Frederick Llewellyn Hovey Willis was born in 1830 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Lorenzo and Eleanor Willis. She died in childbirth. He knew many writers including Emerson, Fuller and Alcott. They founded Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Mass as an idealistic social democracy location where Hawthorne did his first literary work.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 13 April 1885 told his story of becoming involved with Spiritualism, “I was a young man of twenty-one years when I first felt the manifestations which have since become so familiar. I had left Cambridge temporarily for the benefit of my health, and was voyaging to South America. Sea sickness seized me violently and I kept to my stateroom during the earlier part of the voyage. By and by I began to notice strange things transpiring in my little stateroom—for instance knockings—and frequently invisible hands touching me. When I became well again, I thought that these things were merely the delusions of sickness, but when I arrived at Rio Janeiro, I soon found that some subtle changes had taken place in me which had developed some previously unknown powers of my soul, if you please. I could tell what people were thinking of by looking at them, and I knew if a person was writing to me and what he or she was writing about. Other spiritualistic phenomena happened about me, but I fought off the notion of its being of supernatural origin till I returned to Boston.” Later he said, “I had never previously had any medical knowledge at all except a smattering which one picks up in the public schools. In the hands of the spirits, however, I became an old man with a perfect knowledge of medicine.”
Frederick’s interest in Spiritualism caused problems at first. According to the Spiritual Telegraph, 2 May 1857, “The case of Mr. Willis, a suspended Divinity student at Cambridge, is creating an unusual ferment among the clergy of Boston and vicinity; and the excitement is rapidly spreading in all directions, and among all classes of people. Mr. Willis is a remarkable medium for physical manifestation; and at a recent sitting at which Professor Eustis of Cambridge Faculty was present, Mr. Willis’ foot and the Professor’s came in contact under the table; when the learned Professor seized Mr. Willis’ limb, and accused it, or its owner, of deception. This led to the suspension, on the part of the faculty of the College, of Mr. Willis.” Reverend Thomas Higginson who attended the meeting said that the accusations were not proven. He published his observations about musical instruments located under the table being played and moved, and accordion on Mr. Willis’ lap playing tunes at request of the attendees, faint lights appeared upon the table that looked like “glow-worms,” and other lights flickered around the room, that the accordion played when it was on Mr. Higginson’s lap, out of reach of Mr. Willis, watched the guitar play without anyone touching it, and felt hands grasping his feet, but he wasn’t sitting close to Mr. Willis.
After graduating from Harvard Divinity School, Frederick was ordained a Unitarian minister. He lived in Michigan where he abandoned the ministry to enter the Homeopathic Medical School in New York City. He married Love Whitcomb of New Hampshire in 1858 and they had a daughter while practiced medicine in Elmira and Glendora, New York.
Fredrick was an active medical medium while in Michigan in the late 1850s and 1860s. In the Spiritual Times ,2 July 1864 in a quote from the Banner of Light, Willis wrote, “We do not need to go back and say how old dogmas dissolve, and how, one by one, the superstitions of the past leave us free and untrammeled to search for great principles, and to aspire after divine truths. They leave us—these errors—naturally, and the benign inspirations of heaven take their place. We no longer stand divorced from the Pternity of God—we dwell in it. And now our hearts open themselves and express their sympathetic oneness with the true, the pure, and the good.”
Frederick and Love lived in New York Coty for a time. While there, they were editors for the publication The Present Age, Devoted to the Spiritual Philosophy, Polite Literature and General Intelligence, and all the Reformatory Movements of the Day. Suffrage for Women Specially Advocated. The weekly publication was available from 1868 until1873.
During the 1870s and 1880s, his lecture topics included: “Woman’s Place in the World of Ideas,” “The Light of the Soul and Jesus of Nazareth,” “The Heaven and Hell of Spiritualism versus those of Theology,” “The Philosophy of Evil,” “The Inner Life,” and “The Growth of the Spirit.” In 1871, the Music Hall Free Spiritual Meeting in Boston, featured his talk about his spiritual experience in Naples and Rome.
His lectures continued in the 1890s in New England and New York state., including Lily Dale and Rochester, New York. He was known as an inspirational healer and speaker. In 1900, he stayed in Rochester, New York, giving a course of parlor lectures on “Metaphysics or the Science of the Human Soul.”
At the time of his death in 1914, Fredrick was living with his daughter and was a member of the Unitarian Church. He had had a summer home in Glendora on Seneca Lake for forty years.