The first "Patience Worth" communication, St. Louis

Pearl Curran and Emily Grant Hutchings had been using the Ouija board, on and off, since July 1912. Hutchings was a St. Louis freelance writer, published in The Atlantic, Cosmopolitan and Reedy's Mirror. She was the one who brought the board to Curran's house. Then, in the summer of 1913, something changed.

June 22, 1913. The board began a rotary movement and persistently spelled out the letters p-a-t. Then came a line of verse. "Oh, why let sorrow steel thy heart? Thy bosom is but its foster-mother…" Amazed, the sitters decided to take a copy, and the written record began there.

On July 2 there were two more sittings. At the first, the board ignored their questions and guesses and kept spelling p-a-t. At the second, it moved swiftly and surely. It delivered short lines about a jewel in a mountain lake, a face like a twisted oak that laughs at a storm, and a bluet flower.

Three people were in the room. Curran and Hutchings sat at the board, and Curran's mother, Mary E. Pollard, acted as scribe. The board seemed to be possessed with unusual strength at this sitting and started immediately. It spoke of myriad forms plucking flowers and casting them onto a lake, and of the departed still near. Asked who was speaking, it dodged, asking whether one so near should be confined to a name.

Then, in the words of Casper S. Yost, the pointer "suddenly became endowed with an unusual agility." With great rapidity it spelled the introduction. "Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth my name." Curran did not go into a trance. Her mind, Yost wrote, stayed "absolutely normal."

In the weeks that followed, Patience said she was English, from Dorsetshire, with a father named John and a mother named Anne. She gave her dates as 1649 to 1694. She said she emigrated to America and was killed by Native Americans.

By March 1914 the board worked for Curran alone. Later she dropped the board and dictated directly. Between 1913 and 1937, about 4 million words were attributed to Patience, including The Sorry Tale and Hope Trueblood. In 1918 a New York literary committee named her one of the outstanding authors of the year.

Yost, Sunday editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, sat in from October 1914 and published his book in 1916. William Marion Reedy did not doubt anyone's integrity, but favoured a "secondary personality." James H. Hyslop of the American Society for Psychical Research called it "a fraud and delusion." Walter Franklin Prince of the Boston Society for Psychic Research studied the case for about 10 months. He concluded that either the subconscious must be radically reconceived, or "some cause operating through but not originating in the subconsciousness of Mrs. Curran must be acknowledged."

Sceptics looked closer to home. Patience Worth is the name of a maid in Mary Johnston's 1900 novel To Have and to Hold, which Curran denied having read. Critics called the language an invented mixture, not authentic 17th century English. No real Patience Worth matching her account has been found.

Joe Nickell, after five hours with the records, called her "merely a persona of Curran's." Yet Gioia Diliberto wrote of the debunkers in Smithsonian: "No one succeeded." The typescripts still sit at the Missouri Historical Society. The debate they record goes on.