Patience Worth's first message

On 8 July 1913 a housewife, Pearl Curran, and a friend got a message by Ouija board from a voice that gave the name Patience Worth.

Pearl Curran and Emily Grant Hutchings, a friend of hers, were using a Ouija board on 8 July 1913 when the pointer began to move quickly under Curran's hands. It spelled out a message from someone who gave the name Patience Worth and spoke in old-fashioned language, saying she had lived long ago and now made her bread at their hearth. Asked when she lived, the board gave the years 1649 to 94 and said her home lay across the sea.

Curran, born in 1883, went on to produce what she attributed to Patience Worth until 1937. By one count the output reached nearly four million words, among them seven books, poems, prayers, short stories and plays. Some evenings, a writer reports, she kept fiction, verse and drama going side by side, dictating a bit of each in turn. One account says her historical novels and lyric verse reached print and were accepted by mainstream scholars as genuine early American writing.

Whether Curran composed it herself or took down a voice is the dispute. One author puts it as writing, or, depending on your view, transcribing.