Died 1919, Copenhagen, Denmark | ||
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Books Shadow Land Or Light from the Other Side, Northern Lights and Other Psychic Stories - Scholar's Choice Edition | ||
Mme. d'Esperance (born Elizabeth Hope, 20 November 1855 – 20 July 1919) was a British author and a fraudulent spiritualist medium.
Contents
Biography
Growing up in London, Elizabeth claimed to have lived in a haunted mansion, with many empty rooms, she liked to explore. Having spent rather lonely childhood full of alleged psychic visions, mother’s verbal and sometimes physical abuse, and doctors harassment in the scary Asylum days, Elizabeth discovered spiritualism and in the early 1870s mediumistic powers, such as automatic writing, ectoplasm, empathy, premonitions. table-turning. Elizabeth (who by this time married a Mr. Reed and was based in Newcastle) adopted the pseudonym "Mme. d'Esperance" and as such traveled through many European countries, giving séances in Denmark, France, Norway, Belgium, Sweden and Germany. She was notable for being able to materialize flowers and spirits in the séance room which caused much controversy at the time. She wrote two books on Spiritualism. Her first book describes her experiences from childhood, living with her sick mother, while her father was a sailor, and living in a haunted mansion. She describes the shadows she saw in the house, called "Shadow People". The book describes how she developed her Psychic Abilities,the experiments she performed with the scientist, and her circle.
Her last mediumistic séance was held on 1 May 1919, in (Østerbro) Copenhagen, Denmark. She died shortly after that, on 20 July 1919.
Fraud
In 1880 in a séance a spirit named "Yohlande" materialized, a sitter grabbed it and was revealed to be Elizabeth herself. Regarding the exposure M. Lamar Keene wrote in his book The Psychic Mafia "Madame D’Esperance, was exposed-- literally. Ectoplasm grabbed in the dark by a sitter turned out to be the medium in total dishabille. After that embarrassing interlude, Madame D’Esperance apparently became more careful since she wasn’t busted again for thirteen years."
In a séance in Helsinki, Finland, December 11, 1893 Elizabeth claimed to have dematerialized the lower part of her body whilst only her head and stomach remained. Alexander Aksakof wrote a booklet A Case of Partial Dematerialisation which supported Elizabeth's claims of dematerialization (1898). It was pointed out by scientists that the room was so dark that trickery would have been easy to perform, the chair that Elizabeth was said to be sitting on was not examined before or after the séance, and there were no scientific controls in place. Hereward Carrington exposed how she had performed the trick: