Pearl-Pinged?

In the computer world, what is called a "ping" is simply a zero-information message sent from one computer to another, and it is used merely to prove that a communication link exists. I almost felt like I had been "pinged" yesterday, because suddenly on my computer a web browser mysteriously came up with a link to the poetry of Patience Worth.  I cannot explain how that happened, and it was not the result of anything I remember doing (I was not visiting any web pages at the time that had such a link, or were related to the paranormal or poetry). 

Hollywood has tried to get lots of mileage out of the idea that ouija boards yield evil results, a claim that seems to have very little basis in fact.  We should always remember that "scary supernatural" themes milked by Hollywood (for horror movie profits) have little basis in accounts of the paranormal, which rarely describe really horrifying things. 

A reality contradicting Holllywood motifs about the paranormal is that a St. Louis housewife with an unimpressive education (Pearl Curran) used an ouija board to produce some of the most sublime and morally elevated poetry ever written, along with some long literary works that seemed far beyond her capabilities. The messages got from the board claimed that the author was someone named Patience Worth.  This fascinating psychic case is well-documented in the book Patience Worth: A Psychic Mystery, which you can read online here.  The writings of Patience Worth seemed to show a great deal of knowledge that Pearl Curran should not have learned, such as very many details about domestic life hundreds of years ago, many details about life thousands of years ago, and very many obscure details about nature  such as precise details of many plants, flowers and animals. 

Some of the better poems of Patience Worth can be read at this site.  I consider the best poetry of Patience Worth to be as good as the best poetry of Keats, Coleridge and Shelley.  We may marvel at the literary  craftsmanship of such men, but in the poems of Patience Worth there is a kind of effortless lyricism and naturalness and depth of real feeling and emotive authenticity that exceeds almost anything you might read in the works of famous poets.