Medium was Kitchener’s connection to the spirit world – TheRecord.com

KITCHENER On July 5, 1962, medium Thomas Lacey was performing a seance in the basement of a Kitchener home when the spirit of a pilot entered the room.

He was the pilot of a Pan Am plane that had crashed in South America.

He knew he was dead because he was the pilot of the plane. He knew the plane was crashing, said Nick Richbell, a history PhD student at University of Waterloo studying spiritualism in the Waterloo Region.

But the passengers, according to him, didnt know.

Laceys group used the seance to help the passengers pass over. After doing more research into the plane crash, Richbell said he wasnt able to find an exact match.

Its interesting to try and connect the pieces together when you start looking into it, he said.

From 1960 to 1966, over 150 similar seances by Laceys Kitchener circle were recorded on reel-to-reel audio tape.

Based on records, seances were performed by the group starting in 1924 until Laceys death in 1966.

The archival material was donated to the University of Waterloo Library by a professor named Stanley McMullin.

With access to documents and audio reels as the head of the Special Collection and Archives at the University of Waterloo, Richbell has been studying this history for the past three years.

He said the one to two hour seances were performed in a house that still stands on Frederick Street in Kitchener.

It was owned by a businessman called Otto Smith, said Richbell.

Otto was formerly a vice principal of a school here in Kitchener and then he moved into insurance sales. He was quite a well-known character in town.

Seances would be held in Smiths basement.

Richbell describes a medium like Lacey as a person that would go into a trance state, similar to sleeping or being hypnotized. The spirits take over and use the mediums voice because spirits dont have a voice box, he said. Everyone else in the group was there to maintain the energy in the room and ask questions to the spirits.

Lacey was born in England on Nov. 4, 1895 and moved to Canada in 1923.

His first documented spirit connection in Kitchener was recorded in 1924 it was a lecture he gave while in a trance state.

Lacey was an engineer by day and a medium by night. While there were others that got paid for their work communicating with spirits, Richbell said Lacey did it as a hobby.

He and his wife Edith, were very down to earth, from reading comments from people who knew them, said Richbell.

Richbell said the seances would open with Smith playing the organ which he played at a Lutheran Church in downtown Kitchener.

Smith tape recorded the seances. The date would be announced, then Smith would then name everyone in the circle, which Richbell said transitioned to the usual sitters are present over time.

When you have the same people in the seance, it builds up a certain energy, which is believed to help the medium bring the spirits through, said Richbell.

One to two times a week, seances were done in either the dark or red light, with a spirit trumpet in the middle of the room. The spirit trumpet was an aluminum cone about a metre long.

Its alleged that the spirit energy would move these trumpets around the room, said Richbell. He said the trumpet would sometimes tap people on the head or items would appear in the mouth of the trumpet, such as a rose.

At the end of the seance, descriptions or names of the spirits that had appeared would be written on the back of the reel to reel machine box.

There were three main types of seances in Laceys circle. Masters night involved calling on dead scholars and philosophers to have discussions. The other was called visiting night, where dead relatives would visit the circle.

Thomas group was most interested, I think, in the philosophical discussions, said Richbell. He would channel people such as Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Ghandi at some point, and the people in the circle would be having a conversation with their spirit.

The third was called rescue night, where the seance circle would help spirits move across the light.

It wasnt that they were trapped between one world and the other. Spirits just didnt realize they had died, said Richbell.

Next steps for his research are looking into how the practice of seances has changed by speaking with mediums and people organizing the circles today.

Richbell said he is more interested in the people involved, rather than the seances themselves.

I havent figured out how did Thomas Lacey discover he was a medium? Did this happen in the UK before he moved here or did he moved here suddenly? Did he suddenly realize he could channel dead people? said Richbell.

Theres lots of unanswered questions, which is what keeps me going.

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Medium was Kitchener's connection to the spirit world - TheRecord.com