People may assume that spirit voices always come through the medium’s own lips. In the case of direct voice mediumship, that is not what happens. The voice is completely independent of the medium and is created by a spiritual voice box. Some direct voice mediums go into trance, while others are conscious the whole time. Often, the mediums can be heard commenting on or communicating with the direct voices like they are one of the sitters in the room.

One would naturally expect spirits to sound exactly as they did while living on Earth, but this is not always possible.  The voice box the person had on Earth no longer exists. The communication is done mainly by thought and manipulation of the physical world. Spirits who have been on the other side for a long time tend to forget what they sounded like when they were alive.

Elizabeth Blake was a highly skilled direct voice medium. She was born in Proctorville, Ohio, in 1847 and lived there until she was two, moving with her family to Cabell County, West Virginia. She married in 1879 and moved to Bradrick, Ohio, across the Ohio River from Huntington. Although she belonged to the Methodist Church and was highly religious, when she began her mediumship she was expelled from the church.

Blake became extremely popular over the years. It is estimated that 200,000 people attended her séances during her lifetime. She used a 2-foot long trumpet, putting the small end to her ear and the larger one toward the sitter. It appeared as if the voices came from her ear and through the trumpet. She was so popular that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle claimed that she was one of the most gifted voice mediums known at the time.

Two experts at detecting fraudulent mediums tested Mrs. Blake in 1906 to see how she managed to create the direct voices. David P. Abbott and E. A. Parsons had her cover the small end of the trumpet with her palm. The result was the same. The voices grew from whispers to such loudness that occasionally they were heard at one hundred feet away. David P. Abbott’s endorsement of her abilities is important because he could create a trick in which voices appeared to come from a teapot when the spout was held to someone’s ear. His experience with such illusions allowed him to uncover any similar tricks by Spiritualist mediums. At the end of testing, both men were convinced that she was the real deal.

James H. Hyslop, professor of ethics and logic at Columbia University, wrote a detailed monograph about Blake’s abilities. He said she had been repeatedly tested by scientists, physicians and others, and had submitted willingly to all their tests. These men were unable to detect any fraud, but they did not publish their results. Hyslop traveled to Ohio to investigate Blake for himself.

Hyslop’s 1913 report describes the evidential communications that occurred. He wrote:  “The loudness of the sounds in some cases excludes the supposition that the voices are conveyed from the vocal chords to the trumpet.  I have heard the sounds twenty feet away and could have heard them forty or fifty feet away, and Mrs. Blake’s lips did not move.” Wanting to know the mechanical process involved, he wrote, “It may be true that spirits are the first cause of the case, but there are steps in the process which intervene between their initiative and the ultimate result.   It is that which creates the perplexity more that the supposition that spirits are in some way back of it all…    The scientific man cannot see how spirits can institute a mechanical event without the use of a mechanical instrument.”

Elizabeth Blake died in 1920 at the age of 73. According to newspaper reports, she spent her last hours fading in and out of consciousness, talking about being with her deceased husband and children in the spirit world.

Additional Reading: Hyslop, James H. (1913) Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, Vol. VII, pp. 570-788.