Fred Evans and ‘messages from the dead’

Buried within the collections of State Library of Queensland (SLQ) are two original photographs taken during a seance held in Brisbane on October 24, 1888.

The old photographs are mounted on cardboard and have a handwritten caption at the bottom which reads: “Received through the mediumship of  Fred Evans at a seance given before the members of the Psychological Society of Brisbane – Oct 24th 1888”.

Fred P Evans was an English-born ‘psychographic’ medium from San Francisco whose specialty was the production of written messages on sealed, blank slates. The messages were purportedly written by spirits communicating from the  afterlife, through a personal ‘psychographic guide’ called  John Gray.

A book on Evans by American journalist James J Owen states that the popular psychic received many letters from ‘investigators of psychic truth’ across the world urging him to visit, but none contained “any inducement for him of a financial nature”.

Not so the Psychological Society of Brisbane, which offered to pay for travel, expenses and “other favourable inducements” for Evans and his wife to sail Down Under.

Evans arrived in Brisbane in September 1888 and spent an entire day offering his services to the local press from a small flat on Warry Street, Fortitude Valley.

The medium’s claims were tested thoroughly by several journalists, whose published reports were thick with scepticism (and in many cases, openly mocking), causing Evans to write an open letter in response the next day, addressing the reports that, he said “teemed with inaccuracies”.

Nonetheless, about 40 members of the Brisbane Psychological Society packed into the Courier Hall on Queen Street for a special slate-writing seance.

Two pairs of slates were rubbed clean by Evans and then sealed together in pairs once pieces of chalk had been dropped inside. Two society members held one slate each while the rest joined hands. Evans said “a strong power was at once manifested” and some members “twisted in their seats … by the power of a galvanic battery”.

After 15 minutes, the seals on the slates were then broken, revealing two images: one with 30 closely written messages totalling about 450 words, the other with six messages written around a drawn portrait of poet and spiritualist John Pierpont.

The society members were reportedly highly satisfied with the results of the seance, with every name attached to the slates’ messages “recognised by some individual present”.

Only four days later, Evans reportedly suffered a painful accident after falling from a horse at Enoggera. As a result, he was unable to perform any more seances and left for Melbourne and Sydney in January 1889.

Only weeks after his departure, the Brisbane Telegraph newspaper published a series  of exposés on Evans and his psychic techniques.

The newspaper claimed Evans used duplicate or trick slates with pre-written messages, added to surreptitiously once he had found out the names of the ‘spirits’ from his audience, through means of misdirection.