Death is Her Life

By W. F. Neech

This is an authentic record of one of the most astounding mediums ever known. A completely normal housewife in every other way, Lilian Bailey was born with the ability to tune into the world beyond at almost any time she chose. Through her, the 'dead' were able to return time and time again, proving to th

• Language: English
• Publisher: Saturday Night Press Publications
• Release date: Apr 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781908421661

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

A famous millionaire sat with Lilian Bailey when she was at the height of her power as a trance medium. As he left, after receiving, for more than an hour, exceptional evidence for the survival beyond bodily death of those he loved, he rewarded the medium by handing her a packet of dehydrated soup.

Another fabulously wealthy celebrity who wished to benefit from Lilian’s renowned psychic abilities, invited her to dinner in a private room in one of London’s exclusive hotels. Such outstandingly evidential proofs and advice did he receive during and after the meal that, in his elation, he tipped the waiter £10 instead of the usual five. Lilian got the dinner.

Yet when, for fifteen years, she travelled the British Isles, publicly demonstrating her mediumship, Lilian, one of the half dozen greatest psychics of the twentieth century, paid a woman more money a week to look after her home and family than she herself earned. Often, when expenses have been deducted, she has walked away from a meeting place with five shillings in her pocket as the fee for helping some ten or twelve people to realise that those they loved and lost still live on in another world.

Not that she complains. The exhilaration I have of knowing I am serving those on the other side of life is everything to me, she declares. My payment is to see the tears wiped from the eyes of the mourner. These are the only permanent riches—to bring hope and happiness to the spiritually destitute.

One day mediums will be universally acclaimed for the unique and invaluable service they perform for suffering humanity.

One day the world will recognise that in the alleviation of grief the hopelessly underrated and misunderstood psychic is often of greater service than the psychiatrist and the priest. What the mourner needs desperately is not psychological integration or spiritual upliftment but something that brings these about as inevitable by-products—certain proof that those they cared foremost can return from beyond the grave manifesting their own unmistakable individuality.

Of all Spiritualism’s duties, of all mediumship’s facets, by far the most urgent, personal and satisfying is the private trance sitting, where in the seclusion and sanctuary of the séance room, two people, the medium and the sitter, can unforgettably, imperishably, breach the barrier of death and contact the vividly living dead. And of all mediums of our era, none has used the private trance sitting to such magnificent effect as Lilian Bailey. She is, as Hannen Swaffer has testified many times, incomparable in this field.

Yet how often has she been reviled for seeking to comfort the bereaved. They have accused me of calling up the dead, she remembers. Many, ignorant of the truth declare that only evil spirits return. Why evil spirits should be especially privileged, no one has told me. I have often wished that such people could borrow, just for a day, the instrumentality that enables those on the Other Side to speak to us whom the world calls mediums. How staggered they would be! Continuously the so-called dead are calling me up, as I am sure they are calling all those who are tuned in to their wavelength. From all walks of life they come, some who served our world in high places, others from lowly homes, those who died in anger or agony, and those who passed away peacefully, dreaming their way from old age to an existence pleasanter than any dream. Many of them—oh, so many—say: ‘Will you please tell my wife, husband, mother, father that I am all right, well and alive? Do please say I cannot bear them to grieve’.

When it has been possible to get in touch with the mourners named by the eager ‘dead’ Lilian has done so, often only to be snubbed, reviled and told that their dear ones never had anything to do with Spiritualism. They fail to perceive that, in the very nature of things, every person who dies must automatically become a Spiritualist when he seeks to renew association with those he has left behind on earth. But, just as it is useless to put a brush in the hand of a baboon and expect him to sketch like Leonardo, so it is quite frequently (though there are surprising exceptions) hopeless for the so-called ‘dead’ to expect to contact the psychically ungifted ‘living’. So they seek to pass their messages through mediums; and, afterwards, in the words of Lilian Bailey, always the communicator comes to thank me for trying to help, sometimes, when I have been unsuccessful, with a sort of despair that their dear ones cannot understand how close they are, and, when the message has brought great joy to their relatives, bursting with happiness.

It is ludicrous that though modern Spiritualism has been in existence over a hundred years and the psychic powers it has marshalled are as old as man himself, most people still evince hostility, suspicion, fear and ignorance if told that they can talk with those who have died. Tell them that men and women, brilliant, eminent, wise and famous, have propagated the truth of spirit communication, or quote one of the several hundred recorded cast-iron cases of spirit return, and they will mutter their way out of it. To stand up and acknowledge Spiritualism’s claims calls for a reorientation in thinking and feeling that, often, is too blinding psychologically for those who have buried their heads in the twentieth century sands of cynicism, fatalism and escapism.

