Palm Sunday Case

The cross-correspondences refers to a series of automatic scripts and trance utterances from a group of automatic writers and mediums, involving members of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). According to psychical researchers the correspondences when put together convey intelligible messages either from spirits of the dead or telepathy.

Skeptics have written the correspondences can be explained by chance or self-delusion and is a case of researchers looking for connections in random or meaningless data.

Mary Catherine Lyttleton fell in love with Arthur James Balfour in 1875, but fell ill and died on Palm Sunday, 21 March 1875, before Balfour could declare his intent. According to the SPR, in the next 30 years thousands of fragmentary messages from numerous mediums, when considered as a whole, seem to indicate Lyttleton was trying to communicate with Balfour, aided by members of the SPR Edmund Gurney, Henry Sidgwick and Frederic W. H. Myers.

In 1891, Myers wrote a message on a piece of paper then sealed it in an envelope. Myers gave the envelope to Oliver Lodge with instructions to open it before witnesses after his death if the message from the paper should be received through a medium. Myers died in 1901, and various mediums were organised into concurrent sittings at locations very far apart, and notes were made of the words and phrases, and the automatic writings thus obtained. The messages were unintelligible individually and to individual mediums, but over a long period and many seances, it was claimed by the SPR that there was purpose in the correspondences, indicating an intelligent entity was behind them. The principal recipients of the messages included Mrs Margaret Verrall and her daughter Helen; Mrs Winifred Coombe Tennant, who practised as a medium under the name "Mrs Willett" and Mrs Alice Fleming, sister of Rudyard Kipling, who practised as "Mrs Holland".

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