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She takes dictation from the dead

In a small terraced house in the north of England a retired schoolteacher regularly performs an eerie and exhausting labor of love. Hour after hour Stella Horrocks sits in her chair with a notepad before her – waiting, she claims, for the spirits of dead writers to make contact.

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Suddenly the pen she holds in her right hand begins to move. Soon it is sweeping across the paper as the words come tumbling out – sometimes at the rate of more than 200 a minute.

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Stella Horrocks numbers many of the world’s greatest literary figures among the authors she says have dictated new works to her. They include Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen. President John F. Kennedy, movie star David Niven, and Lord Louis Mountbatten are other well-known names whose latest writings Stella has apparently transcribed.

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Death is not the end? Stella Horrocks takes dictation from one of the 300 spirits with whom she claims to be in contact. Among the entries in her unique diary, she says, is the work of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo.

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The output of this “secretary to the spirits” is astonishing: from her pen have come letters, speeches, diaries, memoirs, plays, and books, each in a different handwriting. So far Stella has failed to find a publisher that is willing to take any of the enormous quantity of writings she has amassed. She finds their attitude discouraging. “I am not in it for the money,” she says. “I’d just like to see these works reach a wider public.”

Personal Touches

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Stella says that she can recognize the individual characteristics of each of her authors. “Jane Austen has a much lighter touch than Charles Dickens, though he’s full of life,” she says. “And Noël Coward digs into the paper with his pen as if he’s gardening. Another one is Thomas Hardy and he’s entirely different: more of a businessman.”

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Keeping up with the writers when they are in full flood can be daunting. “They can go on writing for three hours at a stretch when it’s a novel. When Dickens wrote about the Battle of Waterloo, I got through about 200 pages in a couple of days.”

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Others seem to dictate more slowly. Stella is particularly proud of a new work from Jane Austen, which started “coming through” one Easter Sunday at a rate of 2,000 words an hour and was completed six weeks later. She has a stockpile of plays by Noël Coward and a “new” collection of four war stories by W. Somerset Maugham.

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Stella’s technique for “tuning in” to dead authors is simple, she says. “You can’t contact them; they have to contact you when they are ready. You have to keep you mind a complete blank to receive. I don’t know what they are going to write before they start: they tell me each word as they go.”

Stella is only one of a number of people who apparently have to ability to take dictation from the dead. What is the explanation for this remarkable phenomenon?

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Practitioners of art, known is psychic circles as “automatic writers,” sincerely believe that they are in touch with the spirits of writers of the past who are anxious to give proof that life continues beyond the grave. Those who are skeptical have found no easy alternative explanations.

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Some compare the writings produced by an author in his or her lifetime with the “spirit” output and point out that often the quality is inferior. Others invoke ideas of multiple personality, of subconscious memories, and ponder the complexities of the human psyche. Ultimately most have been able to do no more than watch in wonder as the pen sweeps across page after page after page.