Flint being gagged before a seance |
When taking part in séances with Flint, participants would report hearing the voices of the dead surrounding them in the room. Flint would perform bound and gagged in an attempt to prove that he was not throwing his voice. He claimed that he was able to conjure ectoplasm from which he could then reconstruct vocal cords. However, Flint always insisted on performing in the dark, so séance-goers were unable to see him during the performances. He would sometimes even perform in a cupboard.
Amongst those who Flint claimed to have contacted were:
Archimedes
Frederic Chopin
Winston Churchill
Arthur Conan Doyle
Elizabeth Fry
Mahatma Gandhi
Marilyn Monroe
Harry Price
Bessie Smith
Oscar Wilde
The recordings of Flint's séances are now stored at the University of Manitoba.
The collection contains around 2,000 audiotapes and 300 books.
For further reading with samples from his recordings visit:
http://adcguides.com/validity2.htm
Leslie Flint - A fraud? |
A comparison of Flint's recordings to the real voices of well known people such as Mahatma Gandhi and Harry Price sound nothing like each other which has revealed that the direct voice mediumship of Flint is dubious.
The Society for Psychical Research investigated Flint and concluded that the voices heard at his séances were auditory hallucinations brought on by hypnosis. He was also accused of using pre-recorded tapes to produce voices, as well as live accomplices providing a two-way voice channels. Psychical researchers who attended séances with Flint also claimed he was using ventriloquism to produce the voices that they had heard.
In 1970 William Rauscher and Allen Spraggett attended a sitting with Flint in New York and said that the Flint's mediumship was a disaster as the spirit voices sounded exactly like Flint.