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From Can Telepathy Explain ? – Dr Minot Judson Savage

The communications known as "mediumistic phenomena" come in various ways. Sometimes it is through the use of raps. Again it is by lifting, tilting, or in various ways the moving of tables, — perhaps the lifting of one leg and rapping it upon the floor. These movements are always in accord with some previously arranged method. Sometimes they come through what are called inspirational utterances.

Again they are by means of automatic writing, and the psychic, at the time the writing is going on, may be in his or her normal condition, or partially or completely in a trance. I have seen the writing a good many times when there was nothing abnormal visible save that the hand was seized and apparently used as an instrument for the writing, without any conscious will on the part of the agent. While this writing is going on, the psychic may be engaged in conversation on some indifferent topic. This is done at times on purpose to divert the conscious intelligence from what is going on.

In the case of the late Stainton-Moses, the hand would be writing while the owner of the hand was engaged in the task of reading Plato in the original Greek, on purpose to separate as widely as possible his own mental activities from the work in which his hand was engaged.

Sometimes, though not generally, so far as my own experience is concerned, the handwriting resembles that of the claimed communicator. Most commonly, however, it does not, and this would be the more likely even though one accepted the spiritistic theory as to what was going on; for if any person in the flesh should take hold of the hand of another and try to write with it, the chances are that there would be quite a marked divergence from his ordinary chirography.

One peculiarity of this writing, as manifested in some instances at least, is worthy of note. I have seen cases where, when the communicator claimed to be a man, the writing would be the large, dashing business hand, though the agent at the time was a woman. Again, at the same sitting, when some elderly lady claimed to be the invisible agent at work, the penmanship would be set down slowly and with difficulty and in a fine, lady-like hand.

Then there is the writing by means of planchette. There are the messages spelled out by means of the Ouija board. Besides these methods there is perhaps the most common one of the psychic speaking while in a trance. This, some years ago, was the ordinary method of Mrs. Piper.

In later years, however, the work has been done by the hand in writing, while she has been in a dead trance. In one or two cases, at least (I am not quite sure as to how many), both of Mrs. Piper's hands have been influenced at the same time, and apparently by two different and very distinct intelligences.