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In 1945, J. B. Rhine started corresponding with the widow of Lt. Ernest D. Wenberg, an Army doctor who died on December 23, 1944, while a POW of the German government. Like so many other widows who wrote J.B., Mrs. Wenberg wanted to communicate with her dead husband. Her letters to Rhine described all her recent sittings with the psychics of New York, where she was living at the time, and also a few of her encounters outside New York.
For instance, the Rev. C. Drayton Thomas had held four proxy sittings for her with the British medium Mrs. Leonard, who doesn’t really count as a forgotten medium, at least not forgotten by any students of parapsychology.
But the more interesting parts of Mrs. Wenberg’s letters were the sections about mediums I’d never heard of. Mrs. Wenberg was getting advice from a Miss Gertrude Tubby, the former secretary of the late Dr. James H. Hyslop (a Columbia professor turned psychical researcher). Miss Tubby said she only knew two reliable mediums in New York. The first was Beulah Brown.
When I googled Brown I found that she was still working as a psychic until at least the late 1970’s. She gets a brief mention in a Jazz Times article about the composer and musician Horace Silver. “Around that time, in the late ’70s, he also consulted with the New York-based medium, Beulah Brown, who gave him the name for his label, Silveto.”
This was an ad placed in the New York Times in the 50’s.
The second medium recommended by Miss Tubby was Mrs. Tellier, the widow of Louis Tellier, a French golfer who hung himself in a shelter on the grounds of the Brae Burn Country Club in Newton, Massachusetts.
I have yet to find out a thing about Mrs. Tellier, who refused to sit with Mrs. Wenberg. She told Mrs. Wenberg she was “not taking any more sitters for a couple of weeks, due to physical and emotional fatigue.”
Update: a relative of Mrs. Tellier (Sheila Ryan) has very kindly sent me a photograph of Mrs. Ella Tellier. She is the one in white in the back row at the left. Sheila doesn’t know a lot about her, but she is going to try to find out more and she said she would share what she learned. Thank you Sheila, and thank you for the photograph.
Meanwhile Mrs. Wenberg continued to visit mediums, whether they were recommended by Miss Tubby or not. She tried to see someone named Eddie MacKay, but at the time MacKay was “very skittish and would not see me unless I was vouched for personally or by letter by my informant,” who was not named. The unnamed informant in turn recommended a medium named Edward L. Thorne.
However, in her letter Mrs. Wenberg describes Thorne as “the most mercenary and unmitigated fake. He holds no private sittings—why should he, since he gets a dollar for an average of 2 1/2 minutes of drivel at his public meetings and must pull down $75 dollars easily every night.”
Thorne is to the far left in this picture, which is from a June 16, 1941 Life Magazine article about the skeptic Joseph Dunninger. Mrs. Wenberg said Thorne looked “something like an older edition of Orson Wells” and I can see it. That’s Dunninger on the other side of the table.
Mrs. Wenberg attended two of Thorne’s public sittings and her accounts are quite detailed. But when it came to Thorne, Mrs. Wenberg sided with Dunninger. “… it is sickening to see such creatures battening on the credulity and perhaps grief, of people. Not the least distressing thing is to have individuals who seem to be intelligent recommend frauds to one. It makes me doubt what one reads in even apparently well-authenticated books.”
I met Buehla Brown when I was living at the Rudrananda Yoga Ashram in Big Indian New York in 1974. It may have only been once, but she left an impression. She said she did not read horoscopes to build egos.
My goodness. To run across her again after all these years.
Thanks
Hi! Yeah, it’s been a while. Do you know anything more about her?
I met Beulah in the late ’60s and last saw her around ’71. Used to see Horace Silver often at the Little Cedar. I also knew Rudi pretty well and had a wonderful first encounter with him at his NYC Rudi’s Oriental Antiques.
Hello! What can you tell us about Beulah? Who is Rudi? Another medium?
I saw Beulah Brown several times at services at The Little Cedar Spiritualist Chapel in NY. She was quite amazing in both presence and certitude. I was quite a young woman–not yet 20 the first time I saw her. On my first visit, she described a young man who had died in a motorcycle accident and asked who knew him. She would not move on, and, in great fear, I identified myself as the person she was seeking on his behalf. She said unequivocally to me, “There is no such thing as Death. The body is a garment that we step out of like an old coat, nothing more than that.” I believed her, and my own experience with the other side has since borne that out many times over.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience with Beulah! What did she look like? How old was she at the time?
I had 3 readings with BEULAH-BROWN. I was in my early 20’s. She accurately predicted my life 7 yrs ahead. She described my future husband. His looks and his initals. And told mee my life was a 7 yr hardship. She was amazing. May she rest in eternal heavenly peace. So mote it be.
Stacy Horn, seven years later, sorry for the delay! Beulah Brown was quite an imposing older matriarchal woman when I met her. Intimidating even, with a distinctive almost strict No Nonsense demeanor. I was thinking of her again just today (and never saw your earlier response) because there is an Amy Shapiro in Gloucester, MA, who was a protege of Isabel Hickey, a well known Astrologer of the same era. Isabel was also quite a Force of a similar authoritative and classic metaphysical ilk, and I think she might have known Beulah Brown. Amy Shapiro practices past life regression in Gloucester, and, I believe, has a book coming out soon. Beulah Brown was certainly the Real Deal, in my opinion, and I wish I could find more about her on the internet. The Little Cedar Spiritualist Chapel was walking distance from my mother’s apartment on W. 71st Street.
Thank you for the followup! I wish the internet had existed back then, so there would be more or a record. More of a record of everyhing, really.
I remember Beulah Brown from meeting her when my Grandmother visited her chapel. I was very young, around toddler age, I think. I remember that she sat at what looked like a judge’s bench, elevated and made of polished wood. My grandmother wrote something on a piece of paper. The paper was placed in hat I now believe was a place card holder, circles of metal and the paper was inserted in the space. Then you just sat in the audience in the room and waited. I remember feeling like it was a church or a funeral home, really quiet and a thick atmosphere. I was very psychic as a young child and had suffered much trauma, even then, I was going through a lot of trauma. I was very affected by Miss Brown. She definitely was “other-worldly” and her demeanor was very stern or serious. She looked at me quite intently. I remember being very close to her, possibly someone placed me up on her bench. I was born in 1952, August, so this had to have been the mid-50’s or so. I would love to connect with her and I am going to try. Not sure how that will turn out. It took me decades to figure out what went on in my childhood and then decades more to let go of the pain and anguish and forgive which is my final stumbling block. I think Miss Brown is a key but I shall perhaps never know. I am very happy to see here that there are other people who knew of her and felt her presence as I did. I wish I could find out more about her and her life and see pictures of her in her later years and especially around the same time I met her with my grandmother. Thank you so much for at least having a little information.
Catherine, thank you so much for sharing your poignant memories. I’m so sorry for the trauma you endured and I wish you peace for the rest of time, and much luck in reaching Miss Brown.