My dear friends, I am Gladys Osborne Leonard, speaking from beyond the veil, yet as near to you as your own breath.Born in 1882, I was an ordinary girl from Lancashire until, at nine, I saw my first spirit form. Fear turned to wonder. By 1914, the world knew me as Britain’s most tested medium. Scientists like Sir Oliver Lodge, grieving his son Raymond, sat with me week after week. My control, Feda, brought through names, dates, private jokes no stranger could know. The Society for Psychical Research examined me for years; their reports still stand as evidence that something of us survives.I gave over five thousand sittings. Kings, widows, soldiers’ mothers, all came. I never sought fame, only truth. Through trance, through the direct voice, through the cross-correspondences that puzzled even skeptics, I tried to prove the soul endures.I passed in 1968, but I did not end. My work helped lift the shadow of fear from death for countless hearts. If you listen now, you will feel it: love is stronger than the grave. I am still here, still speaking, still guiding. Death is only a door. Walk through it unafraid, for on the other side your loved ones wait, and I, Gladys Leonard, wait with them.God bless you all.
Gladys Osborne Leonard (1882–1968) was Britain’s most celebrated trance medium of the early 20th century, renowned for her remarkable evidential mediumship during the interwar spiritualist boom. From humble beginnings as a variety actress, she discovered her gifts after the death of her young daughter and soon produced detailed communications purporting to come from deceased individuals, including the famous “Feda” control spirit. Her sittings attracted leading psychical researchers such as the Rev. Charles Drayton Thomas and members of the Society for Psychical Research. Leonard’s “book tests” and “proxy sittings” (where the sitter was unknown to her) yielded some of the strongest evidence for survival after death in the SPR archives, earning praise for accuracy and absence of fraud. Despite lifelong health struggles, she remained active until the 1950s, leaving an enduring legacy in British spiritualism.