Fryc in Print

Originally posted on February 13, 2010 at Gaia.com

I won’t blame you if you don’t believe this one.  I’ve got the printout in front of me, but you don’t.

On Valentine’s Day of 2009, I was attempting to print a page relating to an insurance claim for one of my patients.  I turned on the printer and told Word to print the document.  Something surprising happened.

What printed out was Mary-Rose Douglas’ modification of the 1849 photo of Chopin,

and then a picture of Clésinger’s sculpture that was based on his death mask,

and then a drawing of him sitting.

Each was on a separate page, marked at the bottom with the date, “America Online,” and my e-dress.  Nothing has ever printed in this way before on any of our equipment.  After all that, my insurance document printed in a completely normal manner, and no other anomalous images appeared.

I showed the pictures to my husband, who reacted by shaking his fist in the air and calling out, half-seriously, “Hey!  Don’t screw up our printer!”

There was no document open in my computer that contained any of these pictures.  Where could they have come from?  There was some relation to a document I had worked with the night before.  I had e-mailed Charmaine, a designer with whom I’d been working on a costume project.  She had been curious to see pictures of Chopin, particularly what his clothes were like, so I had sent her a few.  A fragment of the text of the e-mail printed with one of the pictures, but only a fragment.  Two of the three pictures that printed had appeared in my e-mail, but only two; I had considered the other one but hadn’t sent it.  And there was another picture that had been in my e-mail but didn’t show up on the mysteriously printed page.

While this was going on, I had no feeling whatsoever that an entity was around, or that there was any unusual energy or anything at all that would catch my attention.

What would cause this odd occurrence?  Well, I don’t know, but in a way I had asked for it.  The day before I went to Mendy Lou Blackburn’s for a psychic practice session, and our friend appeared as usual.  I was whining about my inability to do automatic writing or to be able to get any other tangible, material communications from the spirit world; it was just past the 16^th anniversary of my meeting my dear departed, and I was feeling more frustrated than usual with what I see as my lack of progress in mediumship.  We discussed electronic voice phenomena and spirit photography, and I expressed an intention to try to record some visual trace of Fryderyk or other entities.  I remember saying that I wanted to “take this to the next level.”  In fact, I did snap digital pictures of the room, concentrating on places where we could feel a presence.  That must sound especially crazy, unless you’ve seen pictures of spirits yourself, or read about them, in which case you know that they’re pretty common.  As I’ve reported before, Fryderyk himself has been known to participate in such experiments.  Nothing unexpected showed up in the photos, but it seems that he gave me exactly what I was asking for—just in a different way.  And on Valentine’s Day, besides.

I haven’t received any other anomalous electronic transmissions of any kind since that day, and the printer has performed its duties in its normal, unexciting manner.  There was an unfortunate consequence to this event, though.  A close friend stopped speaking to me because she became convinced that I was involved with an evil spirit, or at least an inappropriate and misguided one that was bent on doing harm.  No amount of reasoning could convince her otherwise.

There was a development with automatic writing that day at Mendy’s, too.  Another being offered to help me with that, and in fact gave me a short message.  It wasn’t exactly automatic; it was more just channeling, writing down what I heard in my head (semiautomatic writing?), but it was still unusual, and the being was someone I hadn’t met before.  While I had the pen in my hand, I asked Fryderyk if he wanted me to write anything.  He started off with words, but the ideas soon raced ahead of my hand, taking shape in my mind all at once.  The message was that writing is far too slow and that we have a better connection than that anyway, so it would be stupid and useless to try to write.  The truth of this was quite clear to me.  Observing, Mendy asked drily, “Happy now?”

And a picture is worth a thousand words, right?

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