Then there is the clear localization of the voice inside the trumpet, in a quite unmistakable manner, and the smooth and easy change from one voice to another, usually with a little click in between, as when one hangs up a telephone receiver, the distinctive tones and manner of speech. If the "ventriloquist" ever lived who could do this with his lips taped and mouth stuffed with cotton, we have yet to hear of him. We recognize, of course, that the vocal cords of the psychic are sometimes involved in the phenomenon, under any conditions, but that involves an entirely different question and has nothing to do with fraud.
We write the above, because we have just been listening to recordings of a number of trumpet voices, belonging to a friend in whom we have complete confidence; also we know one of the two mediums concerned, and have heard a number of the communicators at other seances. The owner wishes these records could be put to some good use in the cause of enlightenment - and so do we. Of those we heard, one was a good record made by Marie Dressler, with Will Rogers chipping in and there was one by Ingersol and one by Houdini. Also there appeared vocally Mrs Fillmore (one of the founders of Unity), the Reverend Cotton Mather, Charles Lindberg (father of Col. Lindberg), and one Guamotazin, last Prince of the Aztecs and nephew of Montezuma (there's a statue of him in Mexico City). Marie Dressler has found a life worth living - a "real life" on the "other side." Houdini admitted that some of his feats were performed by psychic or occult means, and that he did dirt to Walter at the Margery seances. He adds that he succeeded, after his death, in transmitting the code message to his wife, and as a matter of fact, her affidavit has been printed. Cotton Mather explains that the witchcraft of his day was really an outbreak of psychism, and regrets his own part in the persecutions. Charles Lindberg Sr. makes interesting statements about the famous kidnapping (but no use paging the F.B.I.). and Guamotazin, in heavily accented English, finds it incredible that men of our time should question the existence of a God whom all simpler peoples have known and worshipped.
Think what you will of these mysteries. Some of these voices are identifiable, others have too long been stilled. For ourselves we say (not hastily, but after three decades) that living personalities speak in them. All spirit phenomena doubtless have been, and still are fraudulent on occasion - and on occasion they have been and are as genuine as the sunrise. For the phenomenon of trumpet voice at its best, the whole muggy scepticism of orthodox psychology, official science, fanatical religionism, and popular ignorance has not a single intelligible syllable of explanation. Though only the slow processes of time (not any propaganda on our part) can remedy this; in the end the truth of it will be as common to human thinking as root to plant, or sunrise to new day.