Mediums Rare by Richard Matheson

Some Early Beginnings
    T he story about King Croesus of Lydia—somewhere around five forty-six b.c.—is a famous account of the paranormal in ancient times.
    As the story goes, King Croesus wanted to declare war on one of his neighboring countries.
    He wasn’t sure though if he could win or not so he sent envoys to seven of the greatest oracles in the region and had them ask the same question in all seven countries.
    “What is King Croesus doing today?” (“Today,” being the hundredth day after each envoy had departed from the King.) Five of the oracles got it wrong. The sixth was close. Only the seventh got it right. He spoke about smelling a tortoise and a lamb cooking in a brass cauldron.
    Which was exactly what Croesus was doing that day.
    Satisfied, King Croesus asked the seventh oracle what would happen if he invaded the neighboring country.
    The oracle told him that he saw the defeat of a great army.
    Croesus liked the sound of that and invaded. He should have asked the oracle which army he was talking about.
    As it turned out, it was Lydia’s.

    There is good recorded information about a nun named St. Teresa of Avila.
    A Sister Anne of the Incarnation at Segovia gave a deposition under oath in which she described how St. Teresa, after kneeling for about fifteen minutes, was raised up in the air more than two feet. Remaining suspended there for something like a half hour.

    Emanuel Swedenborg was a Swedish mystic and philosopher of the seventeenth century.
    In his earlier years he was a great inventor, designing devices such as a submarine, a flying machine and an air gun that could fire up to seventy rounds without re-loading.
    He also wrote important works on astronomy, anatomy, geology and other sciences.
    He was, in addition, psychic.
    In his later years, religion became his chief pre-occupation.
    His most famous book is the
Arcana Coelestia
which he believed he’d received in its entirety from the spirit world.
    There is an interesting story having to do with Swedenborg and the widow of the Dutch ambassador in Stockholm.
    A goldsmith came to see her some time after her husband had died and asked to be paid for a silver service her husband had bought from him.
    The wife was sure her husband had already paid the bill but couldn’t prove it.
    As the amount was considerable, she asked Swedenborg for his help.
    He came to her house three days after her request and told her that he’d had a conversation with her late husband.
    He said that the bill
had
been paid and that the receipt for it was in a certain bureau in an upstairs room.
    The widow was embarrassed by this because she knew that the bureau had been entirely cleaned out.
    Swedenborg told her that the top left hand drawer of the bureau should be removed to reveal a board which, when drawn out, would reveal a secret compartment and the missing receipt as well as some letters.
    They went upstairs and found the compartment exactly as Swedenborg had described it. The receipt was there. So were the letters.

    Swedenborg also described a fire in Stockholm when he was in Gothenburg, three hundred miles away.
    He told a group of fifteen people how a house that belonged to a friend of his was in ashes and that his own house was in danger. About four hours later, he told the group that the fire was out, extinguished only three doors from his house.
    This all took place on a Saturday afternoon.
    On Sunday, Swedenborg described the fire to the local governor—how it began, how long it had burned and how it had been put out.
    On Monday evening, a messenger arrived from Stockholm.
    The letters he carried described the fire exactly as Swedenborg had on the previous Saturday and Sunday.

    A few years after the philosopher Immanuel Kant had described Swedenborg’s clairvoyant powers—(the power to see at a distance), the first official inquiry into paranormal phenomena was conducted in France.
    It was designed specifically to investigate the claims of one Anton