The Girl Who Called Herself Leonard's Ancestor: Feda and the Raymond Case

Feda was the spirit control of Gladys Osborne Leonard, an English medium who began her professional career in 1914 and became one of the most closely studied trance mediums in the history of British Spiritualism. Communicating through Leonard while the medium sat in trance, Feda presented herself as a young Hindu girl who claimed to be Leonard's own great great grandmother, and it was in this persona that she conducted the sittings that made Leonard's reputation. Leonard rose to national attention after Sir Oliver Lodge, the physicist, and his wife came to her for a sitting following the death of their son Raymond, killed in action during the First World War in 1915. The messages Feda relayed during those sittings, and the evidential details they were said to contain, formed the basis of Lodge's 1916 book Raymond, or Life and Death, which brought both Lodge's grief and Leonard's mediumship to a very wide public audience at a moment when the war had left enormous numbers of British families searching for exactly this kind of contact with the dead. Leonard continued to work as a professional medium for decades after the Lodge sittings, but it was the Raymond case specifically, arriving at the height of British wartime grief, that fixed Feda's name in the public record and drew the sustained scholarly attention that followed for the rest of Leonard's career.