| Alec Harris's remarkable
materialisation and direct-voice mediumship
astounded all those who had the privilege to
witness it; and the world is fortunate that his
wife, Louie, recorded the details of her
husband's great work in a fascinating book
entitled They Walked Among Us. This
book is 'highly-recommended' reading. The
strength and power of Alec's physical mediumship
were universally acclaimed. One astonished sitter
who attended a seance in Alec's home in the
Whitchurch area of Cardiff, which is the capital
city of Wales, remarked, 'The materialised people
came out of the cabinet sometimes two or three at
a time. On that amazing night, about twenty
fully-materialised forms greeted us and spoke
with us, quite naturally. After a while you
forgot you were conversing with so-called
"dead" people'.
In
the mid 20th-Century, the editor of Psychic
News, Maurice
Barbanell said of Alec's mediumship
that 'the spirit forms not only show
themselves in good red light, but they also hold
sustained conversations, after having walked
about ten feet from the cabinet'.
But
in the early days of his spiritual awakening,
Alec Harris at first refused to accept the idea
that he might possess such an incredibly rare
mediumistic gift: his family were Welsh
Christians of the 'dyed-in-the-wool' kind. Born
and bred in Treherbert, in the Rhondda Valley in
South Wales, where Christianity was most
certainly the order of the day, Alec wanted
nothing to do with 'meddling' with the dead, or
with the religion of Spiritualism.
But
then his sister, Connie, died - and subsequently
returned to the astonished members of her family
when Alec attended a seance conducted by the
remarkable Scottish physical medium Helen
Duncan. His sister's
spirit-return encouraged him to sit for the
development of his own spiritual gifts, and he
became one of the finest materialisation mediums
to emerge from Great Britain in the 20th-Century.
Strangely
enough, Alec Harris's sister Connie later made
another successful spirit return in a
materialised form, but this time through her own
brother's remarkable physical mediumship.
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During
the production of materialised spirit forms,
Alec's spirit guides usually took him into a
deep-trance, and the sitters were able to clearly
see him sitting on his chair (bound hand and
foot) inside the 'cabinet' - and the whole room
was bathed in good red light while the
materialised people walked around the room and
spoke with their loved ones. At one memorable seance which was
attended by Sir Alexander
Cannon, Sir Alex spoke to two spirit forms who
were Tibetans, and these conversations were held
in their native tongue, which was unknown to Alec
Harris or any of the other persons present at the
seance. And a
certain Prof. T J Haarhoff, who
was a professor of classics, conversed with a
materialised spirit who spoke to him in ancient
Greek.
These events signal quite
clearly the genuineness of Mr Harris's
mediumship.
Like other physical
mediums before him, Alec was treated abominably
by hostile sceptics who simply could not admit
the possibility that what they were seeing with
their own eyes was genuine phenomena, and he was
hurt in a seance in South Africa when a
journalist grabbed an ectoplasmic spirit-form,
while other members of the press set off
flashlights without permission.
Alec Harris
will be long remembered for the amazing phenomena
that was produced through his remarkable
mediumship.
They
Walked Among Us
by
Louie Harris:
(Psychic
Press Ltd. 1980)
ISBN:
0-85384-055-5
See
a picture of a materialised
spirit-form
More on Alec's
mediumship
see the Ivy Northage
page.
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