Fifty years ago James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, told of the ecstasy and the agony of loving the Queen of Scotland, Mary Stuart. Two sisters, Margaret and Maurine Moon, recorded his words in automatic writing but chose to keep them private because of the very personal nature of his revelations. Indeed, some of them were eliminated entirely, for various reasons, but 41 of his vignettes survive. Now, in the year 2011, the decision has been made to release the surviving information before it is all lost for good.

This is the story of a woman no longer young, who lives as a poor-relation on a farm belonging to distant relatives. Lonely and unloved, she has become painfully shy, excessively timid, unnaturally subservient, talks very little if at all, and exhibits all the symptoms of what we would call deep depression. When the family she lives with takes off for the big State Fair, she is left alone to take care of things at the farm. Enter a man, tall, handsome and enigmatic, with whom she, unsurprisingly, falls in love. He is just passing through, he says, on his way to seek his truths whatever they...

Kenneth Wilcoxon was trying to find evidence of his family's connection to Coxon's Chance, an old plantation in Prince George's County, Maryland. He had asked the spirit Jude Wedge, who had lived back in those times, to find out what he could about Coxon's Chance. Wedge said he didn't know anything about it but he would try to find out and, eventually, his search led him to John Franklin Coxon, who knew a lot about what happened there, but was inept at telling it. Wedge, himself a born story teller, was disgusted with Frank's inarticulate endeavors and took over the "telling" himself,...