfactory, and we were all disappointed; but at the last, just when we thought that all was over, the curtains opened once more, and I saw before me the living form the living form! of a young lady aged twenty-one. Her name was Helen to me, and she was the first sweetheart that I had ever had, and therefore I knew her. I knew her absolutely. She stood there and she put up her hand to me, and waved in exactly the same way that she waved when I took her to her last social. She stood on the stairs, half-way up, and waved me away. She stood there dressed in a white flowing robe, and over that white flowing robe was a fine curtain of net. I was so astonished that I stood up in my seat, which I ought not to have done, and I called out to my wife at the other end of the room, and I said to her, “Why, it’s Helen; it’s Helen”. The girl did not come to me direct, she came right round the room from left to right, and she stood before me, a living, palpitating woman. The same hair that I knew so well, dark and ruddy; the same eyes, hazel; they shone with animation; her face, the same ivory pallor on her cheeks. I said as I looked at her, “Well, I am glad to see you. I am glad. I was only talking about you last night”. Then I heard her speak, and she spoke in the same soft Scotch accent that I knew so well.

Defense attorney: What dialect?

Alfred Dodd: She came from (unintelligible) but it was a cultured Scotch, not a harsh Glasgow Scotch, nothing like it not harsh at all; a soft cultured voice, mixed, of course, with her training in England educa- tionally, and she was so real as she stood there that night. Instinctively I put out my arms to her, thinking that she would be a natural solid human being, but she started back and said, “Don’t touch me”. She dissolved into nothing. She never went back into the cabinet. Now that is the truth. She passed away in 1897, forty-seven years ago.

Defense attorney: Is there any other experience, personal to yourself, Mr. Dodd, that you remember, that you wish to tell my ‘Lord and the jury?

Alfred Dodd: I had an experience in 1940 with Mrs. Duncan. That was at a private seance.

Judge: Where was it?

Alfred Dodd: That was in Liverpool, 94 Sandforth Road, Liverpool, at Mr. R. H. Irwin’s house. That seance was fairly satisfactory, but the lighting arrangements which are red in all these cases, were poor. Some said they could see the forms and some said they could not. The seance ran right through and, although some very remarkable things happened, I was not personally interested in those; they were not personal to me. But at the end nothing had come for me, and I was very much surprised, because at a previous seance I had been told by Helen that she would give me a notable test of her identity. Now Albert’s voice was heard just at the finish, and he called out for a gentleman with glasses on the right, “Please speak”. I said, “For me?” He said, “Yes”. He said, “There is a lady here who wishes to materialize in an old-world dress”. I said, “Oh, she is trying to materialize without a head”. He said, “Wait a minute, we have not managed it. Wait a minute”. We waited two or three minutes it seemed to me an interminable time but in the end he said, “I am very sorry; we cannot possibly manage it, but she told me to tell you that, in her previous life, her name was Mary. She speaks with a Scotch accent tinged with French.” She was a lady, and he said, “This lady lost her head”. Now the singular thing is this, that Helen had given me her identity, who she was three hundred years ago, and those exactly described the characteristics of a lady who went to the block in that era, who spoke Scotch with a French accent.

Defense attorney: May I ask you this as a psychic investigator? Can you tell us what is, or what would you say is, the point and value of a materialization seance if they have any particular point or value?

Alfred Dodd: Well, I should say that physical phenomena specially of the materialization kind is really a guarantee of the proof of Spiritualism, just as physical science is the foundation of our educational knowledge.

Defense attorney: I did not want that quite. Does it go further than evidence of survival?

Alfred Dodd: Oh, yes, it proves survival.

Defense attorney: Is that the main point?

Alfred Dodd: That is the main point, and then, moreover, you feel you are in touch with them.

Defense attorney: Having observed at many of these seances, is the evidence usually adroitly given or otherwise the evidence of survival? That is what I want to know.

Alfred Dodd: You cannot obtain satisfactory evidence of survival by, say, a casual seance; it requires long investigation, and sometimes the evidence comes casually, and sometimes it comes quite directly. It varies. You have got to group these various types and forms together and form one’s conclusion. It makes one into a thinker.

Defense attorney: Is the main point of the evidence one of survival?

Alfred Dodd: Yes, that is the main point.