Physical Mediumship

A Review of Life After Death - Living Proof by Tom Harrison

Tom Harrison is a regular, if colorful, character having served in the forces during World War II, run a fish and chip shop and restaurant, and held various posts in industry. Life After Death - Living Proof tells the truly remarkable story of the Saturday Night Club, a home circle which sat in Harrison's hometown of Middlesbrough, England from 1946 to 1958. The sittings were led by the author's mother, Minnie Harrison.

The Saturday Night Club sittings produced a regular and continued range of the most amazing phenomena including Spirit voices speaking through a "trumpet", countless apports, and - most incredibly - ectoplasmic materializations of those in Spirit. These phenomena have been recorded in photographs and on audio tape. Mr Harrison still has many of the apported gifts.

The circle consisted of a group of regular sitters, including a senior surgeon. Numerous invited guest sitters participated in the circle throughout its existence.

What comes out strikingly throughout the book is that the sittings were not in any way spooky or weird, rather they were joyful get-togethers between family and friends on either side of the Spiritual divide, with regular Spirit visitors dropping in for their weekly chat. One amusing Spirit regular, Harrison's grandmother-in-law Granny Lumsden, caused much laughter by inviting sitters to feel how cold her (ectoplasmic) feet were. Another week upon materializing she left her feet behind.

As well as physical phenomena many cases of evidence being given that was later verified are described. Such evidence is significant because it could not be verified by any of those present, only by later investigation, thus ruling out the possibility of Mediums reading the minds (telepathically or otherwise) of the living sitters.

Following his mother's passing in 1958 Tom Harrison continued to work for Spirit by taking a position as the first manager of the Arthur Findlay College for Psychic Science, and later traveling around giving talks on the incredible Saturday Night circle. Harrison goes on to describe how he participated in several other physical phenomena circles in the 1990's.

Harrison concludes with a description of life in Spirit that agrees with most other such accounts. He does however make reference here and elsewhere in the book to "Spirit children", and refers to them "[continuing] to develop into maturity" in Spirit. Of course the maturity and advancement of a particular Spirit bears no relation to the physical age of the body it inhabits in the physical realm, eg I often feel my daughter is far further along the Spiritual path than myself. Spirits do not wear physical bodies, and only show themselves in physical form that they may be recognized by those they knew in this world. It may be that if a particular sitter is expecting to see, or is comforted by, a maturing child then that is why they show themselves as such.

Physical Mediumship was seemingly much more common in the past than at the time of writing (2005). Of course many physical Mediums have been exposed as fraud, but this obviously does not mean that no such phenomena exists, and it is highly unlikely that eminent scientists such as Sirs William Crookes and Oliver Lodge would have risked there reputations on the topic had it been without substance.

So might it be that physical Mediumship is alive and well but thriving in unpublicized home circles to avoid the poisonous attentions of closed-minded "skeptics" such in the mould of James Randi? Or might it be that Spirit, having provided more than enough evidence for those willing to only open their minds, have moved on to other ways of assisting dwellers of the earth plane?

This is a book of hope, describing those in Spirit as merely one step ahead of those still completing our earthly journey. A truly remarkable work and a must for anyone with an interest in Spiritualism or paranormal phenomena of any kind.

Life After Death - Living Proof by Tom Harrison is published by Saturday Night Press Publications.