Yet as long as people die, mediums will be needed to prove death’s illusion—to show that the body’s death is the spirit’s ecstatic release and that the loved one is still near and still cares. I have never yet known a soul really needing comfort, says Lilian Bailey, go away from a sitting without it. We are never left comfortless, not one of us, no matter what our grief or trouble. The love and power of the spirit is constantly being poured out upon us, whether we can accept it or not.

Lilian Bailey accepted it. How and when and why it has taken this book to tell.

Chapter 1

GRIEF PAYS ITS CALL

The young mother turned to her husband and clutched his arm fearfully. Look! she exclaimed, she is in one of those ‘things’ again.

Twelve-month-old Lilian Airdrie, who was to grow up and become, in spite of herself, one of the most famous trance mediums of all time, lay in her cot and just stared and stared. The doctor, urgently called in when, a few weeks previously, she had first terrified her parents in this way, had tried to calm their fears. Nothing to worry about, he had said cheerfully. Not a fit or anything like that.

Yes, but what is the matter? they wanted to know. The doctor shrugged his shoulders. All he could say was that whatever it was, it was not serious.

Much as they valued his professional advice, grateful as they were for his obvious confidence, the young married couple hardly dared to believe him at first. It was so frightening to see the one you cared for most drift into another realm of consciousness and seemingly lose all awareness of her surroundings; un-canny to watch a gaily laughing child hide her innocent happiness behind suddenly impenetrable eyes. But though the inexplicable ‘comas’ lasted sometimes as long as an hour, there were, as the doctor had prophesied, no unpleasant after-effects. Little Lilian was soon chuckling again.

They say you can get used to anything if you live with it long enough. This thought must have struck her mother one day as Lilian, a big girl now at three-and-a-half, sat and day-dreamed of wonderful adventures in which Mummy, Daddy, dolly and essential foodstuffs, such as jelly and ice cream, played vital roles. Seeing her child gazing wistfully into space, the mother’s hand flew to her mouth to choke back a cry of alarm. Then, as Lilian smiled hugely at some delectable, eminently edible episode on which she was gorging her imagination, her mother let out a sigh of relief Goodness! she exclaimed to herself, I thought for a moment she was ‘going off’ again.

It was only then, with a heart-pounding wave of joyous realisation, that she remembered Lilian had not had a ‘coma’ since just before her third birthday.

Lilian was herself a mother before she had another. This time, however, there was a tremendously significant difference. Her eyes closed as if in sleep, she spoke to the world’s strangest photographer in his humble Cheshire home. And the voice that came from her lips was not her own. It belonged to a man – a dead man!

But we look ahead. What of Lilian’s childhood? Strangely enough, apart from an isolated incident at the age of seven when she heard a mysterious voice inform her, correctly it turned out, that she would pass a pianoforte examination at the Royal College of Music, she never had another psychic experience until the Cheshire episode. Strangely enough? Well, for a woman whose psychic gifts were to convince some of the most famous names in the land of life after death and spirit communication, a childhood practically devoid of supernormal happenings was in itself an amazing phenomenon. Ninety-nine out of a hundred mediums will announce in surprised tones if questioned, Yes, of course I was psychic as a child. But then, Lilian Bailey was to prove herself a medium in a hundred.

Recalling the solitary spirit voice of her young years, Lilian remarks: "I know I was so terribly keyed up about this exam. Music was my whole life. If I didn’t pass, I told myself, I might as well die. Then, out of nowhere, a voice clearly said, ‘It’s all right, Lilian, don’t be afraid, you will succeed’. She did, needless to say, with honours.

When my mother learned I had done so well, continued Lilian, "she hugged me tight. I think it meant evenmore to her than it did to me. But I shall never forget her holding me away at arm’s length and searching my face with perplexed eyes when I proudly announced, ‘God told me I would pass, Mummy.’

"It was an understandable mistake. I couldn’t very well have said a spirit guide had spoken to me. I had never heard of such beings. God was the Person little girls were taught to pray to, the Heavenly Father who answered bedtime solicitations. In the very nature of things He would be the One most likely to intercede on a seven-year-old’s behalf on a ‘life-and-death’ occasion. Anyway, that was how I looked at it.

But I’m sure Mother thought I was going ‘funny’. I think she really was scared, wondering when I would come out with such a presumptuous claim again. She needn’t have worried. I never heard from ‘God’ again during her lifetime.

Lilian, born in Cardiff, Wales, on February 28, 1895, is of Scots descent, and the sole survivor of her parents’ eight children. The other seven, all boys, passed on at, or within a short time of, birth.

Brought to London by her parents when she was nine years old, Lilian, like so many other nine-year-old girls,