Welcome to Unobscured, a production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Minky.

He rushed to embrace his father, but as he neared the figure, it faded and disappeared.

All of it was a shock of course because Henri's father was dead.

He collected himself and moved forward, but the experience left out.

You see, before this moment, Henri hadn't believed in spiritualism.

He'd heard the stories and visited a seance once to see if there was anything to it.

He even, so his story goes, managed to levitate a table at that sitting, but he walked away

unconvinced that there was something supernatural going on.

The madness of some people, he laughed.

After his father's death, though, that encounter with the vanishing figure made him reconsider.

It made him go back and start to think again about what he had experienced in that seance.

He made him decide to return to it.

He scheduled an appointment with a New Orleans medium who called herself Sister Louise.

When they finally sat down together and formed a harmonious circle, Sister Louise said she

felt something.

Henri's hand was trembling, so she handed him a pencil.

In any other context, a shaky hand might be a reason to stop writing, but Sister Louise

saw things with the eyes of a spiritualist.

As soon as the pencil was in his fingers, Henri said an invisible hand wrapped around his

own and then started to write.

Here's historian Emily Clark.

And at his first meeting with Louise, he just writes and writes and writes and writes and

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